The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

  The Dancers of Noyo

  (1973)*

  Margaret St. Clair

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Book information

  -

  Chapter I

  "I hear your tribe has got itself a Dancer," the county agent said. There was a faintly needling note in his voice.

  "Um," I replied.

  "You don't seem very enthusiastic, McGregor," he said. The needling note was more evident.

  "Why should I be?" I asked. "It means being ordered to dance for ten hours a day for months, and at the end of it being sent on a fool's errand down the coast."

  "Fool's errand? I suppose you mean the quest for"—he coughed rather slightingly—"the quest for the Grail Vision."

  "They're calling it the sunbasket vision now," I said.

  "Sorry. It's hard for me to keep up with the tribes' latest in the Indian lore line. But you've got to admit there's nothing like a Dancer to give a tribe that certain something—that je ne sais quoi—" His grin had become definitely nasty.

  "You mean a Dancer's an asset?" I said.

  "Well, there's quite a waiting list for them."

  "You can have them," I said. "They're nothing but flabby synthetic Rasputins. I can't think why the Mandarins have accepted them."

  "They are a bit of a nuisance," the agent said more soberly. "But if the tribes want them, I'm willing to look the other way when they cause trouble. There's nothing the California Republic wants more, right now, than to keep the tribes happy."

  "It's the old heads that want the Dancers," I answered. "Nobody under twenty can stand them. By now, we've all had a bellyful of spiritual insight. Jade Dawn—that's the woman who says she's my mother—had me-chanting 'Hare Krishna' and dropping acid by the time I was five. Yoga, Buddhahood, the Grail Vision—it's all one to me. Dancing to attain something leaves me cold."

  "That's an odd attitude for a medicine man to take," he said lightly. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk.

  "That's different," I replied.

  My tone must have been a little stiff, for he raised his eyebrows. "Is it? You know, McGregor, you're a bit difficult to understand. As far as the dancing goes, why don't you just refuse to do it? The Mandarins—you mean the older generation by that, don't you?—the Mandarins can't really make you. They're too stoned, usually, to make anybody do anything."

  "That's right, they can't. But the Dancer can. He's organized a private army, all the old activists. They call themselves the Avengers."

  "Avengers? Of what?"

  "Anything the Dancer doesn't approve of, I guess ... I have tried refusing to dance. Why else do you think they're making such a fuss about the grizzly bear suit? I've never worn it seriously."

  The agent lowered his feet to the floor and sat up in his chair. "Ah, yes, back to the grizzly bear suit," he said. He picked up his bow from the desk and twanged the string absently. "Did you kill the young man?"

  "No, I didn't," I answered.

  "What killed him, then?"

  "I think he had a heart attack. He was always having fainting spells. I listened once to his heart through a paper tube. He had a murmur and a wheeze in his chest like a wave pulling out from around a rock."

  "What about the claw marks on his body?"

  "Probably a cougar. I didn't make the marks, anyhow."

  "But you do know how to use the suit?" The agent gave me a sidelong glance.

  "Pomo Joe told me the theory," I said. I shifted in my chair. Still, my conscience was perfectly clear. "I've never had it on but the one time. Nothing would ever have been said about young Billings' death, if I hadn't refused to join the Dancer's chorus lineup."

  "Um. Well, as I told you before, I can't assign a man to guard you at Noyo. If you want to come in to Ukiah, I can keep an eye on you. I might even be able to get you a temporary job."

  "No, thanks," I said. "I'd rather take my chances with assassination at Noyo than live in Ukiah in the summer."

  "You have a point there," he conceded. "If it gets too much for you, though, I'll be glad to take care of you here." He stood up. I rose too. He held out his hand to me. "Goodbye," he said. The interview was over.

  I went out into the August sun. Ukiah is hot this time of year. My motorbike was parked in front of the courthouse. I got on and rode down the street to a service station, where I had my tanks filled with wood alcohol. My bike—it's a steamer actually, with a wonderfully simple miniaturized steam engine—will burn just about anything, but it prefers alcohol. Now I was good for many, many miles.

  I was glad to get out of Ukiah. The place depresses me; historically, there has always been friction between the coast dwellers and the inland types who live in the county seat. But as I slid smoothly along the narrow paved road toward Orr's Springs, my spirits rose.

  For one thing, the county agent, though a bit needling, had been definitely friendly. It was decent of him to have offered me a job. For another, he'd made me feel that the Dancer could, after all, be stood up to. The trouble was that the people my own age, though they hated the whole mystic bit, confined their action against it to bitching. When the chips were down and the Dancer cracked that damned whip of his, they danced.

  The road climbed a good deal. I had plenty of power, and it didn't bother me. There wasn't much traffic—an occasional truck from one of the communes, loaded with produce. After I got to Comptche, the road improved quite a lot.

  I wondered what the Avengers would do if I kept on refusing to dance. An arrow through the heart seemed the most likely thing. On the other hand, the whole tribe knew I'd been studying with Pomo Joe. It might be impolitic to kill me just now.

  It was beginning to get dark. I switched on my headlight. The air cooled sharply as I went over the crest of the coastal ridge. I turned to the right, onto highway number one, the coast highway. I could hear the sound of the surf. I went through Mendocino town, where a few artists still held out. A little before I got to Noyo, the hallucinations began.

  They weren't especially disagreeable—a couple of amorphous birds, flying low, and a big coyote that was so realistic I almost unlimbered my bow to take a shot at it. Then I realized that, though there was a certain amount of moonlight, it wasn't casting any shadow. You always get things like that when there's a Dancer around.

  The coyote trotted off into the darkness. I suppose the initial reason for the Mandarins' enthusiastic reception of the Dancers had been the latters' ability to produce veridical hallucinations. (Or rather, the Dancers' inability to restrain the production of hallucinations—they didn't do it on purpose.)

  I've never been able to understand, though, why the Mandarins prize visual illusions so much. Perhaps our different attitudes are an example of what they would have called the generation gap. Poor old sods, it never seems to have occurred to them that they would ever be on the wrong side of the tap, with their juniors thinking them ineffective and wooden-headed. The Mandarins are the most self-righteous generation since Queen Nefertiti.

  I got home about nine. Several fires had been lit in the open, and a little cooking was going on. Act
ually, the tribe could have lived in houses; Noyo had been a considerable settlement, and the Noyo Inn, where Pomo Joe and I hung our hats, was still in good shape. But most of the Mandarins preferred the deliberate archaism of huts made of slabs of redwood bark. They were pleasant enough in the summer, but they tended to leak after the rains began.

  I went over to one of the fires where a girl who was pretty certainly my half-sister was sitting. (She may have been my full sister, too. I'm not certain.) She was plaiting a basket.

  "Hello, Joan," I said. "Anything you could spare a hungry man?"

  Her face lit up. "Sam! I thought you might be back tonight. Yes, there's some cockle chowder. I kept it on the fire for you. It's good."

  She ladled out the chowder for me with an abalone shell. I sat down beside her and began eating. 'It is good," I said. "What kind of cockles?"

  "There's only one kind of cockle here," she said, laughing. "—Sam, Julian's back."

  Julian was a year or so older than I. He'd left, rather unwillingly, on the Grail Quest about six weeks ago. He was the first from our tribe to make the trip—our first "graduate"—and we were all curious about what his experiences would be.

  "How is he?" I asked Joan.

  She shrugged. "Confused. Nobody expected him back so soon. When you finish eating, Sam, why don't you go talk to him? Maybe you could clear things up a bit."

  "I'll go now," I said, getting to my feet. "Where is he?"

  "I saw him over by the dance circle ... no, he's sitting on the ground by -Red Virtue's house." She pointed. "Don't forget to bring back my soup bowl. They're in short supply."

  "OK." I walked over to Julian. I couldn't see the dance circle from there, but I could hear the thud of the drum and feel the heavy stamping of the dancers' feet.

  Julian was leaning up against the side of the hut, as Joan had said. The light wasn't very good, but I could see that his head was drooping forward on his chest. I sat down beside him, the soup bowl still in my hands, and settled myself comfortably against the redwood bark. He didn't move. I ate a few mouthfuls of the soup. Finally I said, "Hello."

  He didn't raise his head. "Who is it?" he asked finally, in a flat voice.

  I felt a thrill of alarm. I was used to the Mandarins being stoned half out of their heads, but Julian had always been an alert type. He'd been the sort of chap who could wake out of sound sleep, grab his bow, and start shooting. I said, Tm Sam, Sam McGregor. Don't you know me?"

  "Oh," he said. He moved so that his head lolled back against the wood. I saw that his eyes were glazed.

  "I'm glad you're back, Jule," I said. I finished the soup. "Unh—did you see the Grail?"

  "What?"

  "I said, did you have the Grail Vision?"

  "I don't think so. I only got as far as Elk."

  I didn't know how to ask him whether he thought he'd get into trouble with the Dancer for only having gone that far. He had been supposed to get to Gualala before turning around and starting home. "Anyhow, you're back," I said at last. I couldn't think of anything better to say.

  For the first time he looked at me. "Am I?" he asked. "You said you were Sam somebody. Do you mind telling me my name?"

  I told him. "Julian?" he repeated. "And my mother called me Day Star?" He shook his head. "I know that's not right. My name's something different, different entirely." He sat for a moment with his head in his hands. Then he got to his feet. "Perhaps if I dance I'll be able to remember," he said. He moved off slowly, in the general direction of the dance circle.

  He'd hated dancing before he made the trip down the coast. It seemed fantastic that good old Jule would go to dance deliberately. I stared after him. I hadn't thought the trip would do him any good; he'd hated making it. But I hadn't anticipated this.

  I put the soup bowl down. The smell of woodsmoke was in the air. The campfires, fed largely with driftwood, burned with sea-green and purple flames. I was thinking about going off to bed when one of the Avengers, a bush-bearded type named Brotherly Love, came up. There was a six-foot-long bow in his hand. "It's time you did a little dancing, Bright Moon," he said to me.

  There was a slight pause. Then I said, "I'm not going to do any more dancing. I've had enough of it."

  B. Love made a beckoning motion with his free hand. Two more Avengers appeared. These were armed with three-foot-long clubs of mountain mahogany. One stood on either side of me. "You'd better come along and talk to the Dancer," Brotherly said.

  Was there any point in resisting? I sat still for a moment, counting up my chances. Everybody my age hated dancing, but there hadn't been any open resistance to it yet. Besides, there were a lot more of the Avengers than there were of us. Youth was in the minority in the tribe; the Mandarins, passionate ecologists all, had restricted the number of then offspring even after the plagues had helped reduce the pressure of population on environment. This was one point we juniors joined them on. But it meant that in case of a fracas with our elders we were outnumbered more than two to one.

  More Avengers were coming up momently, some with bows, some with clubs, some with both. Slowly, with what dignity I could muster, I got to my feet. "OK. Where is the Dancer?" I said.

  "He's watching the dancers, of course," Brotherly said. "Where else would a Dancer be?" (Perhaps I should explain here that, in this account, there is a great difference between Dancer and dancer. The former is an android, theoretically immortal, grown in vitro by the famous O'Hare. But a dancer is just human, a young, male human, who would rather not be dancing.)

  The dance circle was near the sweathouse, where the dancing took place in the winter. It was a large, flat, dusty space with a big spruce tree growing in the center. Tonight the space was illuminated by two flaring torches of pitch-pine, stuck in brackets on the side of the sweat-house.

  The Dancer was standing with his back to us. He was slightly below normal human height, of a uniform deep dusky red, the color of a bad sunburn. I mean, he was red all over—the backs of his heels, his hair, the irises of his eyes. Even the whites of his eyes were of a medium pink. Though the weather was cool—it doesn't warm up on this part of the California coast until September—the Dancer was naked except for a breechclout. I don't know whether or not he was a functional male. I always wanted to call him "it". There was a long, heavy whip, a bull-whip, in his hands. A low platform, an elevation made of redwood logs, put his head rather above those of the dancers. He was looking at them fixedly.

  The dancers were nearly all young men. Among them were only two women, the older women we called Mandarins. They were all stamping heavily around in the circle, raising their knees waist-high and then bringing their feet down with a heavy, jarring thud that shook the ends of the spine. A drummer, hitting on a slab of wood with a rawhide mallet, was keeping time. -

  Besides the usual tribal costume of moccasins and khaki pants, the dancers, even the women, were wearing "dance shirts", garments of coarse white cotton cloth, the sleeves crudely applied, painted in conventionalized eagle designs in thick red and blue paint. Some of them had feather fringes at the sleeves and neck. The feathers ought to have been eagle feathers but they were probably from seagulls. The faces of a few of the dancers were painted with yellow and green pigment. Sun and moon, with stripes on the cheeks, were the favorite designs.

  The Dancer let me stand waiting between my guards for three or four minutes while he contemplated the dancing. Then he turned to face us. "Who is this?" he said.

  "It's Bright Moon," Brotherly said officiously. "He refuses to dance."

  The Dancer (of course it had known perfectly well what I was doing there) transferred its attention to me.

  "Why don't you want to dance?" it asked.

  "... It's a waste of time. And it makes my head ache."

  "The dance is the road to spiritual enlightenment," it told me. It had a mushy voice, like an overripe apple. "It is a road that all young men should take."

  "I don't need it. I'm already studying with Pomo Joe."

&nb
sp; The Dancer didn't think this remark was worthy of an answer. It switched its whip back and forth absently for a minute or two. "The dance has great power," it said at last. 'It can heal the sick, raise the dead, make men invulnerable. It brings blessings on the individual and on his tribe. Why do you refuse these blessings?"