by Emma Bull
She was, too; I’d thought she’d started toward her place, but she hadn’t moved. As if she’d known I was going to ask.
“Tell me about the town,” I said, feeling the twitch of fear in my stomach that goes with the beginning of any risky enterprise.
I had good night vision, but I longed suddenly for a full moon instead of a half. Something — the moon, a star, a last lit window in a house — reflected for a moment in Sherrea’s right eye and was gone. “Why?” she asked.
“Josh said I should.”
“I wanted to know, back when you were still sick, if you’d taken a vow not to ask questions. Now you ask ’em because you’re told to?”
I felt the same rush of irritation I had with Josh. “When have I ever done what I was told?”
Around us was a fury of crickets, but I thought I heard her draw breath. “Always,” she said. “Because it’s the easy path, and the one you’re least noticed on.”
I had a powerful longing to turn and go. “Tell me about the town, Sher. I want to know.”
“Why do you want to know?”
I thought of the camel, and Josh saying that the character of the town might have a little to do with the zoo. And Frances’s frivolous comment about the cooking school. “Because I like it here. I’d say you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but if you didn’t want to, you’d have told me so and gone to bed by now.”
“Sparrow,” she said in an odd, unsupported voice. “Why do you want to know?”
I did turn then, and took three steps toward the circle. The movement shook a thought loose. The postcard lying on the floor in LeRoy’s attic, face up in front of the only person in the community who had seen that view before. And the books we were looking for, stored where they would set off that cascade when moved, just as the cards in a tarot deck, if you believed it worked that way, always came off the stack in the right order.
And Theo being a friend of Sher’s, and me knowing both of them; Sher being friends with China Black; meeting Frances on the bridge; Mick finding my body in the first place. Further back, that I had come to this City, and stayed, and further yet, that I’d been brought to life at all. We, the tarot cards, had come off the deck in order.
I faced Sherrea, queasy with nerves. “Because I think I know half a secret, and I can’t keep it properly until I know the rest. Because whoever’s shuffling is stacking the deck. Why did Josh ask if I knew about hoodoo, then tell me to ask you about the town?”
For a moment she didn’t answer. Then: “Maiden, Mother, and Crone. I didn’t think you were gonna do it.”
“Do what!” I said, my patience frayed.
“Prove you knew enough to understand the answers, dipshit,” she told me happily. “I’m gonna fetch a candle. If I tell you to wait under the big tree, will you trust me to come back and answer you?”
So I stood under the big tree and waited for her. I could see the stars between the heavy branches. The grass of the circle, faintly reflective with dew, was a little lighter than the sky.
I was still queasy. It was as if my stomach knew something my reason didn’t, about what I had asked, what I was about to find out. It was hard not to go straight to the farmhouse and lock the door behind me. I sat down, leaned against the trunk, hugged my knees, and tried to think of nothing.
Then I looked up to find Sher standing over me. “Santos, this isn’t even the hard part,” she said.
“I don’t know what it’s a part of.”
She dropped down on the grass in front of me. In her hand was a little lantern, glass framed in tin with a squat white candle inside. She set it down between us and lit it, and a pleasant piney smell began to spread around us. “I’ll make it easy. Heck, maybe I’ll even make it boring. What do you know about hoodoo?”
“It’s magic. Crowley’s definition, about making changes in conformity with will.”
“Do you believe it works?”
“No,” I said, before I quite thought about it.
“Good. Because it does, and that’s not how.” She let me wrestle with that for a moment, her face impassive and erratically underlit. “We’re living in a closed system. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. That’s true of mental energy, too, and spirit, and emotions — all the stuff that magic and religion are about.
“People who work with those kinds of energy, the unmeasurables, have been called hoodoo doctors. Somebody’s got a lousy love life, or is being worked against by somebody else, or wants to find a better job — it’s sort of like going to the medical doctor when you’re sick.” She grinned suddenly at the farmhouse and said, “G’night, Josh. Anyway, they go to the hoodoo doctor, who does the spell and asks the loa to help the customer. What’s really happening is that the hoodoo doctor, who has a lot of energy and can get hold of more, moves it into the system in favor of the customer, and asks some of the major components in the system to keep things stable.”
This all sounded reassuringly like what must have been in the science book I’d delivered today. Too reassuring to be the whole of it. I fastened, in a kind of reverse self-defense, on a lurking inconsistency. “Where are the loa supposed to come into this?”
Sherrea shook her head. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear that yet.”
“Then what you just told me isn’t true?”
“I’m trying to explain it in order so it’ll make sense. Look, hoodoo isn’t sticking pins in an apple. Hoodoo is all the energy and attention you bring to what you do. Everything you do. The work of your hands, done with all your attention, becomes a container full of energy that you can transfer to somebody else. Baking bread is a hoodoo work. So’s putting in a garden. Or fixing an amplifier, or teaching someone else to. If you do it right, with your whole head, and an awareness of where it came from, and where it’s going when it leaves you. The process it’s part of. And you have to be concentrating on moving energy, not money.”
“Then this is a hobby business?”
“There’s a difference,” she said with exaggerated patience, “between getting money for what you do, and doing it for money. If you don’t do it for love, or because you think it needs doing, get out and let somebody else do it. If nobody else does it, maybe that means it shouldn’t be done.”
A moth had come to knock against the lantern. There were fireflies in the flowerbeds, and something, an owl maybe, shot out of one of the upper branches and disappeared into the darkness. I thought about the City, about the structure and rules of all its exchanges. I remembered the ones I’d taken part in, right up to the last one. “This sounds really nice. But people don’t live like that. They want what they’ve paid for. They want things evened up. Nothing,” I said, almost against my will, “is free.”
“That’s right — that’s your damn religion, isn’t it? And the rest of the congregation is full of people like Albrecht and Beano.” She was angry. Her expression was hard to read in the unnatural light, but her voice was full of it, and the set of her shoulders, outlined against the sky, was stiff, as if she might lever herself up and go away.
“Don’t,” I said. “Standing by the principle has become a reflex, I guess. Besides, I’ve hurt myself with it. If I give it up now, I’m saying I hurt myself for no good reason.”
“It was a good reason,” she said, very softly. The moth was louder than she was. “You’re both alive and here. You had to pay at his rates, in his currency. There wasn’t time for anything else.”
I dropped my gaze to my crossed ankles and left it there.
“Anyway, as long as you keep the energy, all kinds of energy, moving through the system, everything is free. But as soon as you block some of it off, take it out of circulation — wham. The payback is enormous. You kept your self, your energy, out of every damn thing you did, and you’re still paying for it. Albrecht is stuffing energy in boxes and hiding it in his basement as fast as it comes in, the asshole. And everybody’s paying for it.
“When the whole system is screwed up like th
at, you need more than a hoodoo doctor. Straightening things out for individuals isn’t enough anymore. So what you need is a gang of people whose job is to keep the energy circulating, to show other people how it’s done, and to make sure both of those go on even when the gang isn’t there.” Sher leaned back, set her hands on her knees, and looked at me.
“Do you think you’re through?” I asked. “I’m waiting for the answer to the first question. What does this have to do with the town?”
“Oh, work a little bit, Sparrow. It’ll do you good.”
I think I knew, really. I just had to line the facts up in my head. A community of people who made food and entertainments for each other, who had no store or even any regulated system of baiter. A town that had given a herd of musk oxen an escort north, and done its best to keep tigers alive. The people who saved my life because, just then, it needed doing. “Oh,” I said, and, “The whole town?”
“That’s right,” said Sherrea. “Welcome to the Hoodoo Engineers.”
That wasn’t the end of it; I had questions, she had clarifications. But not much later, I walked alone back to the farmhouse.
Or not quite alone. For company, I had my sense of something almost seen, something hovering over me, something that would be revealed eventually, whether I liked it or not. I’d thought it would be in Sherrea’s explanation, and I’d been afraid of it. Now I wished it had been. It was spoiling my appreciation of the fireflies.
Card 10: Outcome
The Tower
Waite: The ruin of the House of Life when evil has prevailed, the rending of the House of a False Doctrine.
Gray: Change or catastrophe. Freedom gained at great cost.
Crowley: His magical weapon is the sword. His magical powers are works of wrath and vengeance.
10.0: Dancing for a rainbow, sweating for the sun
I dreamed that night, for what seemed like all night. I wanted several times to wake up, and maybe even tried to; but I could no more wake up out of the world I traveled through that night than I could have woken up out of the real one.
I’m sorry. That was a bad choice of expression. However I say it, I couldn’t wake up.
It began with the pictographs, black on white. I had forgotten them, or forgotten to mention them to anyone. I was on the left end once more, and next to me the woman with the headdress was saying to me, “There’s not time. It’s not your fault, Wind and Rain it’s not, but you’ll suffer for it all the same. You can’t be taught the dance in a fistful of suns, never mind this little slot of darkness.”
The creature with the flute beside her responded, “What’s to teach? Box step, two-step, cha-cha-cha. Every living thing knows it already. Hey,” it hollered at me, “you know those little bugs in your body? The teeny tiny ones that tell everything what to do? Tell ’em I said to lead!”
“You might try being something other than a handicap for once,” she told it. “You old liar.”
“You,” it said with sudden dignity, “are no fun. What business do you have talking about dancing, the mood you’re in? Get thee to an alehouse. Time’s a-wastin’. We’re outta here. Music, music, music!”
Three dimensions. It wasn’t a sudden transition, but until then it had been a paper-flat world. Dream logic. The creature with the flute still was, and wasn’t anymore, and was clutching my wrist and flinging me. Someone else caught me, and flung me again. I could hear the flute, but I couldn’t see it. But even more than the flute, I could hear drums, the crisp rolling voices of the drums from the village circle. I could see the drummers, male and female, gleaming with sweat, bare-shouldered, their lips drawn back in grins of exertion and delight. Someone else caught my arms.
Jammers. I was the balky axle in their wheel. They were stamping and clapping to the drums, their eyes rolled back in their heads. “Step! Step! Step!” they chanted. Their skinny arms and bony elbows were like the bare branches of trees, jerked in the wind of the beat. They held me down. The drums hammered at me, cut openings in my skin, laid their rhythm-eggs in the bloody wounds and sealed them up, to wait for hatching. That was the first time I wanted badly to wake up.
The Jammers capered around me and herded me on, through the illuminated, benighted Deeps. The buildings were lit like the street scenes in movie musicals, with flashing marquees and neon, with electricity pouring unheeded everywhere. It was a movie musical; the cast of thousands leaped and wiggled and stepped, unsynchronized, through a soundstage Nicollet Market. Both Mick Skinners were there, or rather, both bodies. So were Dana and Cassidy. A skeleton went by in a silk top hat and tailcoat, pausing only long enough to thrust its skull through the ring of Jammers and click its teeth at me.
I’d been looking at the Jammers all wrong. I’d been thinking of them as unhealthy, underfed living people. They were beautifully preserved corpses, of course. How silly of me. They danced very well.
Two long-fingered hands, rose-brown next to the Jammers’ graying skin, parted the rim of their wheel and reached in to me. I let my wrists be taken, let myself be pulled out of the ring.
The hands were attached to a woman whose blue-black hair shivered over her shoulders and down her back to her ankles. She was naked. I stared helplessly, because here in the dream-street I couldn’t look away, or go away, as I would have in waking life. It was such a strange-looking body. The soft, substantial fleshiness of the breasts, shifting and trembling like nervous pigeons when she moved; the smooth padding of stomach and thighs and wide-set hips. She wasn’t fat, but looking at her, I thought of butter and cream and molasses, and other rich things: velvet and satin, gold poured out in dim light, the lapping of warm water on the skin. She drew me close and kissed me on the lips.
Then she moved away, and a figure stepped out from behind her. This was a man, dark-skinned, and naked, too. The shoulders were as straight as mine, but broader under the red cloak fastened around his neck; tiles of muscle marked out the chest, and were blurred under the thin pelt of curled black hair. He had no distinct waist; his body narrowed from the chest to the hips, tapering and pared as a knife blade, and the hair grew over it, thinning to a stripe over his belly and widening again at the groin. His penis hung relaxed in the black brush of it, limp and wobbling. His legs were black-haired and bony-kneed. I couldn’t imagine walking in that body. I couldn’t imagine walking in hers.
I had seen them both somewhere before. Where… ah. Stylized, on the walls of China Black’s hounfor.
He also took my hands and drew me close, and kissed me on the lips. Then the picture jumped, as if someone had cut out too many frames in the splice. He closed one large milk-white hand around my neck until I couldn’t swallow, until my breath sounded like a saw going through a board, and slammed me back against the wall. And Beano said, “Nothing’s free… ” And though I didn’t really feel any pain, that was the second time I wanted to wake up, and much more urgently than the first.
Continuity, even by dream-logic, broke, as if the projectionist had started the wrong reel. I was in one of the vegetable gardens, alone, wrapped in a perfect silence that never really happened in the fields. The row at my feet was half-weeded. I knelt and went back to work. Reach, pull, toss. Reach, pull, toss. It had a rhythm. It had a sound, a series of sounds — and I began to hear the drums, somewhere distant, speaking to the motion of my arm.
I stood up (as I did it, I heard that, too, allowed for in the drumbeat) and started walking toward the town circle. It was full dark when I reached it, but the torches, the lanterns, the bonfire, broke the darkness up into pleasing sections. The drummers were in an arc of the circle by themselves, playing fiercely, the big drums between their knees, the smaller ones propped on their thighs. The rest of the circle was clapping and swaying, and singing responses to one strong voice whose owner I couldn’t see. I slid through a gap and stood inside the ring.
The dancers were in the center, stamping, tossing their heads, working their shoulders. The strong voice, I found, was Sherrea’s, singing in a languag
e I didn’t know. And I knew so many. The ring of onlookers had receded behind me; I was surrounded by dancers now. None of them touched me, but none had to. The force of their movements, and the rhythm they moved to, were like an assault.
I felt the rhythm pulling at my muscles. I felt my head yanked back and my spine arched as if someone had hooked my breastbone and was pulling it up on a rope. My legs were weak and weren’t answering my brain. And in all the split places of my skin, in the blood running its closed path beneath, in the straight, hard bones of my arms and legs and in the bone cask of my rib cage, the wasp-eggs of the beat were hatching out.
That was the third time, and the strongest. What I would have run from the third time wasn’t pain. It was the coming of the thing I had waited for all night, the thing Sherrea hadn’t talked about. The number of hoodoo is nine, because it is three times three, and three is at the heart of everything. Something said that, as an aside. I wasn’t listening properly.
The eggs hatched out in a stream of — I don’t know, I don’t know. How does the charge controller feel, when the current comes down the line from wind or water or photovoltaic cell, and it holds it back, feeds it steady to the battery? Is it hot like that, thick and hot and sweet in the mouth and the muscles? Is it clean and brilliant as a breath of ozone after lightning? Silly. It’s hardware. It doesn’t know. I knew.
I lifted my foot, and the power surged in me as if a turbine had spun. Any motion did it. Stepping, leaping, twisting like the upward reach of a lick of flame. Any motion. Would it work in one of those other bodies, the woman or the man? I couldn’t imagine it. Not those borrowed suits of flesh. Just this pure envelope of energy, engulfed and blinded in a rising tide of white light.
Sherrea was in front of me, dressed in white. She sang out a line and voices all around me answered. I laughed and dropped to my knees in front of her. She held out a mirror.
I knew my own face. I had always used mirrors, to make sure I was unobtrusive, to be sure I looked as much like the people around me as I could manage. And so I knew my face, not as mine, but as a mirror and a blurry print of others. Now I knew I had to search this reflection for the real skin and bones, eyes and nose and mouth. Working, Sherrea had said, with the whole mind…
