Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  “What I’ll never understand is the lost socks.” Hoisting his trouser legs, Humphrey displayed two plump ankles, each one sausaged into multiple layers of socks. “How do people lose them, just riding around all day or sitting on their tails?”

  “You’ve got me,” said Grace. She gave a bewildered shake of her nearly hairless old head, which was adorned at the moment with a blond wig. “A body could fill up a closet after one day on the streets.”

  “Shoes I understand,” he said. “You can slip out of them without thinking. Your hat could fall off in a crowd. I’ve seen people lose false teeth. I’ve seen tires fall off wheelies. No mystery there. But socks?”

  “Remember when that lady at the lunch counter dropped her nose in the soup?”

  “And she fished it out, snapped it on, and kept right on eating!” Humphrey’s brown bag of a face crumpled with disgust. “I don’t know what the world’s coming to, Gracie. First we all move inside these bubble cities to get away from bugs and sunburn and poison rain and radiation. Live without threats from nature! And now everybody’s redoing their faces, rewiring their nerves, replumbing their organs, replacing their joints. Where’s it going to stop? With brains quivering in jars?”

  “Who are we to talk?” said Grace, rubbing her knees. “I’m thankful for my new joints. And if you didn’t have that ticker,” tapping him on the chest, “your blood would turn to sludge and they’d make fertilizer out of you for the farmpods.”

  “You’ve got a point there.” Humphrey lowered his eyes—his electronic eyes, he could not help remembering—and laced the fingers of his prosthetic hand into those of his natural one.

  They lapsed into silence, feeling the full weight of their ninety-odd years. Entropy, they knew, was gaining on them.

  On the following nights, after dumping their debris, Grace kept watch atop Mt. Texxon while Humphrey drudged below in the caverns, laying out wires and relays and fuses. They had left passages through the rubbish for just this purpose. Over the years, they had pilfered the materials from demolition sites, including charges of plasty, which would go in last of all.

  Here and there in the grottoes the shoring had collapsed, barricades of cardboard had given way, towers of cans had tumbled down, and so Humphrey had to proceed cautiously. As he crawled along, trailing wires behind him, he often found his way blocked by a rubbish-slide and had to backtrack. Twice the walls caved in on his very heels, and he was forced to grope his way out by side-tunnels.

  After the second of these escapes, he slumped beside Grace on the mountain crest, gulping air. “If I don’t make it out one of these days,” pant, “I want you to go ahead,” pant, “and throw the switch.”

  “With you inside? And me out here all by my lonesome getting grilled by the Overseers? Not on your sweet life.”

  “Forget I said it,” he added quickly.

  Her lips puckered and her face darkened under the blond wig. “I don’t plan to go on living without you, Hump. So you stick around.”

  “All right, sweetums. Simmer down.” He stroked her trembling hand.

  “I can’t stand the thought of staying on alone. You know that. With you gone, I’d be the only sane person left alive.”

  “Never you worry. We’ve got a lifetime hitch, you and me.” He pecked her on the cheek.

  Their minds running in parallel grooves, the two ancient scavengers thought of death.

  “You know,” said Grace after a spell, “when we lose our wits or our spunk, we ought to hold hands and jump down a recycle chute.”

  “Okay by me,” said Humphrey. “Mingle our molecules.”

  She lifted the wig to scratch her scalp. “It still seems unnatural to me, dissolving people in a soup of acids, instead of burying them like they used to.”

  “Even when they planted folks in pine boxes, the worms eventually recycled them. Acids are just quicker.”

  She patted the wig back in place. “I’d rather feed worms.”

  “I wonder if there’s a single worm inside the Enclosure. Maybe somebody raises them for experiments. To make protein burgers, say. We could donate our corpses to the lab.”

  “I don’t know about you, kiddo,” said Grace, bouncing to her feet, “but I’m not a corpse by a long shot. Let’s go scavenge.”

  In keeping with Humphrey’s prediction, one midnight just four weeks later they found that Mt. Texxon would not hold all the rubbish they had collected. When Grace tried to mash in the leftovers, she could hear junk shifting ominously inside the caverns.

  Humphrey was down there, crawling through the passageways, uncoiling wires. Headlamp bobbing, he squeezed into the deepest recesses of the mountain. He would have been glad right then for a pair of syntho knees. His natural joints were killing him. He wondered how his father had endured the pain and claustrophobia during all those decades in the mines. A pack of hungry kids at home would make a man put up with just about anything, he supposed.

  After depositing the last charge of plasty and hooking up the detonator, Humphrey sucked in his gut and started the long scramble toward the surface. Whenever he bumped the sides of the tunnel, the mass of junk shuddered above him. He made his way gingerly, thinking of his father crushed in that Kentucky mine, remembering his promise to Grace. From the walls on either side protruded the necks of bottles, rims of cans, strings, sleeves, artificial limbs, the edges of books, the corners of pictures, all compressed into strata like the mud of an ancient sea, but Humphrey scarcely looked at them, he was so intent on escaping. Then he noticed the bowl of a soup spoon jutting out. How could he have missed it? Gracie must have tossed it when he wasn’t looking. Without thinking, he yanked the spoon from the drift of junk. A small quake buckled the props in front of him, lowering the ceiling.

  That was royally dumb, he thought. Sinking to all fours, he crawled forward. He could hear other props giving way as the mass of debris shifted.

  A few meters above him, Grace perched on a boulder, listening to the mountain as if it were a colicky baby. Each time it grumbled and heaved, she groaned. The quakes sent tremors up through the aluminum slope, through the elastic boulder on which she sat, through her bones.

  “You all right, Humphrey?” she whispered into the talkie strapped to her wrist.

  His reply seeped through the plug in her ear. “Little queasy down here, ducky. But I’ll make it.”

  “You’re not prospecting? Hunting for socks or spoons?”

  “Heavens, no!” he panted. “Now hush.”

  She lowered the talkie from her lips. The Overseers could hear you blink your eye, if they happened to be listening in your direction. They could monitor your heart, and tell if one of the valves was sticking.

  Grace kept an eye on the park gates, where early visitors would begin arriving within an hour or two. Most young people would ride the belts up the side. But many of the oldsters would climb on foot, mouths groping for air like stranded fish. She understood why they labored up these metal slopes, their hearts thumping, spots dancing before their foggy eyes. She was one of them, youthful in spirit despite her battered carcass, which had been mended with electronics and plastic. The artificial portions of her were numb, as if the surgeons had implanted lumps of emptiness in place of her knees, her liver, her right foot and left shoulder, all the failed organs and bones. Her own original flesh ached about these empty spaces, and her soul moaned through them like a ghost flitting through a crumbling house. There was nothing like a jaunt up the mountainside to revive the spirits.

  She checked the most reliable of her watches. 01:20. “Hurry it up, kiddo,” she whispered into her talkie.

  For a moment only gasps leaked through the earplug. Then Humphrey muttered, “Going as fast as I can. Got to rest a bit.”

  “How’s your ticker?” By way of answer, the thump of his heartbeat came slushing into her ear. “Sounds too fast!” she hissed. “How far do you have to go?”

  A rasping noise smothered his reply as a quake shook the mountain.

 
; “Humphrey?” she whispered.

  “It’s all right. A little slide. I’m digging through.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The golf-and-garter tunnel. About midway.”

  “Here I come,” said Grace.

  “You stay put.”

  “Not on your life.”

  She donned a helmet and headlamp, pushed the boulder aside, and waggled down the ladder. If someone discovered their secret, so be it. Plan or no plan, she was not about to lose Humphrey. At the base of the ladder, where the rubbish tunnels began, she switched on the lamp and shuffled away into the gloom. From Humphrey’s description, she recognized the mouth of his tunnel by the golf club elbowing out from the wall and the garter belt dangling from the roof. She crept on, careful not to touch anything but the well-packed floor. Another slide, she thought, and we’ll both be sardines.

  Within a few paces she came to a blockade where the ceiling had collapsed. Through the jumble she could hear the sound of Humphrey’s quiet scratching, like a mouse trapped in a heap of cans. She began carefully working from her side, removing a pot, a crushed hat, a slipper.

  His voice quavered in her ear. “Gracie?”

  “You were expecting a troll?” She pried loose a clump of masks, a bag of hair clippings. “I hope your daddy was better than you at shoring up mine shafts.”

  “His mountains were made of rock,” Humphrey wheezed, “not skittery junk.”

  The sound of his scratching drew closer. Grace clawed her way forward. A chunk of roof fell on her, but she wriggled free and kept going. Presently she cleared away the chassis of a wheelie, and there was Humphrey’s light. In a moment his hands appeared through the opening, the fleshy one bleeding and the synthetic one leaking oil. Then his lovely crumpled face appeared. She squirmed forward and hugged him fervently, ignoring the spoon in his breast pocket.

  It was nearing 02:00 when they rode their carts down Mt. Texxon. They stopped at the light-fountain in Marconi Plaza, too excited to fret over their aches. They sat on the fountain’s edge, with colored lights swirling around them. Up in Natureland Park, the three mountains gleamed, still deserted, for the new day’s visitors had not yet arrived. The entire city looked as though it had been hatched that very minute, the pure architecture of thought.

  Humphrey drew the switchbox from his pocket and asked, “You want to do it?”

  “Let’s both,” said Grace, placing her hand on his.

  Together they released the safety and pushed the button.

  There was a deep rumble. The sides of Mt. Texxon bulged and the top burst open, spewing smoke and ash and clots of junk into the enclosed sky of Oregon City.

  Traffic stopped. Riders leapt from pedbelts and stood gawking as the air filled with shoes, wigs, spinning bottles and glinting cans, snarls of wire, printed circuits, posters, all the leavings of their lives. Gobs of plastic settled on walkways. Grease filmed windows. Scraps of metal pelted awnings and roofs. The citizens were struck motionless, gaping at the ruptured mountain, their avenues grown suddenly hazardous, while a blizzard of forgotten things blanketed the city.

  Holding one another’s hands, Grace and Humphrey rested solemnly on the fountain’s lip, two old-timers with long memories, recalling the real mountains and volcanoes of their youth.

  Oregon City ground to a halt. Gears and switches seized up, pedbelts froze, lights flickered whimsically, fountains spewed at crazy angles, smoke alarms wailed, fire sprinklers doused offices and stores, overturned wheelies blocked the avenues. The Overseers’ shuttles could barely navigate through the soupy air. Their cones of light shone down on chaos. Cleaning robots made little headway against the mess, their tires skidding on oil smears, their brushes gumming up, their pincers snagging. In the end, soldiers were called out to deal with the emergency using those primitive tools, shovels and buckets and brooms.

  Terrarium

  Phoenix thought of her as the barefooted walker. On a day when the pressure inside Oregon City and inside his own head seemed no greater than usual, no more conducive to visions, he emerged from his apartment and there she was, pacing in the wrong direction on the pedbelt. By matching her stride to the speed of the conveyor the woman managed to stay at the same point in the corridor, just opposite his door. Bustling along, yet never stirring from her chosen spot, she reminded Phoenix of the conjoined whirl and stillness of a gyroscope.

  This prodigy backed him rump against his shut door. He looked down, but not before catching a glimpse of red hair escaping from the woman’s hood, cheeks glowing through a skim of cosmetics, green gown actually darkened with perspiration below the arms and around the neck. The corridor trapped her smell, the reek of a hot animal. She was a throwback, he told himself, aroused and ashamed. By lowering his gaze he hoped to give the woman a chance to withdraw from his life. Sight of her naked feet sent his gaze skidding back up to her face, and so he had the misfortune to be staring into her luminous green eyes when she turned on him and said, “It’s called walking, you idiot.”

  Abruptly she stopped her pacing, and the belt carried her out of sight, bare feet and all, beyond a curve in the hallway.

  Phoenix emptied his lungs. The ventilator soon banished her smell, but the image of her face, flushed and naked beneath the film of cosmetics, stuck fast in his memory. He went on to work, easing from pedbelt to escalator to elevator, and eventually to the roller-chair that carried him to his desk, where he bent as usual over satellite monitors. But rather than hunt for solar flares, hurricanes, ozone gaps, storm fronts, or the thousand other signs of nature’s assault on the human system, his eyes kept tracing the shape of the woman’s face in the cloud patterns, the bulge of hip and breast in the contours of continents.

  After work, instead of gaming or chemmie-tripping, he went straight home. There was no barefooted woman pacing outside his door, of course, since the pedbelts were crammed with riders. He pressed a thumb to his lockplate, then stood for a minute in the opening, watching the double stream of riders. Their feet were shod, their legs still, their heads properly hooded or wigged, their bodies hidden beneath gowns, their faces masked. No one returned his wary glance.

  It pained him to enter the apartment. The room’s neatness suddenly oppressed him. Nothing invited his touch—not the sharp angles of his furniture, not the glinting console, not the wall murals that were just then shifting their designs to mark a new hour. The air smelled of nothing, tasted of nothing. He tossed a pillow on the floor, left a cabinet standing open, dragged a few costumes from their hangers, but without any real hope of disturbing the order of the place. Slumped in the softest chair, burning his lips on a cup of narco, Phoenix scrutinized the geography of his life, seeking some wild place that might accommodate the longing aroused in him by this barefooted woman.

  Days ticked by. Each morning before work he peered out through the spyhole in his door, but with less and less fear—or was it hope?—of seeing her. Just when his life was composing itself again, when clouds on the Earthsat monitors were beginning to resemble clouds again instead of lips and ankles, one day he looked out and there she was, pacing along in sweat-darkened green. The lens of the spyhole made her appear swollen. Her naked feet churned and her bulbous head, fringed in red curls, bobbed ridiculously. Wondering how such an unappetizing creature could have enthralled him, Phoenix opened the door. It was a mistake. Her full stare caught him. Moist cheeks behind the glaze of makeup, long-boned feet, swim of legs beneath the gown.

  This time she pronounced the words icily: “It’s called walking. You should try it. Melt away some of that flab.”

  By reflex, he smoothed the cloth over his cushiony stomach. Flab? How dare she refer to his body. The chill in her voice implied that, while he had been moping around with her image spiked into his brain, she had forgotten him entirely.

  “Do you mind?” she said, never breaking stride. “There’s less traffic here. Fewer zombies to compete with.”

  He shook his head no, then in confusion nodded yes, uns
ure what he was answering. The woman kept up her treadmill stride. Phoenix shilly-shallied in his doorway, immobilized by a snapshot view of himself as he must appear to her: bouffant wig of iridescent blue, face painted to resemble the star of Video Dancers, every inch of flesh cloaked in a moodgown. He could not bear to look down at the garment, which was doubtless a fireworks of color, reflecting his inner pandemonium.

  “I don’t mind,” he said, his nostrils flaring with the scent of her. “Why should I mind?”

  “There are lots of drecks who do,” the woman said.

  She smiled, and he winced. The smile, the private sharing of words, the eye contact, the exposed face—it was all coming in a rush, shattering the rules of sexual approach. Unwilling to name a body part, he stammered “Do your walking things hurt?”

  “Never. That’s why I go barefoot, to keep them tough.”

  “And why have them tough?”

  “So I can walk barefoot.”

  “But why walk at all?” he demanded in vexation. Before he could slice into her circular reasoning, passengers trundled around the curve, and the woman, with no attempt at disguising her smile, crossed to the other belt and rode away out of sight.

  For a long time Phoenix stood in his doorway, hoping. But traffic thickened in the corridor and the woman never reappeared. Or maybe she did pass again, duly costumed and painted, lost in the crowd. Passing, she might even have seen him, but without being able to distinguish him from the hundred others who were decked out this morning in iridescent blue wigs and the painted face of that video star. Phoenix felt paltry, lurking there on his threshold, at once conspicuous and invisible.