Noting her disgust, he growled, “City girl.”
“I’m trying. It’s a lot to get used to.”
His mouth quirked into what she took as a smile, although she could not be sure. Only his teeth showed through the bristling fur. “Sorry. I get impatient. Let’s work.”
They leaned their packs against the scabby trunk of the sycamore. Scrabbling down the bank, avoiding the frail blue flowers, Jurgen was the first to reach the spring. He grabbed a stone, then another and another, heaving them to the side. Marn slid after him, wary of his flailing elbows. As he hefted the next rock, there was a blur of movement, like a rope snapping and recoiling, and he cried out.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’ll be damned. A snake.” He stared at his arm. “I’ve just been snakebit.”
“A snake? But they’re extinct.”
He gave a harsh bark of laughter. “This one didn’t get the message.”
He loosened his cuff and folded back the sleeve. Marn forced herself to look at his bare forearm, which bristled with the same coarse black hair that covered his jaw and skull. The muscles were thick and netted with veins. Near the elbow were twin rows of puncture-marks, like pin-pricks, leading up to a pair of larger purplish holes, oozing blood.
She pressed a hand over her mouth. Words dried on her tongue.
“I’m glad to learn we didn’t kill off all the snakes,” Jurgen said, “but I’d be happier if this one wasn’t poisonous.”
“How do you know it’s poisonous?”
“See those two big holes? Those are fang marks, where the venom is injected. Question is, what species?” He rehearsed the possibilities as he labored up the slope. “Too far north for cottonmouths. A rattler would have made a ruckus. Likely a copperhead.” He suddenly turned, and Marn, hurrying after, bumped into him, then immediately pulled back. “Could you tell,” he asked, “was it brownish, with darker bands, or creamy with copper bands?”
Marn trembled. “All I saw was like a rope lashing out. I didn’t notice color.”
“Well, open your eyes.” His gaze, dark and rough as the stones he had been heaving, glared at her, then swung away. He continued on up to the sycamore, where he slumped against the piebald trunk. His outstretched legs in their muddy coveralls looked like two more knotty tree roots. He tilted the arm for inspection.
Marn approached cautiously, afraid of Jurgen, of the snake, of the repulsive wound. “Shouldn’t we go back?”
Again he laughed harshly, his chin thrust up by pain. “If that bastard could survive our poisons, I can survive his.”
“We need the medicine kit.”
“I’ll be okay as soon as I rest a minute.” He tilted his head back against the trunk and loosed a full-throated bellow.
Was this how the poison worked? Marn wondered. She hovered uncertainly before him, feeling too small to budge him unless he cooperated. “Come on, Jurgen. We’ve got to go back.”
“If there’s snakes, what else might have survived?” His eyes, already squinting from pain, squeezed tighter in his effort to recall names. “Fox. Deer. Turtles. Eagles. Salamanders. What else? Bears. Beavers. Owls. Why not coyotes? Maybe even cougars.”
The terror Marn had felt when she first peered out through the hole in the pipeline now swept back over her. It was madness to have left Indiana City. Stifling or not, life back there was at least safe. Nothing could lash out at you, leap on you, bite you. Her skin crawled. “Jurgen,” she said as calmly as she could, “get up. We’re going back to camp.”
“Right,” he grunted. But instead of moving, he gazed at his wounded arm. The flesh was turning purple, the skin from elbow to wrist was swelling. “Imagine—snakebite!”
“Jurgen,” she pleaded.
“Just get my pins under me.” His legs jerked, but failed to lift him. “Dizzy.”
His weakness frightened her now, as his strength had frightened her before. “Should I go for help?”
Jurgen shook his head. “No. I can walk. Give me a hand.” He raised his good arm.
Without letting herself think, Marn grabbed his thick hand with both of hers, braced her feet against a root, and tugged with all her might. Slowly he rose to his feet. Once upright, he staggered a few steps. “Can’t see. Fool legs won’t work.”
Again without thinking, Marn slipped an arm around his waist and eased her shoulder against his side, bracing him. They lurched ahead. He was massive and his weight seemed to grow with every step. But she would not let go, not even when he reeled and his beard rasped her forehead. She could feel his panting against her ribs, and she found herself panting in sympathy.
By the time they stumbled into the dome she was too weary to fret about their twined bodies. But the startled expressions with which Hinta and Sol greeted them brought back her confusion.
“A snake bit him,” Marn explained, short of breath.
“A what?” demanded Sol, shrinking back. Even Hinta raised her gloves, palms out, as if to shove them away.
“Help me lay him down.”
“Are we there?” Jurgen’s voice rose brokenly. The good fist rubbed his eyes. “Can’t see a thing.”
That snapped Hinta and Sol out of their daze. Together with Marn they lowered him to his cushion. The swollen arm, mottled scarlet and purple, made Marn nauseous. She pushed her feelings aside and bent over him, covering him with his sleeping bag. Sol ran to call the others, while Hinta powered up the medicine console.
Marn was trying to cut Jurgen’s sleeve with scissors, to ease the swelling, but the arm kept jerking. “Jurgen,” she spoke close to his ear, “you’re going to be all right. But we’ve got to touch you. You’ll forgive that?”
His answer was mumbled. “Sure, sure. Go ahead.”
A point of fear glinted from his black eyes. His shivering made the cushion tremble. Marn finished cutting the sleeve, then drew the cover to his chin, leaving only the puffy arm exposed. “Hurry,” she whispered to Hinta. “He’s in shock.”
“Snakebite?” Hinta called. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Copperhead. Code it in, see if there’s an antidote.”
Hinta slipped off her gloves and typed the implausible message on the console. As Marn watched the lithe fingers dance on the keys, desire uncoiled in her. She yearned to make her first contact with this brisk woman, so easy in her body. But instead here was Jurgen stretched out beside her, his body cumbersome and rough.
“It says lower the arm,” Hinta read from the screen, “bind it above the elbow, slit the skin at the fang marks, suck the venom out, administer antivenin.”
“Can we make that?” Marn asked.
Hinta tapped the keys, paused, shook her head, the milky hair swirling. “Idiot machine synthesizes antidotes for every toxin we ever invented. But for natural poisons—nothing.”
Jurgen broke into delirious babbling. “Snake, by God. Thought they were all dead. Wolves. Bears. Ghost bite.”
“Easy,” Marn whispered. It seemed callous to touch him through clumsy gloves, so she drew them off and pressed her bare hand to his cheek. The shudder of that contact ran through her body. But she had no time to savor it.
Hinta passed her the antiseptic swab and scalpel. Worry swept aside all of Marn’s inhibitions, made her scrub and then slice the skin, exposing red flesh. Meat, the same as any animal. “Now the syringe.”
“I’m looking for it.”
Marn waited. Jurgen trembled under her hands. “Hurry.”
Hinta rummaged in the medical chest with angry clacking noises. “It’s not here. Maybe somebody took it for collecting samples.”
Marn let her body think for her. “Quick, check if the venom is a stomach poison.”
“Why do you—”
“Just do it.”
Clicking of keys. “No,” said Hinta, “it’s a blood poison.”
Marn looked down at Jurgen. Only the whites of his eyes were visible. His mouth was a wheezing hole in the beard. The skin around the wound seemed
ready to split. The fang marks oozed.
“You’re not going—” said Hinta in a panic.
Marn waved her away. It was like bending steel to force her mouth down to the festering wound. Her lips met his hot skin. She sucked, and the first trickle of fluid on her tongue made her gag. She reared back and spat violently into a bowl. Then she bent once more to the wound.
By then the others were crowding into the dome, simmering with questions, carrying with them the smells of wood and dirt. Marn heard the word snake hissed repeatedly, as if it were an incantation. She kept sucking, gagging and spitting, until they were shocked into silence, kept sucking until nothing more would come, then she leaned back, mouth sticky, an acrid taste on her tongue. She glared at the ring of faces. “What are you staring at? You’d rather he die?”
They drew back from her, as from a sparking wire. Marn stayed by Jurgen, her hand on the black spittle-soaked fur of his jaw. She felt a connection with this man, as if in pressing her lips to him a circuit had been closed and power had surged between them.
“We don’t have the antidote,” Hinta explained to the others.
Their whispers took up again the hiss of snake, snake. It was as though, in felling Jurgen, a legendary beast had struck at them all. What did any of them know about the wilds? School had taught them little, merely filled them with dread of the outside. Videos and holos showed only deserts, sulphurous volcanos, blank oceans, and miles of blighted emptiness. You could learn about this forested and rivered world only by hearsay, through the old folks, or through tedious hours in the archives.
Marn stroked Jurgen’s hair, which felt as springy and resilient as the soil in the forest. His mouth sagged open, breathing hoarsely. His naked arm, bloated and discolored, lay at his side.
“The question is,” Hinta was saying, “do we take him back inside or not?”
“And give it all up?” The acid-scars on Jolon’s cheeks reddened with indignation.
“No, absolutely not,” said Coyt.
Voices jumbled together too quickly for Marn to sort them out. The sensations from her hands commanded all her attention—the wiry mat of his beard, so strange, and the stuttering pulse in the bend of his elbow. Could a heart pump so fast, through so huge a body? He bulked on his cushion like a fallen tree.
When Marn could separate voices again, Rand was saying, “It would take a pair of us to haul him back through the pipe. Or we might locate a health patroller.”
“And the Overseers would be here in half an hour with cages and chemmies,” Jolon pointed out. The ruddy scars on her cheeks, the tension in her body, the balled fist on either knee proclaimed that she had no intention of going back.
Heads nodded in agreement. Marn knew they were right. Any contact with Indiana City would end the experiment and land them in quarantine, most likely for the rest of their lives. But she wanted the choice made clear: “And if he dies?”
No one answered. Except for the strain in their faces, they might have been meditating, or drugged. Marn recalled the vows she had taken with them back in that echoing oil tank—to live outside for a year, a cycle of seasons, before voting to stay or return. And if they returned, to do so in secret. She remembered how Jurgen had always been the first to shove aside every obstacle. Jurgen, with sawdust on his beard, proclaiming to all the astounding properties of wood. Jurgen, stinking with sweat, laughing when the others wrinkled their noses at him. Jurgen, ripping away his mask, spreading his hands on the Earth.
Marn spoke deliberately. “It’s not worth his dying. Nothing’s worth it.”
Sol pinched his upper lip. “We knew there’d be accidents.”
“That’s why there are nine of us,” Coyt added. “Redundancy.”
Marn could not connect their words to this body panting beneath her hand. She kept hearing him cry out in pain, kept seeing those mitts claw at his inflamed eyes. Her own vision began to blur. The others’ faces merged, until they all seemed like clones of the same hostile person. For the first time in days she longed for her mask, to hide herself.
Then she heard Hinta’s voice, and recognized once again the silky hair, the high cheek-bones: “I don’t think he’d want us to go back inside.”
Her blue eyes, which usually made Marn think of sky, now made her think of ice. “Look,” said Marn, “this isn’t a broken machine. It’s Jurgen, don’t you see?”
“We know, Marn, we know,” Hinta soothed. “We’re not forgetting him. He’s why I’m here, and why I’m going to stay.”
“I say we vote,” Jolon insisted.
“Vote, vote,” cried the others.
“All right, then,” said Hinta. “Do we take him inside?”
Like the others, Marn curled one hand in her lap, thinking furiously. Thrust one finger up—or a closed fist? That was the computer’s binary choice, yes or no, too stark for human questions. How could she let him die, the first person she had ever touched? And yet this was why they had come outside, to get back in touch. Return to Indiana City would be death of another kind.
“Time,” Hinta called.
As Marn lifted her arm, the fist closed of itself, squeezed tight as if to keep hold on something. Around the circle were eight balled fists, eight refusals to go back.
Marn closed her eyes. Beneath her fingers Jurgen’s hectic pulse raced on and on, against all reason.
The others padded away to the hatch, where their boots and tools waited for them, a few pausing beside Marn on their way, glancing at Jurgen, whispering in sober tones. If the largest one of us could fall so quickly, to a beast we thought was extinct, what might happen to the rest of us? That is what Marn heard in their whispers, what she read in their taut faces as they withdrew again to the day’s chores.
Only Hinta stayed behind. Her eyes, no longer ice, had become sky again, a softer blue. As she lowered herself beside Marn, she sighed. Their shoulders brushed. Neither drew back. “So we wait,” Hinta said.
“We wait,” said Marn.
“He might live. Just to spite the city. Show them he can survive outdoors, do without their fancy medicines.”
Marn wanted to bury her face in that springy hair. But her lips were still gummy with Jurgen’s blood. Beneath her hand his pulse shredded away the minutes.
After a while Hinta stirred. “Come on, you need a break from this.” Rising with a sensuous unfolding of her legs, she went to the dome’s entrance and whistled.
Moments later, Sol ambled in. “News?” he asked.
“No,” said Hinta. “He’s the same. Would you sit with him, keep him warm, spoon him some cardio if he comes to?”
Marn caught the small word—if.
“Sure,” Sol replied. “You going out?”
Hinta drew on her gloves, tucked her hair into the collar of her worksuit. “Marn and I want to go clear that spring.”
“No,” Marn insisted. “The spring can wait.”
“He’s unconscious. He doesn’t know you’re here.”
“But I can’t just leave him.”
“Your staying won’t do him any good. You’ll only make yourself sick. And we need you, we need everyone.” Hinta waited by the airlock holding a shovel, one hip thrust out in a challenge Marn could not decipher.
“Go on,” Sol urged. “We’ll come get you if there’s any change.”
Marn knelt beside Jurgen, hesitating. Her wrist tingled from his breath. The pulse seemed to be growing stronger. A crescent of black iris showed under each eyelid. What if he should wake, now, and find her fingers on his throat, her hair brushing his face?
Confused, she lifted her hand from the warm skin, stood up, backed away, and followed Hinta outdoors.
The rock-strewn spring, which had seemed a kilometer distant this morning when she was helping Jurgen back to the dome, was only a few minutes’ walk away.
“Look at the lovely blue flowers,” Hinta said.
“Bluebells,” Marn told her. “And that’s a sycamore,” she added, pointing to the gigantic piebald t
ree.
“Such odd names. Sounds like Jurgen’s teaching.”
“Yes.” Marn took the shovel from Hinta, saying, “In case mister snake is still around.” Then she scooted down the bank amid the nodding blossoms, her boots gouging the mud.
And mister snake was still around, slashing at the shovel as soon as Marn disturbed its lair. There was the same blur of movement, like an end-knotted rope snapping, and the click of teeth against metal. The two women leapt back, and the snake withdrew. Furious, Marn realized now why she had come. She pried the stones apart with the shovel, tumbled a few, and then out the creature slithered, gliding with sinuous ease. Its wedge-shaped head was the color of copper, and its length was ringed by coppery bands. It might have been a limb off the sycamore, cast down and set moving. Nothing she had ever seen rivaled it for grace. She watched, fascinated, as a forked tongue licked out between the fangs, tasting the air.
Only when the snake lowered its head and began writhing away did she remember Jurgen lying unconscious. Hatred ran like acid in her veins. Hefting the shovel she advanced on the snake, tightening every muscle to crush it. But even before she heard Hinta crying, “No, no, let it be!” she was easing the handle onto her shoulder. The hatred passed, dissolved away by an emotion she could not name, as she watched the creature until it glided out of sight into weeds.
“He belongs here,” Hinta said. “This is his place.”
Marn nodded, half mesmerized. Now that it had vanished, the snake seemed almost legendary again, too beautiful and supple and quick to be real. She tugged the gloves away to wipe her eyes.
Hinta removed her own gloves. Without a word, she took Marn’s hand.
That night, when Jurgen muttered in his sleep, “Marn? Where’s Marn?” she rolled over, pulled the sleeping bag up to his throat, rested a hand on his forehead. No fever. She touched his wrist, and was reassured by the slow, steady pulse.
Relieved, she crept from the dome and into the bewildering night. The darkness buzzed with clicks and cries. From the woods came a hooting sound that might have been an owl. Was that possible? Scraps of moonlight rocked on the lake. In the water there might be more snakes, or other beasts for which she had no names, but she would go in anyway. Shrugging free of her clothes, she waded in with muscles tensed, breath held, then splashed forward as she would in a pool. But this was no sanitized water; this was whatever the lake gathered from land and sky.
Dancing in Dreamtime Page 19
