Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  At this point in their initial interview the girl extended one small hand, greasy from the lion’s jaw. Instinctively grasping it, Orlando felt the nimbleness in the fingers, saw the shrewd eyes measuring him as if he were one of the mechanized exhibits.

  “Then it’s a deal,” she said. “Call me Mooch.”

  In fact Orlando had been searching for an apprentice, whom he could teach the art of beast robotics. Since he had scored too low to qualify for breeding, he would never father a child, so he was content when the girl emerged from the lion’s jaw and ensnared him in her dizzy speech. Officials at the city orphanage were glad to let him claim her, for Mooch was the slipperiest foundling they had ever tried to corral. She would sneak from the dormitory and ride the belts or creep through engine rooms in the deepest levels of the city or poke about the disney, as she had been doing on the day when the lion bit her.

  Thus Orlando was not surprised when she returned from her dirt search with the wagon full of dust, grit, straw, balls of hair, and sundry obscure items of filth. While Mooch plastered the animals with this grime, Orlando posted messages on the electric signs explaining to visitors that such squalor was typical of beasts in the wild. He also took the occasion to rearrange the exhibits. Father Spinks had displayed the beasts alphabetically, so that dragons stood next to dinosaurs, griffins next to giraffes. However beasts used to array themselves in the wilds, Orlando felt certain they would not have done so alphabetically.

  “Why don’t we put the forest creatures with other forest creatures,” Mooch proposed, “and all the river beasts together, the snow leopard with the abominable snowman, and so on?”

  “You tell me what goes with what, and I’ll shuffle them,” agreed Orlando, who was a genius at engineering but rather in the dark in matters of biology.

  Since there was no distinction between workday and play-day within the Enclosure, the disney never closed, which meant Orlando had to shuffle the exhibits while patrons watched. The temporary separation of beasts from their labels led to confusion. He might be wheeling a polar bear onto a foam iceberg, say, while Mooch danced alongside smearing the fur with goo, and a tourist would holler, “What did that skunk used to eat?”

  Indeed, as the filth began to ripen, many of the beasts were mistaken for skunks. More than one school child yelled out rude variations on the question, “Why do these mechos stink?”

  “That was their general custom in the wild,” Orlando would answer politely.

  Fortunately, the Overseers, who cruised through the disney several times a day on their rounds, knew even less of biology than he did, so they permitted him to rearrange the exhibits and besmirch the beasts to his heart’s content—provided, of course, that calm was preserved.

  How to relocate the imaginary beasts was a puzzle, because in most instances their habitat was ill-defined. Dragons and trolls could be placed in caves with bats and bears. But where would you put a griffin? Among the eagles, in keeping with its front half, or among the lions, in keeping with its rear? Should centaurs graze with zebras, or should they be assigned to the ape house out of respect for their human torsos? Sasquatches had been reported everywhere from the rainforest of Colombia to the airless heights of the Himalayas, yet none had ever been captured; so where did you exhibit this hairy shambling monster? Orlando was beginning to understand why his father had opted for the alphabetical display.

  In the end he and Mooch herded all the unclassifiable beasts—the feathered serpents and snake-haired gorgons, the whiskered growlers and long-fanged snuffers—into a huge pit, where the creatures milled around like a nightmare stew.

  This monster pit soon became a favorite haunt for visitors, who poured through the gates in undiminished numbers, wigs and mood gowns gleaming in the fluorescent light. Many of them now wore breather masks, to shield themselves from the stench.

  No sooner had the soiling and shuffling been completed than Mooch declared, “How about we do over the voice boxes? Erase the goofy speeches and make them sound like animals?”

  “There’s quite a collection of howls and hisses in the archives,” Orlando said by way of agreement.

  “Sure, and whatever we can’t find there I’ll do myself,” said the girl, whereupon she launched into a hair-raising chorus of snarls and grunts and whistles. “And I can do gnawing on bones, death-rattles, panting, and fights. Just listen.”

  The girl’s demonstration convinced Orlando that she had animal blood in her. The goose bumps on his skin did not smooth out for a long while after.

  Modifying the voice boxes took just over a month. The brown bear no longer told stories about forest fires, but merely snorted or growled. The monkeys now gibbered instead of reciting jingles. The elephants ceased ruminating on philosophy and began simply ruminating, quietly munching plastic hay. The giraffe stopped bantering jokes about the inconvenience of a long neck and kept silent. Following what Mooch had gleaned from old books, Orlando programmed the other beasts to remain silent most of the time. The woods must have been eerie, he decided. Quiet as tombs except for wind and water and birds. And even birds kept mum half the day.

  Visitors who complained about the silence or about the sporadic bestial sounds were provided with headphones that played all the old malarkey.

  Continuing the search for wildness, Orlando and Mooch asked themselves what else could be done to make the mechos act more like beasts and less like humans dressed up in fur suits. Well, rhinos should not balance balls on their nasal horns, rabbits should not consult pocket watches, gorillas should not play drums, and flamingos should not play croquet. Deciding what all these creatures should do was a more difficult matter.

  “Mostly they just slept and ate and hunted,” said Mooch.

  “Who’ll pay to watch beasts snoozing?” Orlando objected.

  “Suppose we make half of them hunt while the other half sleep.”

  “What will they hunt?”

  “Each other.”

  This alteration required another two months of labor. Frogs now gobbled dragonflies, mice pounced on frogs, rabbits gobbled mice, owls murdered rabbits, and high-leaping wolves snatched the owls. At the end of each murderous cycle, the victims were restored to life, put to sleep, and the former sleepers awakened for hunting.

  Despite some muttering, the visitors generally applauded this new regime. There was plenty of action. Wherever they turned, some beast was always slaughtering some other one. Even the cows and sheep, stupidly chewing their cuds, would sometimes be attacked by a mountain lion or a pack of beavers.

  Undeterred by grungy hides and this new show of aggression, people still crowded up to pat the beasts. “Nice kitty,” they would purr to the tigers. “Sweet little pooch,” they would lullaby to the jackals. They climbed on the centaurs and ostriches and kicked them in the ribs, shouting, “Giddap!”

  All this familiarity struck Orlando as unseemly. “Should I put up glass to keep people out?” he wondered aloud.

  Mooch withdrew a well-chewed pigtail from her mouth. “No, don’t. Beasts never lived behind glass. How about we paint a line between the crowds and the exhibits, and program the critters to bite anyone who crosses it?”

  “Bite the visitors?” he repeated incredulously.

  “Only a gentle munch on the arm, and maybe a lash or two with the tail.” When he hesitated, the girl added, “You want them to respect the beasts, don’t you?”

  They converted the jungle exhibit first. Chimpanzees would now hurl plastic fruits at intruders, cheetahs would leap on them, pythons would coil about their legs, spiders would crawl through openings in mood gowns and probe with needle teeth. The warning signs declared:

  DO NOT CROSS SAFETY LINE

  LIKE THEIR WILD ORIGINALS,

  THESE BEASTS ARE DANGEROUS

  Anyone invading the barnyard exhibit would now be kicked by mules, butted by pigs, pecked by chickens, and battered by the stiff wings of geese.

  Inevitably, some patrons ignored the warning signs. When this happ
ened, Orlando and Mooch had to shut off the power and go pry the trespasser from the grip of a giant panda, as the case might be, or from beneath a squatting stegosaurus. More than once they had to fiddle with the programming, when an overzealous beast ripped a gown with its claws or bloodied a visitor’s nose.

  Gate receipts swelled. Apparently the citizens enjoyed being terrified out of their wits. As news of the beast attacks spread through Oregon City, visitors crowded into the disney, edging beyond the warning lines, provoking assaults from squirrels and moose and pterodactyls.

  Catching wind of these developments, the Overseers sat Orlando down in the control room for a lecture. There were two officers, one a brawny great lug and the other one even brawnier, both in silver jumpsuits covered with bulging pockets, their faces hidden inside mirrored helmets. In voices like the rumble of a bowling alley, they reminded him that humanity had withdrawn into the Enclosure to be shielded from the grab-and-gobble of nature. And here he was unleashing mechanical marauders indoors. All their talk added up to the warning that, if anyone got seriously hurt in his diddly amusement park, Orlando would be in the deepest, darkest trouble.

  After they left, he prophesied bleakly, “Somebody’s going to get hurt.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mooch agreed.

  The way she twisted her mouth, Orlando could not tell whether she was reluctant or eager to see the first mangled body.

  The first mangled body turned out to be Orlando’s. He forgot to switch off the beam one day before entering the alligator pool with his oil can. By the time Mooch heard his yelps and cut the power, the gators, with their slashing tails, had broken one of his legs and three of his ribs.

  “You see what I mean about respecting the beasts,” Mooch pointed out.

  While he was laid up recuperating she spent a good deal of time, he noticed, tinkering with the beasts. On the monitors in the control room he could see her moving from exhibit to exhibit with her tool cart, and often he would hobble into the workshop to find her performing surgery on mother boards.

  “What’s up?” he asked her.

  “Improvements,” was all she answered.

  As soon as he was sufficiently mended to roll about the disney in a wheelie, Orlando painted a second warning stripe at a safer distance from the exhibits. Crossing this new line would trigger sirens. He was afraid to think of what crossing the old line would trigger, now that Mooch had fiddled with the controls.

  In addition to the new warnings, the sight of the engineer gimping around in an invalid’s chair, his leg in a cast, had a chastening effect on the visitors.

  Several weeks passed without further mishap. Then a gang of teenagers dared one another into invading Monkey Island. They soon regretted the venture. Inflated coconuts rained down on them, followed by monkeys with flailing limbs. The strength of these little manikins astonished even Orlando, who after all had built them. Their ferocity could only have come from Mooch. For some reason he could not shut down the power beam, so he had to rescue the battered teenagers with ropes. All were bruised, and three were hospitalized with mild concussions.

  The Overseers wheeled Orlando to the local station, where they read him the laws regarding public hazards. They could revoke his license right now, without further ado. But instead they gave him ten days to clean up his act. At the end of that period, a squad would come round to make sure everything was perfectly safe. In the meantime, the disney would be closed.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to tame them after all,” Orlando told Mooch later.

  “Good luck,” she muttered darkly.

  Against doctor’s orders, he abandoned the wheelie and heaved himself onto crutches. Mooch grumped along at his heels. He would begin by disarming the monkeys, which peeled back their lips and gibbered at him. “Cut the power,” he said to Mooch.

  “It isn’t on,” she answered.

  He gazed across the moat toward Monkey Island, where a baboon was shaking a fist and a gorilla was torturing a tire.

  “Then how are they running?” he asked.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, you see, it didn’t seem right that we could turn them off and on anytime we felt like it. I figure a creature’s not free so long as you can flip a switch and shut it down. So I rigged them up with batteries.”

  “Batteries!” he shouted. From a palm tree on the island a chimpanzee regarded him soberly, like a scholar perusing a footnote. Orlando tried to recall the fatal moment in which the yearning for wildness had blossomed in his heart. Was it before or after he liberated Mooch from the lion’s jaw? Sighing, he told her, “Well, I’m going to have to unplug them.”

  “I wouldn’t try that.”

  “Why? What will they do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “That’s the point. Nobody knows. Nobody can know. They’re wild.”

  Staggering on the crutches, he turned his back on Monkey Island and glanced across the way at a sullen water buffalo, which was idly demolishing its manger. “You mean they might tear me limb from limb?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Orlando thought hard. The squad of Overseers would be making their inspection in little more than a week. If they found even one hazard in the place they would put him out of business. Scowling at Mooch, he said, “How long before those batteries run down?”

  “Five years, I figure. They’re the best you had.”

  “Five years!” He closed his eyes, then quickly opened them again as he lurched dizzily on the crutches.

  “You want your wheelie?” she asked.

  “I want my disney. My calm, peaceful, poky old disney.”

  “But I thought we were turning it into a wildlife sanctuary,” said Mooch hotly.

  “I didn’t want to go this far.” He gazed around forlornly at the growling, pawing, sinister brutes. “The place is too dangerous to keep open. But I can’t afford to close it. Can’t you see? It’s my livelihood. It’s my life. And now you’ve ruined it.”

  The girl appeared to chew on this verdict as if it were the first bite of the worst food she had ever tasted.

  The gates remained locked, with a sign out front explaining that the disney was closed for renovations, while Orlando tried every trick he could think of to disable the mechos. Fortunately, Mooch had not altered their territorial imprints, so they did not stir from their pools and caverns and dens. Thus he could ride his wheelie up and down the aisle without being attacked, so long as he did not cross the warning stripes.

  Jabbing the beasts with poles only upset them, and resulted in the loss of poles. Surrounding the exhibits with energy shields had no effect, nor did he have any luck with neutralizing rays. He was soon at his wits’ end.

  Mooch, all this while, holed up in her room. Orlando had to work alone, muttering to himself in a fury that gradually changed, over the course of the week, to despair. He scarcely slept. On the appointed day, the Overseers turned up at the gate and blared through a bullhorn to be let in. There were six of them, big hulking bruisers, with meltguns and truncheons dangling from their hips. In their silver uniforms and mirrored helmets, they towered above Orlando, who met them in his wheelie, the game leg jutting before him in its cast like the masthead on a ship. “Gentlemen,” he pleaded, “I haven’t quite whipped things into shape. If I could have just a few more days . . .”

  “You’ve had a few days already, Mr. Spinks,” the lead officer growled.

  “I don’t think it’s wise, just now, to go—” Orlando began.

  The officer cut him off: “We’ll decide what’s wise and what isn’t, Mr. Spinks.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Shut up and keep out of the way.”

  When Orlando still protested, the officer waved his gloved hand. One of the Overseers grabbed the handles of the wheelie and shoved Orlando roughly against a ticket booth.

  Holding his
breath, Orlando watched them divide into three pairs and scatter among the exhibits, their helmets gleaming, truncheons in their fists, meltguns swinging.

  Soon the first scream tore through the disney. Within minutes, four of the six men came staggering back to the gate, their jumpsuits torn and bloody. They dumped Orlando on the ground, hurled the wheelie aside, and pounded him with truncheons and questions.

  “I don’t know how they got that way!” Orlando cried, wanting even then to protect the child. “It just seemed to happen! I lost control over them!”

  Meanwhile the lead officer was shouting instructions into his wristphone, summoning riot control. Soon a flight of shuttles would glide overhead, melters would spew their vaporizing beams, and everything Orlando had made would turn to mist.

  He writhed on the ground and wailed. A boot landed in his ribs, on top of the old fracture, and other boots were drawing back to kick when suddenly one of the Overseers yelled, and they all took off running for the street.

  Wincing with pain, Orlando sat up to watch them go, then snapped his head round and stared back down the main aisle of the disney. A tide of beasts came surging toward him, snakes and leopards and ostriches, lumbering gorillas, monkeys shuffling arm in arm, a pride of lions and a family of dragons, one-eyed monsters and monsters with two heads, pandas and camels and goats, and right at the front was a phalanx of elephants, and perched atop the largest of these, like a diadem, sat Mooch.

  The ground shook from the thud of feet. Orlando scrambled into the ticket booth to keep from being trampled, and the flame in his ribs made him whimper. “Mooch!” he bellowed. “Stop!”

  She did not speak or wave or even look his way as she went riding out through the gate.

  Just then shuttles appeared overhead, melters zinging. Orlando shielded his eyes and blinked up at the sleek machines. The pilots cut down the laggards at the rear of the troop, then started blasting their way forward through the ranks.