The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

  I put the passes in my pocket and stood up to go. I was beginning to feel a certain expectation, not altogether pleasant, but interested, for what lay before me. What I had told B. Love was not wholly false; I was looking forward to the journey. After all, what had happened to Julian could probably happen to me. I was on the edge of an experience.

  I went back up to the road. I felt less tired than earlier. The break for food had done me good. I jogged along almost happily for a while, though I still felt that I was making remarkably poor time with my walking. I was wondering how far I was from Caspar when something made me look up. There was Brotherly, still on my motorbike, gliding slowly and silently along the height above me. There was no mistaking his jutting bushy beard.

  "Come down here!" I bawled. I didn't think of my bow; I was too angry. I felt I could have climbed up the slope after him and pulled him off the bike all in one motion.

  I don't know what he thought, but after a moment he came sliding down the slope with a great rattling of tawny rocks and loose shale. The slope was pretty steep, and it seemed a fifty-fifty chance that he'd be unable to stop and would go whamming into the fence and over on the rocks below. But my bike had good brakes.

  "Whyn't you stop following me?" I demanded. "You know I'll make the Grail Journey. I promised to."

  "No, I don't," he said. "I—" He wouldn't look me in the eye. He bent over the bike's handlebars and began fidgeting with something.

  "Get off my bike," I said with sudden resolution. "We can't play tag with each other all the way down Highway One to Gualala. Get off my bike."

  He dismounted slowly. When both his feet were on the ground he aimed a wide, loose haymaker at me. I ducked, and aimed a blow of my own at his jaw.

  It connected, but not as solidly as I had expected. I must still be tireder than I realized. He blinked but stood firm, and before I could take another swipe at him I saw there was a gun in his hand. Brotherly Love was threatening me with a gun.

  You cannot imagine what a shock this was to me. Firearms, like the other destructive gadgets of the old culture, are anathema to the tribes. I'd never seen a gun before, except in a comic book I'd found behind the desk in the lobby of the Noyo Inn. I felt like a Victorian lady confronted with a lewd drawing chalked up on a wall.

  Surprise made me speechless. BL must have read my outrage in my face, for he said, "I'm sorry to have to use the gun. You can walk along pushing the bike, and I'll walk along beside you. But we can't take any chances. I've got to stay with you until—"

  "Until what?" I demanded. "I wish I could think of something adequate to call you."

  "Never mind names. I have to stay with you until I'm sure, unh, sure you won't turn back."

  I felt he was lying. His rather stupid face, under the beard, was contorted with the effort of his falsehood. But I didn't know what he was waiting for. He must be sure by now that I wouldn't turn back.

  "I refuse to push my own bike," I said, and then, without a pause, "That's why the light bothered her so. Her eyelids were unusually thin."

  My remark seemed perfectly reasonable to me. There was an autopsy going on, and the girl's eyelids had been dissected and found to be of few microns thinner than most people's.

  BL looked at me. I had the sensation of having said something gauche,, something that passed the limits of good taste.

  "OK, then," he said at last, "you go on by yourself, and I'll go back to Noyo."

  "How do I know you can be trusted? You started back to Noyo once before. And she had that constant pain in the side because the sciatic nerves were actually inflamed."

  "Well, I can. Be trusted, I mean." He put the gun back in his clothing and got astride my bike once more. "Go on, McGregor. I won't follow you anymore. We'll be expecting you back in Noyo in about six weeks."

  He turned the bike in a wide arc and shot off back up the highway—still, I thought, on my bike. I couldn't imagine what had made him change his mind so abruptly. I wondered what die final result of the autopsy would be.

  -

  Chapter III

  Alvin Biggs was a CBW worker. I was Alvin Riggs. The identity was absolute and perfect. But, since I subsequently went back to being Sam McGregor, I shall narrate my experiences as Riggs, and my experiences in my other extra-lives, in the third person.

  I had been walking along watching the autopsy and wondering vaguely why Brotherly had elected to turn back, when I began to be Alvin. There were no intermediate stages. I became Alvin between one breath and the next.

  Alvin was a little under forty, and a little overweight. At the present moment he was sweating heavily. This was partly because it was a hot day and partly because, not wanting to be turned back at the gate of the New Life Commune, he had taken the long way around.

  He had pushed through thickets of baccharis, avoided clumps of poison oak, swatted hovering flies away from his wet forehead. Now he stood on a slight rise above the commune, touching the equipment in his pocket a little nervously. Needles, aspirator, capillary tubes, packing, labeling materials—it was all there, and it made rather a big parcel. He envied his colleagues who were working on skin irritants. All they had to do was to get skin of scalp scrapings. People always made such a fuss when you asked them to give you a little blood.

  The Mendocino county health department had notified the state department of public health that the New Life Commune had had several cases of highly drug-resistant malaria. According to the county, the disease had been eventually controlled; but Alvin thought he would very much like to get blood samples from the commune members who'd suffered from it. Grant and promotion time was coming up in Alvin's office. He'd like to have his own project, instead of working under other people. It would be a great help if he had a new strain of Plasmodium to offer the committee.

  Alvin had elected to wear a green whipcord suit rather resembling the uniform worn by county health department people. Alvin wasn't intending to tell any direct lies. Lies usually cause trouble later. But if the commune members should happen to form the opinion that he was a public health man, come to help the commune with its sanitation and drainage problems—why, it might be a desirable thing.

  In the middle distance below him there was a cluster of geodesic domes, and one big hangarlike building that must be the recreation hall. There were latrines somewhere about, to judge from the smell. The smell would have interested a genuine public health man, but Alvin, who certainly wasn't interested in the prevention of disease, took it in his stride.

  Farther away, and off to his right, were a number of branchy fruit trees and a field of some sort of green crop, like alfalfa. And immediately below him, the most striking thing within eyeshot, was a dense cloud of dust, like an exceptionally solid bank of smog.

  Through the cloud he could occasionally catch a glimpse of human figures moving. It was like seeing the glint of fish swimming in a turbid aquarium. And from the center of the cloud came a dull rhythmic thud and a soft shuffling.

  What were they doing, moving about in the murk? And in this heat, too. Once more Alvin got out his handkerchief and blotted sweat from his forehead. He'd better go try to find someone. The people in the circle seemed too preoccupied to notice him.

  He skirted the dust cloud nervously. Two or three dogs ran out from the dust and began barking furiously at him. One of them, after barking in paroxysms for a minute or two, fell over on the ground and started twitching in some sort of fit. Froth came out from its mouth and collected around its jaws. It reminded Alvin of the laboratory dogs.

  He went to the recreation hall first. There was nobody there, though several uncovered dishes of food, sitting on the windowsill, were surrounded by buzzing flies. Perhaps the building was really a dining hall. But where did the commune members cook?

  He visited the geodesic domes next. There was nobody there either; there were lots of unmade mattress beds, heaps of clothing, dog droppings. From the mess, he would have expected them to have cholera rather than malaria.

/>   The latrines, too, were empty. Riggs went back to stand uncertainly on the edge of the dust cloud, listening to the shuffling of feet and the heavy repeated thud. Up close, he could see that the cloud was raised by a big circle of people, hand-in-hand, moving slowly from right to left as their hands swung back and forth. The dust was stifling.

  A girl, her back to him, shuffled slowly past. On impulse Riggs put his hand on her shoulder and tried to draw her out of the circle. He'd have to talk to somebody, sometime, and the girl might as well be the one.

  She resisted. Riggs kept on pulling, blinking his eyes against the swirling dust. He had to shuffle along beside her, keeping up his pull. Finally her hands slid out of those of the people on either side of her and she came stumbling out of the circle. Alvin had her free.

  She was so covered with dust that she looked like an unbaked gingerbread man. "Why are you dancing?" Alvin asked. It was the first thing he could think of to say, but already he had the feeling that the situation was out of his control, beyond his command.

  She looked at him unseeingly. "Sheba had puppies," she said in a fainting voice, "and my baby is so sick, and Nick is stoned again. He always beats me when he stops being stoned. He says he dances better when he's stoned." She whimpered, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. "Let me go back. I want back in the circle. I want to dance."

  Alvin had felt a throb of interest at the mention of the sick baby. Reluctantly he released the girl's hands. She stood swaying for a minute. Then she pulled at the joined hands of the people shuffling past her until they parted. An instant later she was back in the dust cloud again.

  Alvin didn't know what to do. If he could find the woman's baby, he might be able to get blood samples from it without asking anybody. It would avoid a lot of trouble. But where was the baby? He had found nobody in any of the buildings. Was everybody in the New Life Commune within the circle of shuffling dancers?

  Once more Alvin pulled at a dancer's hands. This time it was a man, and he was less docile than the girl had been. He jerked his hands back from Alvin's touch with an angry grunt.

  The CBW warrior was beginning to be stung by the desperation of the ignored. He caught the man by the shoulders and tried to swing him around to face him. The dancer staggered, but refused to yield to the pressure, and the next moment he had jerked himself loose.

  "Get out," he said to Alvin in a flat, hoarse voice. He was still facing inward toward the circle. "We'd kill you if we weren't dancing. You're not a dancer. Get out of here."

  "Say, listen, fella—" Alvin began indignantly, and then halted, realizing the futility of argument. What the dancer had told him wasn't so much an expression of hostility as it was a statement. He didn't belong in this place.

  He tried once more, selecting a girl again. Without looking at him she swung her hand, joined to that of the man next to her, upward and back. She hit him—not un-painfully, for she was wearing a heavy ring—on the side of the chin.

  The unexpectedness of the blow made Alvin wince. He was still trying to decide what to do when words, seeming to come from somewhere inside the circle, began to be heard: "Our Father, Our Father. Our Mother, Our Mother. Our Brother, Our Brother. Our Arrows will come back. Our Arrows will come back."

  The words grew and swelled, augmented themselves. Soon everybody in the circle was singing, tonelessly and hoarsely. It was astonishing that they could sing at all, considering the dust.

  The heavy repeated thumping had begun to jar along Alvin's spine. He ought to get out; the male dancer had told him to. Or should he stay on, hoping they'd stop dancing eventually, and he'd be able to get his blood samples? He wasn't a dancer ... but if he joined the dance he'd be ... A curious hankering was growing in him.

  He stood a moment longer, balancing between desire and common sense. Then, with a rush, he was pulling at the hands of a couple who were moving past him. Softly their fingers parted; they must have recognized that his motive was not to disrupt. Alvin stepped between them and joined his hands to those on either side. Their hands were swollen, warm, slippery with sweat and gritty with dust.

  In a moment Alvin was moving with the others, singing with the others. Had he done the right thing? For an instant he longed to shake his hands free and run. But he might be able to get his samples this way, and ... the shuffling step and the thudding were soothing to him.

  He was not, for the nonce, so taken up with the dance as to be unable to observe what was in the center of the circle. Through the enveloping dust he saw a man squatting on his hunkers and beating on a wooden plant with a heavy mallet. A tall woman, seemingly elderly, stood beside him. There was a handkerchief in one of her hands and a long feather in the other. The pair were the hub of the circle, the point around which the dancers moved.

  At their feet, looking like a heap of old clothes, lay the babies and children of the commune. A few of them were sitting up, watching the dancing, but most of them lay limply, whether asleep, or sick, or narcotized by the drumming. The pall of dust hovered over everything.

  The singing died away. Alvin made two or three rounds of the circle in silence. Then the elderly woman with the feather chanted, "I have seen the kingdom, I have seen the kingdom, There I met my mother, There I met my mother ..." and the others took it up.

  One of the children in the center stirred, moaned, and sat up with a sort of howl. With a shock Alvin saw it was not a child at all, but the girl whom he had drawn out of the dance earlier. She must have passed out.

  She got to her feet, weaving back and forth and still making the howling noise. The dancers nearest her unclasped their hands. In a trice she was in the circle again.

  The dance went on. Alvin found that whenever he went past, the woman with the feather eyed him sharply. It was not a hostile look, but a probing one. She seemed to be expecting something from him.

  He was panting. His hands began to tremble. The woman came and stood before him, moving slowly as he moved, so that she always faced him. She was whirling the feather rapidly before his face, and as she whirled it she made a sharp panting noise—hu, hu, hu—like an exhausted runner. Alvin couldn't take his eyes from the feather, and didn't want to. He felt very odd. He didn't know what was happening to him.

  Abruptly he broke from the hands that were holding his and staggered toward the. center of the circle. The medicine woman followed him, still making the panting noise and twirling the feather. From time to time she would draw her hand sideways before his face at the level of his eyes, or fan him with the hand that held the handkerchief.

  Alvin realized he was still singing the words of the song and keeping time with his feet to the beat of the mallet, but in a dazed, drunken way. The rational part of his mind told him he had been—was being—hypnotized. Hyp—hyp—hyp—He stopped moving and stood quite rigid, eyes closed, making a moaning sound. Tremors shook him. At last his knees buckled under him and he fell heavily to the ground.

  His visions were confused but pleasing. He was out for several hours. When he stirred and sat up, moaning and trembling, the sun was well in the west.

  Unsteadily he got to his feet. The dance continued, the drummer still beat the plank with his mallet, the medicine woman was standing before another drummer twirling her feather. But something had happened. Something had changed in him.

  His hand brushed the apparatus in his pocket. He pulled it back quickly. And then, without warning, he was gripped by a trembling, terrible urge to confess.

  Confess? To what? CBW was worthwhile, necessary to national defense, almost a noble enterprise. He'd done nothing wrong in coming here to get samples of these people's blood.

  To no avail he reasoned with himself. The spasm, the necessity, still gripped him. He had to tell them, somebody, anybody. He couldn't keep the words back.

  "Listen," he said, licking his lips and swallowing, "I'm a murderer." His voice rose. The medicine woman was looking at him. "I'm a murderer. I've spent my life trying to kill people. I came here to try to get yo
ur blood. I'm a sower of plague, a breeder of pestilence. I'm a murderer.

  Tears were running down his cheeks. They trickled down his neck and ran on to his collar. The medicine woman had looked away again. The dance continued.

  Alvin felt transfixed by futility. He had confessed, but nobody had listened. They hadn't paid any attention to him.

  -

  Chapter IV

  I didn't return to being Sam McGregor with anything like the abruptness with which I had become Alvin Riggs. There was a long period when I sat by the edge of the road, listening to the noise of the waves and trying to get back to being somebody, anybody at all, through preferentially Sam. (Who did the trying? If my identity had been lost, who was the "I" that was trying to recover it? I imagine a philosopher would have found the point of some interest.)