Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  The videos had shown a series of white peaks strung out along the equator, rising like teeth above the rust-dark jungle. Planning a feelie called Journey to the Crystal Mountain, the studio wanted the brothers to hike to and from one of those peaks, with gritty adventures along the way. While descending in the shuttle, Graham had taken a bearing on the nearest shining mountain. What made it gleam? he wondered. Not snow, at this latitude. Stone? Volcanic glass?

  Carl tilted up his mashed fighter’s nose, hairy nostrils flaring. “You trust this air?”

  “It’ll do. I’m not lugging tanks, even in point-nine G.”

  “Risk it, right?” Carl thumped him, hard, and filled the dome with rowdy laughter. “My daredevil bro.”

  Graham was older by two years, but Carl was taller by a hand and heavier by thirty kilos. He was large and steady, slow to excite and slow to calm down, like a boulder resisting changes in temperature. The older brother picked his way around obstacles, while the younger one bulled his way through. The elder sensed patterns, nuances, details; the younger tuned in on threats. And so in their treks they had fallen into complementary roles, Graham leading them into the uncharted zones and back again, Carl keeping them in one piece.

  After supper, Carl began methodically packing their two rucksacks, checking the food, the clothes, the stove and fuel, the lights, especially the guns and explosives and flares.

  Unsettled by the silence that came on at dusk, Graham kept pacing from window to window, staring out at the mazy woods. No movement, no glint of eyes. Abrupt and final as a wall. Somehow he must find a way through that tangled mass to the dazzling mountain. He trembled. Unless you could die from going there, no place was truly wild. On Earth, death had retreated to the intensive-care wards. Off Earth, it could meet you anywhere.

  “Ease up, bro,” said Carl.

  “I’m loose. You don’t think I’m loose?”

  “You’re wound tight as a top.”

  Graham knew it was true. But the excitement was sweet, the tension of standing on a cliff’s edge.

  Their shimmersuits were opaque in the early light, clinging to them like brown pelts, and their packs bulked high above their helmets. It was the twilit hour when nighttime predators yield to those of the day. Nothing stirred.

  “Point the way, big brother, and let’s move.” Even though Carl whispered, his voice sounded huge in the stillness.

  “I’m looking.” Graham always savored this moment on the threshold of a wild zone, deciding where to enter. At length he ducked under a limb and stepped into the russet woods.

  They moved slowly at first, cautiously, then more quickly as Graham picked up the grain of the land, Carl lumbering behind with stungun in hand, the two swinging along in tandem like a four-legged beast, rarely talking, rarely needing to talk. Beyond the palisade of trees at the jungle’s edge, the undergrowth thinned out. Light from the orange star speckled the ground. The spongy soil yielded beneath their boots, preserving the faint mark of their passage.

  In the first few hours, they paused only for Graham to sight back along the way they had come, memorizing the gestalt of trunks and limbs so that days from now he could lead them back out. Then as the shafts of light from the local sun tilted toward vertical, the brothers halted as if on signal. They shrugged free of the packs and sat on their helmets.

  Graham took a pinch of dirt and held it to his nose. Must, mildew, iron. From overhead came that metallic clinking, as of jangled keys. “I can’t figure out that noise.”

  “That’s my gears seizing up from this heat,” said Carl, mopping his broad face. The gun lay in his lap. “Melt me to a puddle of grease, at this rate.”

  Graham surveyed the jungle. The leaves and vines and fernlike fronds were in shades of red, the solid trunks nearly black, creating an impression of embers and ashes. The trees rose about three times a man’s height before branching horizontally. Wherever they touched, the limbs of neighboring trees interlaced, and the joints blazed with gold and blue growths like bright flowers. Dead trees, their trunks rotted through, dangled from the lattice of branches, and creepers looped down in festoons. The canopy appeared so tightly woven, Graham imagined a person could walk up there. Animals certainly could. “You see anything move yet?” he asked.

  “Negative,” Carl answered.

  “Better not be all plants. No animals, no action.”

  “I figure they’re here, just back deeper in the woods.”

  On their next halt, Graham asked the question again, and Carl answered, “Nothing to sweat about.”

  “What? I didn’t see anything.”

  “You notice those things like gray bags hanging from the trunks, spikes all over them?”

  “Those are animals? I thought they were epiphytes.”

  “They move. Tree-burrs, I call them.” Pointing overhead with the gun, Carl added, “And those snaky dudes that slither through the roof I call branch-weavers.”

  Graham peered long before making out a gliding shape, like a scarlet rope, moving through the web of limbs. Having detected one, he saw them everywhere. The canopy was in fact crawling with these snake-like animals, which seemed to be lacing the branches together, binding twig to twig.

  “Want a closer look?” said Carl. “Give the gawkers back home a thrill?”

  Before Graham could protest, Carl fired a quick burst up through the canopy. Three of the branch-weavers clattered to the ground and lay still, like hanks of rusty chain.

  “You and that gun,” said Graham.

  “It won’t hurt them. Give them a minute, they’ll be squirming again.” He turned over one of the scaly bodies with his boot. “Check out that armor. See how these plates mesh? And look how this gooey stuff seeps out between the joints. I figure they smear that on the bark and glue the whole mess together tight as a net.”

  “To catch what?”

  “Anything that’s crawling around up there.”

  Graham studied the scaffolding of limbs. He would have to climb up there eventually to get a bearing on the crystal mountain. But he was in no hurry. He shouldered his pack, pulled on helmet and gloves, yet he did not want to leave until the branch-weavers revived. As the seconds passed, and the bodies failed to stir, he grew uneasy. “Maybe you gave them too high a charge.”

  “It was nothing. A tickle.” Carl prodded the motionless bodies, the plates clicking. He snorted. “Well, crap. I do believe the suckers are dead. You wouldn’t think anything this tough on the outside could be so weak on the inside.”

  “Too weak for you to go blazing away with that damn gun.”

  “I wasn’t blazing away. What I shot them with wouldn’t have stopped a rat back home.”

  “Well, we’re not back home.”

  “I noticed. So don’t get us lost.”

  They had walked only a few paces when there came a snarling and scratching from behind. Wheeling, they saw a pack of many-legged animals the size of cats tearing the ropy bodies of the branch-weavers to shreds. In less than a minute, the beasts had stuffed the scraps into pouches along their flanks and were scurrying into burrows under the roots.

  Carl whistled. “You talk about hungry.”

  “And quick,” said Graham, disturbed by the scavengers, yet doing his job, filling his senses with the oily smell, the scrabbling sounds, the bitter tang of this first kill. There would be others. Every year, Carl became more trigger-happy, firing at anything that was even vaguely menacing, as if he feared their luck was running out.

  They swung into motion, Graham at point, Carl behind. Their shimmersuits took on a ruby sheen from the heat. They sauntered easily, a pace they could maintain all day, if need be, for days on end, for weeks, like caribous migrating. Now and again Carl would whistle, gesturing at the canopy or the undergrowth, and Graham would stare and stare before seeing a camouflaged beast. This was always the way of it: Graham had an eye for the still pattern of things, Carl had an eye for anything that moved, and each brother was nearly blind to what the other could s
ee. “If it can’t run or jump, it can’t hurt you,” was Carl’s slogan. “If it moves, you can’t find your way by it,” was Graham’s counter.

  Because the local day was little more than twenty E-hours long, the afternoon passed quickly, shafts of light piercing the jungle at lower and lower angles. They pitched camp beside a creek. After shaking a slug of the water in a toxi-vial, to make certain it was safe, Carl lay down and plunged his face into the stream. “I’ll set up,” he said, chin dripping water, “you remember.”

  While the encampment took shape under Carl’s big hands—domed tent blossoming, sleep-mats inflating, supper brewing, tripwires unfurled around the perimeter—Graham sat on the bank with his bare feet in the creek, recalling the day’s trail. He retraced their steps until he reached the beginning point in the parachute field. Then he turned about and worked his way forward to this creek, then back again, as if he were winding and unwinding a ball of string.

  When he opened his eyes, Carl was serving out the stew. It tasted of catfish and potatoes, but it was the same high-energy confection that would wear other flavors on other nights. Graham swallowed some, then spoke about what had been troubling him: “Let’s not do any more killing than we have to, okay?”

  “The feelie crowds love it,” said Carl.

  “I know they do. But I hate it. I’m sick of it.”

  Carl did not reply. A movement in the vault of limbs had snared his attention. “Visitors,” he grumbled.

  This time Graham easily spied the beasts, inky blobs against the darkening sky. There were ten or so, arrayed in a circle above the camp. Two more joined them, then two more and two more. They kept arriving in pairs until their bodies formed an unbroken ring. The limbs creaked under their weight. They were larger than the scavengers that had torn up the branch-weavers, as large as wolves, but thick and slow-moving.

  “Ring-watchers,” whispered Carl, naming them.

  Graham placed a hand on his brother’s arm. “Don’t shoot.”

  “You want to sleep with that party upstairs?”

  A tremor passed around the circle of bodies, setting off harsh grating noises in the network of limbs.

  “Let’s see if the light will scare them off,” said Graham.

  With a grunt, Carl switched on the perimeter flare. There was an explosive release of gas, and the camp was haloed in a blaze of light. Guttural cries sounded in the branches, then a jostling of sluggish bodies. “Go on, you hairy bastards,” Carl shouted, “find somebody else for supper.”

  Graham watched uneasily as his brother shuffled in a lumbering, triumphant dance.

  Twice in the night Carl wriggled out of his sleeping bag, hissed, “Relax, I got this,” disappeared outside, and in a few minutes returned, breathing heavily. Come daylight, Graham found two ring-watchers sprawled near the entrance of the tent.

  “They got too curious,” Carl explained. “I could hear the pack of them nosing around. These two crossed the flare.”

  Graham set his mouth. Death, always more death. This, too, he must absorb. He turned over one of the carcasses, revealing a cluster of many-jointed legs surrounding a hole that was lined with spikes, a lethal opening large enough to swallow a man’s head. A knobby skeleton bulged under the pelt, which was silvered like that of an aged gorilla. It smelled like rotting fruit.

  “Pretty, eh?” said Carl. “I figured you’d want a look.”

  “Did they attack you?”

  “Not what you’d call attack. Moseyed up. Wouldn’t stop. I hit them with about the right dose for a dog. And thump, down they went. Not a kick.” He grasped one of the ponderous sacks of bones with gloved hands. “Here, grab hold of this thing.”

  They heaved the bodies out through the barrier of light, which still blazed yellow against the orange dawn. While the brothers ate breakfast, the humpbacked scavengers dismembered the carcasses, then withdrew under the shadowy roots, gorged and swaying, leaving behind only a solitary bone.

  “Six minutes flat,” said Carl. “Hide and hair and giblets.”

  “I’m going to look at what they left.” Putting on gloves and slipping out through the light-barrier, Graham squatted beside the bone. It was hammer-shaped, the color of old piano keys, dimpled with sockets. He lifted it gingerly, testing its weight and hardness. Suddenly there was a frantic scuffling and a wave of scavengers came rushing at him and tumbled him flat under their swarming weight. The bone turned in his grasp and jerked violently away. A moment later he was sitting up dazed, Carl beside him with gun at the ready, and not a beast in sight.

  “You hurt?” Carl asked.

  Graham shivered. He felt as though twenty fists had landed on him, but landed gently, as if tapping a message. “No, no.”

  “Did they bite you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The brothers inspected Graham’s suit, but could find no rips in the tough fabric.

  “God damn,” said Carl, “they were all over you before I even saw them. I thought they’d tear you to pieces.”

  Rubbing his neck, remembering the furious weight, the bone twisting from his grasp, Graham said, “I bet they could have, if they’d wanted to. But all they seemed to want was that bone.”

  “What in hell for?”

  “Who knows?” said Graham, his voice quavery.

  “Don’t mess with their booty, man, that’s the lesson.”

  “Maybe they won’t eat anything unless it’s already dead.”

  “Which is what I figured you were. Lunch meat.”

  They broke camp in silence. Pathfinding came hard for Graham that day. The more he thought about the attack, the more his fear tainted every other sensation. Again and again he found himself at a standstill, up against a river or thicket or swamp, uncertain how to proceed.

  By mid-morning he realized he must overcome his dread and climb up into the canopy to get a fresh bearing on that mountain. Leaving his pack with Carl, he shinnied up a tree, grabbing vines for handholds. A scampering broke out overhead, then receded. As he rose, the light grew brighter, and as he surfaced above the web of limbs the full dazzle of daylight made him squint.

  “See anything?” Carl shouted.

  Graham blinked water from his eyes. “Oh, my Lord, yes.” Strewn with those blue and yellow flower-like growths, the canopy spread away in undulating plains. In the distance, dark, shaggy herds were grazing, with here and there a lone beast skulking around the edges. He thought of bison and wolves. The only break in that rolling prairie was the mountain, gleaming against the horizon. “There it is,” he called down to Carl. “We’re right on course.”

  “Good. Now move it,” Carl hollered. “I’ve got company.”

  Before Graham could put away the binoculars, from below came the stungun’s whine. He gave a shout and scrambled down through the branches and hit the ground with pistol drawn.

  A few paces away, Carl stooped over a gray hairless mass of flesh. “Check it out, bro,” he said. “Another ugly brute.”

  Graham studied the body. It had a bear’s bulk and a segmented torso, with a dozen or more legs jutting from the sides, each one ending in a pad of flesh as broad as a dinner plate. The skin was ash-gray mottled with black, like the tree bark, and it was perforated with hundreds of slits that oozed a sweet-smelling liquid.

  “What are these holes for, you figure?” Carl pried open one of the slits with his knife.

  Graham winced. “Don’t. I’ve seen enough.” He scanned the woods. “Was it alone?”

  “Naw, they’re all over.” Carl stood up from the ashen body. “See the bulges halfway up that tree? Greasy shine on them? The whole bunch came at me. Not fast, kind of like trucks in low gear, grinding along. When I nailed this one, the others split.”

  The descent from the flowered canopy, with its glimpse of the shining mountain, to this grisly scene left Graham shaken. He slid the pistol into its holster, without fastening the flap.

  “Come on,” said Carl, hefting his pack. “I don’t expect they’ll st
ay scared for long.”

  All that afternoon the ashen creatures trailed them, slinking along the fretwork of limbs. The brothers made good time, because Graham now had a clear sense of direction. But no matter how fast they walked, the shadow-creepers—as Carl named the beasts—never fell behind.

  That night, relieved to be inside the tent with the light-shield arching overhead, Graham said, “Maybe they’re just curious.”

  “Want to interview us, you think? Or see how we taste?” said Carl from his sleeping mat. “You volunteer to find out?”

  “No, but I can’t help thinking—”

  “Thinking what?”

  “About those scavengers, the way they snatched that bone, then let me go. Like they were being careful not to hurt me.”

  Carl laughed. “You didn’t smell dead enough.”

  “But what about those others—the ring-watchers and branch-weavers and that gray bag of guts you shot. If they meant to kill us, why did they creep up in full view instead of charging? Maybe they’re only trying to drive us away, or find out what sort of animals we are.”

  “Next time I’ll give them a questionnaire,” Carl said.

  “You don’t hear what I’m saying,” Graham muttered.

  “I hear, I hear. You’re saying, don’t snuff the bastards. But I was only trying to stun them. How was I to know they’d die so easily? A little poof, and their circuits go haywire.”

  “That’s the problem. That’s what eats me up. We don’t know anything. We’re pig-ignorant. We never stay in any wild zone long enough to learn the first thing about it. We’re always pushing on, out and back, soaking up new sensations.”

  Carl fixed him with an amused glare. “You tired of the wilderness, nature boy? Want to pack it in? Live in the cities?”

  “No, it’s just—”

  “You rather live in a box, ride around in a box, work in a box? Count me out, chum. I want to keep seeing things I never saw before, go places nobody’s ever been.”

  “But every time we land, we’re like babies waking up, without names for anything. It’s all a buzzing, swirling mystery.”