Dreamsnake

by Vonda McIntyre

  Her hand aching, she stepped back for a moment.

  “About time you stopped that noise.”

  Snake jumped at the voice and turned toward it, but no one was there. Instead, in the side of the alcove, a panel clicked away into the rock and a window appeared. A pale man with bushy red hair glared out at her.

  “What do you mean, beating on the door after we’ve closed?”

  “I want to come in,” Snake said.

  “You’re not a city dweller.”

  “No. My name is Snake. I’m a healer.”

  He did not answer—as politeness dictated where Snake had been raised—with his name. She hardly noticed, for she was getting used to the differences that made politeness in one place an offense somewhere else. But when he threw back his head and laughed, she was surprised. She frowned and waited until he stopped.

  “So they’ve quit sending old crocks to beg, have they? It’s young ones now!” He laughed again. “I’d think they could choose somebody handsome.”

  From his tone, Snake assumed she had been insulted. She shrugged. “Open the gate.”

  He stopped laughing. “We don’t let outsiders in.”

  “I brought a message from a friend to her family. I want to deliver it.”

  He did not answer for a moment, glancing down. “All the people who went out came back in this year.”

  “She left a long time ago.”

  “You don’t know much about this city if you expect me to go running around it looking for some crazy’s family.”

  “I know nothing about your city. But from the looks of you, you’re related to my friend.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” For the first time he was taken aback.

  “She told me her family was related to the keepers of the gate. And I can see it—the hair, the forehead…the eyes are different. Hers are brown.” This city dweller’s eyes were pale green.

  “Did she happen to mention,” the young man said, attempting sarcasm, “just exactly which family she’s supposed to belong to?”

  “The ruling one.”

  “Just a minute,” he said slowly. He glanced down and his hands moved, out of Snake’s view, but when she moved closer she could see nothing beyond the edge of the “window,” for it was not a window but a glass panel carrying a moving image. Though startled, she did not permit herself to react. She had known, after all, that the city dwellers had more mechanical technology than her people. That was one of the reasons she was here.

  The young man looked up slowly, one eyebrow arched in astonishment. “I’ll have to call someone else to talk to you.” The image on the glass panel dissolved in multicolored lines.

  Nothing happened for some time. Snake leaned outside the shallow alcove and looked around.

  “Melissa!”

  Neither the child nor the horses were in sight. Snake could see most of the pool’s near shore through a translucent curtain of withered summertrees, but in a few places enough vegetation remained to hide two horses and a child.

  “Melissa!” Snake called again.

  Again there was no answer, but the wind could have carried her voice away. The false window had turned dead black. Snake was about to leave it to find her daughter when it wavered back to life.

  “Where are you?” a new voice called. “Come back here.”

  Snake glanced outside one last time and returned reluctantly to the image-carrier.

  “You upset my cousin rather badly,” the image said.

  Snake stared at the panel, speechless, for the speaker was astonishingly like Jesse, much more so than the younger man. This was Jesse’s twin, or her family was highly inbred. As the figure spoke again the thought passed through Snake’s mind that inbreeding was a useful way of concentrating and setting desired traits, if the experimenter were prepared for a few spectacular failures among the results. Snake was unprepared for the implied acceptance of spectacular failures in human births.

  “Hello? Is this working?”

  The red-haired figure peered out at her worriedly, and a loud hollow scratching noise followed the voice. The voice: Jesse’s had been pleasant and low, but not this low. Snake realized she was speaking to a man, not to a woman as she had thought from the resemblance. Not Jesse’s twin, then, certainly. Snake wondered if the city people cloned human beings. If they did it often and could even handle cross-sex clones, perhaps they had methods that would be more successful than those the healers used in making new dreamsnakes.

  “I can hear you, if that’s what you mean,” Snake said.

  “Good. What do you want? It must be worrisome from the look on Richard’s face.”

  “I have a message for you if you’re direct kin of the prospector Jesse,” Snake said.

  The man’s pink cheeks whitened abruptly. “Jesse?” He shook his head, then regained his composure. “Has she changed that much in all these years, or do I look like anything but direct kin?”

  “No,” Snake said. “You look like kin.”

  “She’s my older sister,” he said. “And now I suppose she wants to come back and be the eldest again, while I’m to go back to being nothing but a younger?”

  The bitterness of his voice was like a betrayal; Snake felt it like a shock. The news of Jesse’s death would not bring sorrow to her brother, only joy.

  “She’s coming back, isn’t she?” he said. “She knows the council would put her back at the head of our family. Damn her! I might as well not have existed for the last twenty years.”

  Snake listened to him, her throat tightening with grief. Despite the brother’s resentment, if Snake had been able to keep Jesse alive, her people would have taken her back, welcomed her back: if they could, they would have healed her.

  Snake spoke with some difficulty. “This council—perhaps I should give the message to them.” She wanted to speak to someone who cared, someone who had loved Jesse, not to someone who would laugh and thank her for her failure.

  “This is family business, not a matter for the council. You should give Jesse’s message to me.”

  “I would prefer speaking to you face to face.”

  “I’m sure you would,” he said. “But that’s impossible. My cousins have a policy against letting in outsiders—”

  “Surely, in this case—”

  “—and besides, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. The gate’s locked till spring.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Jesse would have warned me.”

  He snorted. “She never believed it. She left when she was a child, and children never really believe. They play at staying out till the last minute, pretending they might get locked out. So sometimes we lose one who tests the rules too far.”

  “She stopped believing almost everything you say.” Anger tightened Snake’s voice.

  Jesse’s brother glanced away, intently watching something else for a moment. He looked at Snake again. “Well, I hope you believe what I tell you now. A storm’s gathering, so I suggest you give me the message and leave yourself time to find shelter.”

  Even if he was lying to her, he was not going to let her inside. Snake no longer even hoped for that.

  “Her message is this,” Snake said. “She was happy out here. She wants you to stop lying to your children about what it’s like outside your city.”

  Jesse’s brother stared at Snake, waiting, then suddenly smiled and laughed once, quickly and sharply. “That’s all? You mean she isn’t coming back?”

  “She cannot come back,” Snake said. “She’s dead.”

  A strange and eerie mixture of relief and sorrow passed over the face that was so like Jesse’s.

  “Dead?” he said softly.

  “I could not save her. She broke her back—”

  “I never wished her dead.” He drew in a long breath, then let it out slowly. “Broke her back…a quick death, then. Better than some.”

  “She did not die when she broke her back. Her pa
rtners and I were going to bring her home, because you could heal her.”

  “Perhaps we could have,” he said. “How did she die?”

  “She prospected in the war craters. She couldn’t believe the truth that they are dangerous, because you told her so many lies. She died of radiation poisoning.”

  He flinched.

  “I was with her,” Snake said. “I did what I could, but I have no dreamsnake. I could not help her die.”

  He seemed to be staring at Snake, through her.

  “We are in your debt, healer,” he said. “For service to a family member, for bringing us news of her death.” He spoke in a distressed, distracted tone, then suddenly looked up, glaring at her. “I don’t like my family to be in debt. There’s a payment slot at the base of the screen. The money—”

  “I want no money,” Snake said.

  “I can’t let you in!” he cried.

  “I accept that.”

  “Then what do you want?” He shook his head quickly. “Of course. Dreamsnakes. Why won’t you believe we have none? I can’t discharge our debt with dreamsnakes—and I’m not willing to exchange my debt to you for a debt to the offworlders. The offworlders—” He stopped; he seemed upset.

  “If the offworlders can help me, let me speak to them.”

  “Even if I could, they’d refuse you.”

  “If they’re human, they’ll listen to me.”

  “There’s…some question about their humanity,” Jesse’s brother said. “Who can tell, without tests? You don’t understand, healer. You’ve never met them. They’re dangerous and unpredictable.”

  “Let me try.” Snake held out her hands, palms up, a quick, beseeching gesture, trying to make him understand her. “Other people die as Jesse died, in agony, because there aren’t enough healers. There aren’t enough dreamsnakes. I want to talk to the offworlders.”

  “Let me pay you now, healer,” Jesse’s brother said sadly, and Snake might as well have been back at Mountainside. “The power in Center is precariously balanced. The council would never permit an outsider to deal with the offworlders. The tensions are too great, and we won’t chance altering them. I’m sorry my sister died in pain, but what you ask would risk too many more lives.”

  “How can that be true?” Snake said. “A simple meeting, a single question—”

  “You can’t understand, I told you that. One has to grow up here and deal with the forces here. I’ve spent my life learning.”

  “I think you have spent your life learning how to explain away your obligations,” Snake said angrily.

  “That’s a lie!” Jesse’s brother was enraged. “I would give you anything I had it in my power to give, but you demand impossibilities. I can’t help you find new dreamsnakes.”

  “Wait,” Snake said suddenly. “Maybe you can help us in another way.”

  Jesse’s brother sighed and looked away. “I’ve no time for plots and schemes,” he said. “And neither do you. The storm is coming, healer.”

  Snake glanced over her shoulder. Melissa was still nowhere to be seen. In the distance the clouds hugged the horizon, and flurries of windblown sand skittered back and forth between earth and sky. It was growing colder, but it was for other reasons that she shivered. The stakes were too high to give up now. She felt sure that if she could just get inside the city, she could seek out the offworlders by herself. She turned back to Jesse’s brother.

  “Let me come inside, in the spring. You have techniques our technology isn’t advanced enough to let us discover.” Suddenly, Snake smiled. Jesse was beyond help, but others were not. Melissa was not. “If you could teach me how to induce regeneration—” She was astonished that she had not thought of the possibility before. She had been completely and selfishly concerned with dreamsnakes, with her own prestige and honor. But so many people would benefit if the healers knew how to regenerate muscle and nerves…but first she would learn how to regenerate skin so her daughter could live unscarred. Snake watched Jesse’s brother and found to her joy that his expression was relieved.

  “That is possible,” he said. “Yes. I’ll discuss that with the council. I’ll speak for you.”

  “Thank you,” Snake said. She could hardly believe that finally, finally, the city people were acceding to the request of a healer. “This will help us more than you know. If we can improve our techniques we won’t have to worry about getting new dreamsnakes—we’ll be better at cloning them.”

  Jesse’s brother had begun to frown. Snake stopped, confused by the abrupt change.

  “You’ll have the gratitude of the healers,” Snake said quickly, not knowing what she had said wrong, so not knowing how to repair it. “And of all the people we serve.”

  “Cloning!” Jesse’s brother said. “Why do you think we’d help you with cloning?”

  “I thought you and Jesse—” She caught herself, thinking that would upset him even more. “I merely assumed, with your advanced—”

  “You’re talking about genetic manipulation!” Jesse’s brother looked ill. “Turning our knowledge to making monsters!”

  “What?” Snake asked, astonished.

  “Genetic manipulation—Gods, we have enough trouble with mutation without inducing it deliberately! You’re lucky I couldn’t let you in, healer. I’d have to denounce you. You’d spend your life in exile with the rest of the freaks.”

  Snake stared at the screen as he changed from rational acquaintance to accuser. If he was not a clone with Jesse, then his family was so highly inbred that deformities were inevitable without genetic manipulation. Yet what he was saying was that the city people refused themselves that method of helping themselves.

  “I won’t have my family indebted to a freak,” he said without looking at her, doing something with his hands. Coins clattered into the payment slot beneath the screen. “Take your money and go!”

  “People out here die because of the information you hoard!” she shouted. “You help the drivers enslave people with your crystal rings, but you won’t help cure people who are crippled and scarred!”

  Jesse’s brother started forward in a rage. “Healer—” He stopped, looking beyond Snake. His expression changed to horror. “How dare you come here with a changeling? Do they exile the mother as well as the offspring out there? And you lecture me on humanity!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You want regeneration, and you don’t even know you can’t reform mutants! They come out the same.” He laughed bitterly, hysterically. “Go back where you came from, healer. There can be no words between us.”

  Just as his image began to fade, Snake scooped up the coins and flung them at him. They clattered against the screen, and one jammed in the protective panel. Gears whined, but the panel would not completely close, and Snake felt a certain perverse satisfaction.

  Snake turned away from the screen and the city to look for Melissa, and came face to face with her daughter. Melissa’s cheeks were wet with tears. She grabbed Snake’s hand and blindly pulled her out of the alcove.

  “Melissa, we’ve got to try to set up a shelter—” Snake tried to draw back toward the alcove. It was nearly dark, though it was morning. The clouds were no longer gray but black, and Snake could see two separate whirlwinds.

  “I found a place.” The words came hard: Melissa was still crying. “I—I hoped they’d let you in but I was afraid they wouldn’t, so I went looking.”

  Snake followed her, nearly blinded by the windblown sand. Swift and Squirrel came unwillingly, heads down and ears flattened. Melissa took them to a low fissure in the abrupt cliff of the mountain’s flank. The wind rose by the moment, howling and moaning, flinging sand against their faces.

  “They’re scared,” Melissa yelled above the whining wind. “Blindfolds—” She uncovered her face, squinting hard, and covered Squirrel’s eyes with her headcloth. Snake did the same for the gray mare. When she uncovered her mouth and nose the wind took her breath away. Eyes streaming, holding her breath,
she led the mare after Squirrel into the cave.

  The wind died away abruptly. Snake could hardly open her eyes, and she felt as if sand had been driven into her lungs. The horses snorted and blew while Snake and Melissa coughed and tried to blink the overwhelming sand away, brush it from their hair and clothes, spit it out. Finally Snake managed to rub or brush or cough away the worst of the scratchy particles, and tears washed her eyes clean.

  Melissa unwrapped her headcloth from Squirrel’s eyes, then with a sob flung her arms around his neck.

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “He saw me and sent you away.”

  “The gate was locked,” Snake said. “He couldn’t have let us in if he’d wanted to. If it weren’t for you we’d be out there in the storm.”

  “But they don’t want you to come back. Because of me.”

  “Melissa, he’d already decided not to help us. Believe me. What I asked him for scared him. They don’t understand us.”

  “But I heard him. I saw him looking at me. You asked for help for—for me, and he said go away.”

  Snake wished Melissa had not understood that part of the conversation, for she had not wanted her to hope for what might never happen. “He didn’t know you’d been burned,” Snake said. “And he didn’t care. He was looking for excuses to get rid of me.”

  Unconvinced, Melissa blankly stroked Squirrel’s neck, slipped off his bridle, uncinched his saddle.

  “If this is anybody’s fault,” Snake said, “it’s mine. I’m the one who brought us here—” The full impact of their situation hit her as violently as the storm winds. The faint glow of lightcells barely illuminated the cave in which they were trapped. Snake’s voice broke in fear and frustration. “I’m the one who brought us here, and now we’re locked outside—”

  Melissa turned from Squirrel and took Snake’s hand. “Snake—Snake, I knew what could happen. You didn’t make me follow you. I knew how sneaky and mean all these people here can be. Everybody who trades with them says so.” She hugged Snake, comforting her as Snake had comforted Melissa only a few days before.