So Long Been Dreaming

by Nalo Hopkinson

  He smacked his six-inch paws against my arms, clawed at my breasts, and tried to shake my hands from his throat, but I didn’t feel it. I was pumped from the drop into this body and I had him. That dawned on him too, and with a panicked look, he stopped squirming and whimpered, a tortured sound I didn’t want to hear. My new heart banged against ribs and backbone, flushed nerves and muscles with potent stimulants, and obliterated my fledgling compassion. When you dropped into a life, the story of the host body, its impulses and desires, were almost impossible to resist. A body historian, working the soul mines of Earth, but I wanted to resist. What the hell was wrong with me?

  The husky lunged. Turning his momentum against him, I plunged his head and shoulders into the water and grunted a cheer through clenched teeth. His struggle splashed swamp in my face. I snorted stagnant muck out of my mouth and nose. It tasted like dandelion and beet greens, like my past lives breaking out on a new tongue. Panicked, I swallowed down this old history. My skinny brown forearms trembled with holding 150 pounds of dog under water, and I wondered just how long my drop-in power surge would last. I’d been wrestling the husky less than a minute, but I dimly recalled entire lifetimes that seemed shorter. I was suddenly terrified:

  What kind of life was it going to be in this body?

  The lapse of killer concentration cost me a chunk of leg flesh and my balance. The husky could have chewed through bone, so I was lucky. Still, it hurt like hell, and I roared a mezzo-soprano glissando that startled me out of pain. The diva holler was definitely one of my former voices breaking out, and no way should that be happening. Body historians never let the past take over; you were now or nothing.

  No time for existential crises. Flailing under water, the husky banged into my wounded leg, and a blues holler burst from my chest. Another old voice. Loudmouth jungle fauna joined in, chattering and hooting like they were on my side. The dog thrashed up to suck in some air, his face just cracking the surface. My hands wanted to shove him back toward the bottom of the swamp, but looking at his soggy snout and mud-rimmed eyes, I couldn’t do it. The body I was in had already died once, and I could drop into another dying somebody – if complex enough and within range – risky, but the husky’s only life was on the line. I summoned the divas back to my mouth. Singing syncopated rhythms in a minor mode, I forced the hands to let go of his neck. His ears shot up. My blues aria surprised him as much as me. He gulped down air, shook the water out of his fur, and without blinking, watched me scramble away. I couldn’t stop singing until the song was done. He cocked his head at the last notes, like he knew the melody. Brown saliva dripped off his tongue as his ears went flat again. I hauled butt for dry land when I saw a plan working behind his eyes.

  The mucky bottom grabbed my feet and pitched me against two dead dogs. Buttocks and hind legs dangled in the algae soup, head and shoulders slumped on the slimy shore. Dobermans. I vaguely remembered them trying to eat me too, but I’d managed to waste them before it came to that. They had holes in their heads, and blood was attracting the bugs: crawlers, fliers, and swimmers. I recoiled, glad I hadn’t dropped in as a Doberman attack dog. I recoiled again, this time at myself. You didn’t get to choose a life; you only had minutes to find what was available. A true historian should be glad for any dying body to ride. Every story offered precious insight.

  The dog lowered his head and extended his snout. I knew huskies were quiet, not barkers or yappers. They put everything into the growl. Still, feeling the rumble from his chest forty feet away surprised me in my bones. I glimpsed a pistol just beyond the dead Dobermans, easily within reach, but I hollered out another aria and squashed the urge to grab it. Staring into the husky’s eyes, I let the melody fade. This body for his life, it seemed fair.

  We both gulped shallow breaths. I ran my fingers across the smooth skin on my neck and remembered the husky ripping out my jugular. Body historians were serial amnesiacs, conscious only of our griot’s creed and the Edges, the sliding in and out of a life. I had twice ten thousand Earth years of Edges. That and a griot’s loyalty to the soul mines. Dropping in for a quickie then suiciding out to somebody else was a total waste of resources. Griots rode a body as long as possible. In the soul mines, you collected lives; you didn’t sacrifice yourself to save one.

  The husky came at me like a flash of silver lightning. Dropping out was going to hurt like hell, but I was prepared. I focused on his eyes, not his fangs. The husky was quite beautiful, a strange presence in this jungle world, a special Edge for my memory tatters. . . . At the last second, with astounding speed and grace, and despite my spark of rebellion, this body reached across the dead Dobermans, grabbed the gun, and shoved it down the husky’s mouth. The pistol barked five times, and he was gone before I could think, before I could struggle with my new self to save him. I yanked the pistol out of his mouth, and the corpse slid down my belly into the water, ice eyes gone dull gray, jaws frozen in a deadly grin. My right hand was shaking, but my gun hand was still. I threw up the meager contents of my stomach and tried for a few tears. Nada. This body didn’t want me to care about dead huskies or Edges of pain. It swallowed my distress almost before any emotion registered, and directed me toward its Mission. I shivered.

  When the husky corpse floated against the other dead dogs, I stopped waiting for it to come back to life and crawled ashore. Now or nothing. I stuffed the pistol in my pants, squeezed water out of my spongy hair, and headed for a tangle of trees and vines. My drop-in power surge had faded. Solid ground wobbled under my legs, even when I stopped moving. The trees threatened to turn upside down and stick the sky under my shaky toes. Blood and white froth spurted out of the puncture wounds in my leg, and one arm looked liked mincemeat. Tatters of a taupe cotton shirt stuck to blood and muck on my belly and breasts. I ripped off a piece of pants that wasn’t swampy or piss-yellow and tied it tight around the leg wound. I tried touching myself all over to feel who I was, but I was too raggedy. Settling down in a tree root throne, I watched thin spears of sunlight bounce off my shark navel ring and cut through the haze. Glints of metal among the branches made me blink and squint.

  The trees had eyes, and they were watching me. Mechanical worms with camera heads wriggled up branches into blossoms and clumps of foliage. I should have checked them out. Instead I convinced myself I was paranoid, hallucinating, and what I needed was to sit still and gather myself, not chase spooks. Dizzy from the heat, sore and itchy from sweat, bug bites, and dog gouges, I didn’t feel excitement for a new life, just fear at a moral chasm opening before me. At each drop-out, specific memories from a finished life slipped beyond consciousness. Body historians dropped into a new life with old lives repressed, except for the Edges, the first and last moments, or there’d be no space for new experiences. Damned serial amnesia was working my last nerve – getting me all caught up in patterns I didn’t remember – or why else would I be too lazy for paranoia and morally outraged over a dog killed in self-defense?

  Because at a certain point, you get tired of being a gig slut.

  I couldn’t tell if this thought was griot creed, from past lives, or from my current body. One thing I did remember – if you got too full of life, a historian could unravel into chaos, into a jumble of nothing. That wasn’t going to happen to me. I made myself listen to the birds singing squabbles and love songs. Occasionally I heard a war.

  Sharp mechanical sounds clashed with the nature music. Bells and whistles mashed together in nagging bursts. My new life was calling. I had to get on with it. Body historians, griots of the galaxy, we didn’t diddle ourselves in jungle paradises, we inhabited flesh to gather a genealogy of life. We sought the story behind all the stories. Collecting life’s dazzling permutations, however sweet or sour, was our science, religion, and art – nothing nobler in eternity. I peered in the direction of the nasty noise. At the south end of the mucky water where the trees thinned out, I saw a leather jacket, one sleeve inside out, flung across a signpost. The sign read: “Biohazard! No Trespassing!” in
English with a vividly drawn skull dead centre.

  Damn!

  Everything hurt. I’d sat in the tree root throne for quite awhile. Stiff muscles and joints protested as I stood up. At least the ground stayed still and the sky didn’t fall. I limped along the shore to the sign and jacket. A cell phone jangled in the breast pocket. I didn’t want to answer, especially not knowing who I was or how I wanted to deal. And it seemed like I’d been hating phones for over a hundred years, but you got to start somewhere.

  “What’s up?” I said in full-throated mezzo irritation.

  “If you got the hot sauce, I got the stew,” a male basso said in Standard American English. I couldn’t fix a more specific point of origin.

  “Diablo sauce,” I said without thinking. “Sets your mouth on fire.”

  “You get the recipe?”

  “Yeah.” I wanted him to mention my name, what I was supposed to be doing, where I was, but somehow I knew it wasn’t the sort of operation you discussed on an open line.

  “Twenty-six hours or we lose the bonus.” His voice tickled the backs of my knees and under my arms. “You’re almost inside the white circle. How you holding up?”

  I looked at the bloody rag around my leg. Claw marks on my breasts raked over old scars. My hands slid across muscular thighs and buttocks, narrow ribcage and broad shoulders, to a big head sitting on not much neck. I tried to fill the sculpture of this woman. Something in me resisted, not her exactly, but. . . . Fingertips glided down high cheekbones, broad nose, and full lips to a blunt chin. The supple skin felt good. A middle-aged firebrand in great shape, scarred and battered here and there but. . . . “Nothing significant.”

  “You sound . . . tired.”

  Did he hear something in my voice or was this just code? “It’s the heat, mostly.”

  “After the dinner rendezvous, can you handle an explosive situation?”

  “I can handle anything, as long as the food’s good.” That seemed the right amount of bravado for this body. “How’s the rest of the menu?”

  “Out of this world.” He chuckled, and the connection went dead.

  I felt abandoned. Rubbing my cheek against the phone, I checked through the jacket pockets and found a few ammunition clips for the pistol, a purple beanbag lizard, a fountain pen/flashlight, two packets of extra-strength Frizz Ease, crushed sunglasses, menthol eucalyptus cough drops, and a slip of fortune cookie wisdom:

  The Gods who were smiling at your birth are laughing now.

  My lucky numbers were two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen – and somebody had scrawled “plus five backward.”

  No wallet, no name, and a pathetic bunch of random clues. I dumped one packet of Frizz Ease into my hair and worked my fingers through tight knots. The frizz didn’t ease. Feeling vigilant at last, I scanned the trees for mechanical worms with camera heads. All I saw scurrying along the branches were furry black millipedes squirting stink gland poison at ants. A bug, smudge of mold, blade of grass – they were too simple for a griot drop-in, yet still compelling. The front-runner ants got a blast of lethal funk, curled up into balls, and fell out of the trees. The other ants kept marching forward. The millipedes’ stink glands would be empty soon. I smiled. An eye trained on movement, a scientist hooked on bugs, an assassin with murder on the brain – how to read the signs of life and make a story? That was a griot’s challenge. That’s what I loved: being in a life, discovering the story, no matter how rough the ride.

  The dogs had ripped my shirt to shreds, but putting on a jacket in heavy, no-breathing heat seemed mucho loco. The sleeves were several inches too long and an odd combination of black coconut oil and seaweed smells permeated the lining. The bugs having a party on my skin finally drove me inside the leather – at least until I knew what I was doing.

  Surveying the area, I realized the swamp was actually flooded land in the oxbow of a stream, not a proper swamp. An endless relief of trees and water in every direction offered no perspective. Which way was the white circle and the damn rendezvous? From the marks in the ground at the Biohazard sign, I could see where my body had fought with the dogs. I traced the footprints to a narrow path that led north through the trees. At a flowering tree split by lightning so that it stooped over the path with innards exposed, I found a brown leather knapsack that matched the jacket. The straps were caught in scorched branches and dead vines. Here the footprint trails diverged. My host and the husky had dashed down the path until the two Dobermans jumped out of the bush, then we all hightailed it to the water.

  Thick white slugs, gorged with wounded tree flesh, oozed through black cracks in the bark, like pus. Looking at the charred trunk and boughs made old scars on my breasts and thighs throb. I stroked the mangled tree and disentangled the knapsack from split branches. It weighed almost forty pounds – heavier than I expected. In the top compartment I found a clean tee shirt, packets of dried fruit, which I gobbled down, and Soya Power Bars, which I saved for later, despite how hungry I was. Three bottles of Fluid Mineral Recharge, bug juice, antiseptics, and bandages made me feel well-prepared. The bug juice smelled like millipedes’ stink glands. Remembering the curled-up ants, I sprayed myself liberally.

  A thrill danced up and down my nerves as I pulled out a plastic map and an electronic compass. No aimless wandering – I had directions. I longed for a mirror to glimpse what I looked like this time. I took off the jacket and pulled on the tee shirt, which was way too big, then cleaned and bandaged my arm and leg. I splashed antiseptics on the rest of my wounds and squirmed at the sharp pains. One bottle of Recharge was all I’d allow myself before looking over the map. No global context, just local frames of reference – this was a map for somebody dealing in secrets. I wanted to find my way out of secrets. The oxbow and the path I stood on were marked in green. An arrow pointed beyond a “circle of death” and a “forest of ancestors” to “the final shore.” I lingered over the map, memorizing its details and imaging the journey before folding it carefully and tucking it into my pants.

  The main compartment’s zipper snagged on threads from the seam, and after a few half-hearted tugs, I almost gave up. For someone hungry for clues, I was procrastinating, because I just knew. . . . One sharp tug ripped it open and revealed thin metal cylinders bundled in groups of twelve, each held together by what I guessed were timing devices.

  A backpack of explosives with fancy detonators.

  I didn’t have to follow this body’s terror story. I could rebel, invent a new scenario or. . . .

  A sound behind me, something splashing in the water, made me spin around, pull the pistol out of my pants, and throw myself to the ground. My raw skin screamed, but I ignored that and the acid sweat dripping into my eyes. In the distance, water sloshed against the swampy oxbow shore, vines swayed against one another, and a breeze in the treetops made spears of sunlight dance through the mist. Shadows played in shadows. The pistol shook in my hands and tears dribbled down my chin. I didn’t want to go back and hunt for spooks. I wanted to move forward, get on with the Mission – mine and hers. Griots were storytellers, whatever the story. The detonators and explosives made my heart race. Now or nothing: experience this life, gather its secrets, or in the chaos of memories, cease to exist. I heaved the pack onto my back and started walking the route outlined in green on the map. If I only had twenty-six hours, I shouldn’t waste time. There were worse things than being a terrorist, and I’d been them all.

  I tried not to think, just walk the trail. No underbrush kept me occupied, no wild animals came out to challenge me. All I had to do was put one foot in front of the other. Maybe it was the heat and swaying vines or the chemical haze that set me adrift, I couldn’t say. My feet were still on the spongy ground, but I was lost in bits of memory – from the Edges.

  I’d dropped into a tree once, somewhere cooler than this jungle. The first Edge was a sapling, shaken, uprooted, and stripped bare, then a canyon of memories too deep to reach, and finally I was a giant tree – nothing between me and
the sky. I didn’t have eyes, but I could drink a trillion points of light and stroke out the right vibrations, red and violet vibrations that sent excited electrons dancing with new partners. A gigawatt blast of lightning surged through my body, shattered my woody spine, and set me on fire. Miles of roots smoldered in the dirt. I fell over and burned to death in a rainstorm.

  So many fires and storms.

  I flashed on a hillside battlefield pummeled by balls of hail. A master samurai had run an enemy through with a sword. I dropped in the body, and his death wounds healed before the samurai’s eyes. With hail cracking against my skull, I picked up a curved sword and swung it through the air at no one in particular. The samurai muttered a prayer and chopped off my demon head to make sure I stayed dead. He was safe. No griot could reclaim a body twice. We only got one dance.

  “Yes, dance life!” an old priestess in a Sea Island village shouted. I can still feel her voice in my throat. “But if you trip and stumble, then sing life!” She danced down her gods, called them to ride her body, while she healed a sick child. Feet, hands, head, and belly moved to different beats, a polyrhythmic prayer that wore out her heart. With her last breath, she left her story behind, a blessing for the future. I dropped in, ready to ride clear, new flesh, but her last breath caught in my throat. She refused to leave, and we were stuck in one body – she at the edge of death and me on the verge of life. In the final moments, when I was on my way out, the priestess was still with me, a mad woman lost to herself, begging me to let her cross over, to let her be a song on the wind. Suiciding precious resources, I walked her into the sea, headed across the waves to the motherland, and the priestess blessed my future.

  Even now, I was blessed with an ache of loneliness for her, for the healing we did: my cool hands on hot cheeks, on the soft heads of newborns pressing into the light; my strong hands clutching the dry fingers of an old man no longer afraid to die and grasping my granddaughter’s sticky fingers when she pulled me close to whisper the secret of the tiny bird we’d rescued. “Iridescent hummers are the only ones who can fly backwards.”