Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  I see the day coming when the earth trembles and cracks into huge, mile-deep fissures. People in Washington—who value curiosity more than anything, even life itself—go to the edge and look down. Then they begin to scream and run about wildly.

  It is quite useless, because they cannot escape. They are gripped in the monstrous jaws, lifted high into the air, and torn apart.

  The Seventy-Million-Year Dinosaurs are back in town.

  afterword: the seventeen-year locusts

  Here is a universal law that I just invented: Stories under 2,000 words are excused Afterwords.

  .

  ——————————————————————————————————

  story: the courts of xanadu

  The eagle’s way is easy. Strike north-north-west from Calcutta, to meet the international border close to the little Indian town of Darbhanga. Fly on into Nepal, passing east of Kathmandu. After another hundred miles you encounter the foothills and then the peaks of the Himalayan range. Keep going—easy enough when you fly with the wings of imagination. You traverse silent, white-capped mountains, the tallest in the world, float on across the high plateau country of Tibet, and come at last to the Kunlun Mountains. Cross them. You are now in China proper, at the southern edge of the Takla Mahan Shamo, one of the worlds fiercest deserts, a thousand miles from east to west, five hundred from north to south.

  If you are driving, or walking on real feet, you have to do things rather differently. The Himalayas are impassable. The Tibetan border is patrolled. Travel in the Tibetan interior is restricted.

  Gerald Sebastian made the trip to the Takla Makan in two different ways. The first time he was alone, traveling light. He sailed from Calcutta to Hong Kong, flew to Beijing, and then took the train west all the way to Xinjiang Province. He was a celebrity, and his presence was permitted, even encouraged. However, his trip south from Urumqi, into the fiery heart of the Takla Makan desert, was not permitted. It was difficult to arrange, and it took a good deal of bribery.

  Today’s Chinese, you will be told by their government, do not accept tips or bribes. Just so.

  Sebastian’s second visit to the Takla Makan Shamo had to be very different. His three-week disappearance on the first trip had left the Chinese authorities uneasy; they did not want him back. For his part, he did not want anyone in China to know of his presence. This time he also had four people with him, and he needed a mass of equipment, including two large, balloon-wheel trucks.

  The trucks were the obvious problem; the four people—five, if one includes Sebastian himself—would prove a worse one. The group consisted of the following: one world-famous explorer and antiquarian, Gerald Sebastian; one wealthy, decorative, and determined woman, Jackie Sands; one NASA scientist, Dr. Will Reynolds, as out of place on the expedition as a catfish on the moon; one China expert, Paddy Elphinstone, fluent in the Turkic language spoken in Xinjiang Province, and in everything else; and one professional cynic, con-man, and four-time loser, convinced in his heart that this expedition would be his fifth failure.

  How is it possible to know what a man believes in his heart?

  It is time for me to step out of the shadows and introduce myself. I am Sam Nevis. I was along on this expedition because I knew more about treasure-hunting, wilderness excavation, and survival in the rough than the rest of Sebastian’s helpers put together—which was not saying much. And by the time that we were assembled in Sebastian’s hotel room in Rawalpindi, ready to head north-east out of Pakistan, I already knew that the expedition was going to be a disaster.

  It was not a question of funds, which is where three of my own efforts had failed. Gerald Sebastian had enough silver-tongued persuasiveness for a dozen people. How else could a man raise half a million dollars for an expedition, without telling his backers what they would get out of it?

  I had seen him cast his spell in New York, three months earlier, and knew I had met my master. He was a bantam-weight, silver-haired and hawk-nosed, with a clear-eyed innocence of manner I could never match.

  “Atlantis,” he had said, and the word glowed in the air in front of him. “Not in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, as Colonel Churchward would have you believe. Not at Thera, or Crete, in the Mediterranean, as Skipios claims. Not among the Mayans, as Doctor Augustus Le Plongeon asserts. But here, where the world has never thought to look.” He whipped out the map, placed it on the table, and set his right index finger in the middle of the great bowl of Xinjiang Province. “Right here!”

  There were half a dozen well-dressed men and two women sitting at the long conference room table. They all craned forward to stare at the map. “Takla—Makan—Shamo,” read one of them slowly. He was Henry Hoffman, a New York real estate multimillionaire who also happened to be Mr. Jackie Sands. He was seventy-five years old, and she was his third wife. He leaned closer to the map, peering through strong bifocals. “But it’s marked as a desert.”

  “Exactly what it is.” Gerald Sebastian had paused, waiting for the faces to turn back up to meet his eyes. “That’s what the word shamo means, a sand desert—as distinguished from a pebble desert, which is a gobi. This is desert, extreme, wild, and uninhabited. But it wasn’t always a desert, any more than there were always skyscrapers here on Manhattan. You have to look under the dunes, a hundred feet down. And then you will see the cities. Cities drowned by sandstorms, not water.”

  He reached into his case and pulled out another rabbit: the images taken by the Shuttle Imaging Radar experiments. He slapped them onto the table, and turned to Will Reynolds. “Doctor Reynolds, if you would be kind enough to explain how these images are interpreted….”

  Reynolds coughed, genuinely uncomfortable at explaining his work to a group of laymen. “Well—uh—see, this is a strip taken by a synthetic aperture radar, the Shuttle Imaging Radar, on board the Shuttle Orbiter.” He worked his hands together and cracked the knobby finger joints. Will Reynolds was a stork of a man, with a long neck, great ungainly limbs and a mop of black hair. “It’s sort of like a photograph, but it uses much longer wavelengths, microwaves rather than visible light. Centimeters, rather than micrometers. So it doesn’t just see what’s on the surface. Where the ground is dry, it sees under the surface, too. And in a real desert, where there’s been no rain for years or decades, it can see a long way down. Tens of meters. Here’s some earlier SEASAT and SIR-A shots of the Sahara Desert, where it hasn’t rained and you can clearly see the old river courses, far below the surface sand dunes….”

  His hesitancy disappeared as he slipped into his special subject, and he was off and running.

  Gerald Sebastian did not interrupt. He would not dream of interrupting. It was pure flummery, the oldest and best conman style, with the right amount of technical and authentic detail to make it persuasive. Will Reynolds could not be bought, that was obvious. But he could be sold, and Sebastian had sold him on the project. Now he was showing the radar images of the Takla Makan, pointing out what seemed to be regular geometric figures under the sand dunes, where no such figures could be expected.

  Those shapes looked like the natural cracking patterns of drying clay to me, but no one around the table suggested that. What do investment bankers, art museum patrons, and the rest of the New York glitterati know about clay cracks? And what do they care, when it’s only a half a million dollars at stake, and you might be part of the team that finds Atlantis? Nothing could beat that as cocktail party conversation. Sebastian knew his pigeons.

  Very well; but what was I doing, following Sebastian on his wild chase to the world’s most bleak and barren desert? I was a professional, a fund-raiser and treasure-hunter myself.

  To understand that, you have to remember an old gold-miners’ story. Two prospectors were out in the American West, late in the nineteenth century; they had looked for gold unsuccessfully for forty years. They had dug and panned and surveyed one particular valley
from end to end, and found not an ounce of gold anywhere in it. Finally, they decided that there were better ways to get rich. They left the valley they had explored so carefully and so unproductively, and headed for the nearest big town. There they put every cent they had into buying provisions, horses, and wagons, and they both set up stores.

  Then they started spreading the story: the worlds’ biggest gold find had just been made, back in the valley they had come from. If you went for a stroll there, you would stumble over fist-sized nuggets of twenty-four carat.

  The run on horses, wagons, and supplies was incredible. Everybody in town wanted to dash off to the wilderness and stake a claim. The two old prospectors had cornered the market for transportation and supplies, and they could name their price. They sold, and sold, and sold, until at last one of them found he had only one horse and one wagon left. He jumped into the wagon, whipped up the horse, and started to drive out of town. As he did so, he found he was running side by side with his old friend, also with horse and wagon.

  “Where you heading?”

  “Back to the valley—to get the gold!”

  “Yeah!”

  So I was along on Sebastian’s ride. And I was sure that the same ghosts of golden discovery must fill and dominate the fine, phantasmagoric mind of Gerald Sebastian. He and I were cut from the same bolt of cloth. As the poet laureate of all confidence tricksters and treasure-seekers puts it, we were “given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie.”

  In my own defense, let me point out that the full insanity of the enterprise was not obvious at once. It became apparent to me only when we assembled in Hong Kong, prior to flying to Pakistan.

  There, in the regent Hotel in Kowloon, looking out over Hong Kong Harbor with its crowded water traffic, I tried to buy Jackie Sands a drink. A dry martini, perhaps, which is what I was having. Paddy Elphinstone, our China expert, had warned me that it would be my last chance at a decent alcoholic cocktail for quite a while.

  Jackie smiled and ordered an orange juice. It was predictable. She was dark-haired, clear-skinned, and somewhere between thirty-eight and forty-four. Her hair stood out in a black cloud around her head, her eyes were bright and she was so healthy looking it was disgusting. She seemed to glow. If she had ever tried alcohol, it must have been a long-ago experiment.

  “Gerald is entitled to his opinion,” she was saying. “But I have my own. I didn’t come here expecting to find Atlantis. And I’m sure we won’t find Atlantis.”

  “Then what will we find?” I asked the question, but young Paddy Elphinstone seemed even more interested in the answer. He had been drinking before we arrived, then accepted the drink that Jackie refused and quadrupled it. As the waiters went by, he gabbled at them in their own tongues, Tamil and Malay and Thai and Mandarin and Cantonese. Now he was leaning forward, his chin low down toward the table-top, staring at Jackie.

  “Visitors,” she said. “Old visitors.”

  Paddy laughed. “Plenty of those, to the Takla Makan. Marco Polo wandered through there, and the Great Silk Road ran north and south of it. The technology for horizontal well drilling in Turpan was imported all the way from Persia.”

  “I mean older than that. And farther away than that.” Jackie reached out and put a carefully manicured, red-nailed hand on Paddy’s. Wasn’t she the woman I had imagined for twenty years, wandering the world at my side, the competent, levelheaded companion that I had never managed to attract?

  Her next words destroyed the fancy. “Visitors,” she said. “Long, long ago. Aliens, from other stars. Beings who found the desert like home to them. They came, and then they left.”

  “Pretty neat trick,” said Paddy. He was leaning back now, too drunk to pretend to sobriety. “Sure that they left, are you? Damn neat trick, if they did. D’yer know what Takla Makan means, in the local Turkic?”

  I was sure that Jackie didn’t. I didn’t, either. I knew that Paddy had that incredible gift for languages, learning them as easily and idiomatically as a baby learns to talk. But I didn’t know until that moment that Paddy Elphinstone was also an alcoholic.

  “Takla Makan,” he said again, and closed his eyes. His thin, straw-colored hair sagged in a cowlick over a pale forehead. “Takla Makan means this, Jackie Sands: ‘Go in, and you don’t come out….’ ”

  At its western edge China meets three other countries: Russia to the north, Pakistan to the south, and a thin strip of Afghanistan between. The east-stretching tongue of Afghanistan would provide the easiest travel route, but it and Russia are both politically impossible. With no real choice, and a need for secrecy above all, Gerald Sebastian had arranged that we would move into China through Pakistan.

  We drove from Rawalpindi to Gilgit, skirting the heights of the Karakoram Range. At Gilgit we made our final refueling stop, six hundred gallons for the trucks’ enlarged tanks. Then we took the old path into Xinjiang, just as though we were heading for Kashi, on the western edge of the Takla Makan desert. Five miles short of the Chinese border we left the road and veered right.

  I probably took more notice of our path than the others, because I was driving the first truck with Will Reynolds as companion and navigator. He was following our progress carefully, tousled dark head bent over maps and a terminal that hooked him into the Global Positioning System satellites. He called the turns for me for more than seven hours. Then, as the sun of early May began to set and the first sand dunes came into sight to the northeast, he nodded and folded the map.

  “Were two hundred miles from the border, and we ought to be out of the danger area for patrols. Sebastian said he wants to stop early tonight. Keep your eyes open for a little lake ahead, we’re going to stay by it.”

  I nodded, while Will put the map away and pulled out one of his precious radar images. Every spare moment went into them. Now he was trying to pinpoint our position on the picture and muttering to himself about “layover” location problems.

  The lake, thirty yards across and fed by a thin trickle in a bed of white gravel, appeared in less than a mile. While the other truck caught up with us, I hopped out and bent down by the soda-crusted lakeside. The water was shallow, briny, and heavy with bitter alkalines.

  I spat it out. “Undrinkable,” I said to Sebastian, as he moved to join me.

  He didn’t argue, didn’t want to taste if for himself to make sure. He knew why he had hired me, and he trusted his own judgment. “I’ll get the desalinization unit,” he said. “Tell the others. A gallon per person, to do what you like with.”

  “Washing?”

  He gave me a remote smile and gestured at the pool’s still surface.

  Dinner—my job and Paddy’s, we were the hired help—took another hour, cooking with the same diesel fuel that ran the motors and would power the hoist derrick. By the time we were finished eating, the first stars were showing. Fifteen minutes later the tents were inflated and moored. The trucks, packed with supplies and equipment, were emergency accommodation only.

  We sat on tiny camp stools arranged in a circle on the rocky ground. Not around the romantic fire of Sebastian’s movies—the nearest tree was probably three hundred miles away—but around a shielded oil lamp, hanging on a light tripod. Gerald Sebastian was in an ebullient mood. He had wandered around the camp, putting everything that appealed to his eye on videotape, and now he was ready to relax. He was a rarity among explorers, one who did all his own camerawork and final program composition. He would add his commentaries back in America.

  “The hard part?” he said, in answer to a question from Jackie. “Love, we’re done with the hard part. We know where we’re going, we know what we’ll find there, we’re all equipped to get it.”

  “What is it, d’you think?” said Paddy in a blurry voice. His words to me in Hong Kong concerning access to alcoholic drinks in China applied, I now realized, only to others. Paddy had brought along his own bottled supply, and from the w
ay he was acting it had to be a generous one.

  Instead of replying, Sebastian stood up and walked off to the trucks. He was back in a couple of minutes carrying a big yellow envelope. Without a word he slipped out half a dozen photo prints and passed them around the group. I felt the excitement goosepimpling the hair on my forearms. Sebastian had shown me pictures when we first talked, and I gathered he had shown others to Jackie Sands and Will Reynolds. But like a showman shining the spotlight on a different part of the stage for each different audience, he showed each set of listeners what it wanted to hear—and only that. I had asked a dozen times for more details, and always he had said, “Soon enough you’ll see—when we get to Xinjiang.” I had no doubt that even now there was another folder somewhere, one that none of us would see.

  Back in the United States, Sebastian had produced for me only two photographs, of a ruby ring set in thick gold, and of a flat golden tablet the length of a man’s hand, inscribed with unfamiliar ideographs. I couldn’t relate either of those to Atlantis, but of course I didn’t care. Atlantis was somebody else’s part of the elephant.

  The picture in my left hand was not one I had seen before. It was clear, with excellent detail and color balance, good enough to be used on one of Gerald Sebastian’s TV documentaries. Some day it might be. For I was staring at a green statue, with a meter ruler propped alongside to show the scale, and although in fourteen years of wasted wandering I had seen the artifacts of every civilization on Earth, this, whatever it might be, was unlike any of them.

  It was man-sized, and must weigh a quarter of a ton. The plumed helmet and tunic might be Greek or Cretan, the sandals Roman. The face had the Egyptian styling, while the sword on the heavy buckled belt was vaguely central Asian. And if I stretched my imagination, I could see in the composed attitude of the limbs the influence of Indonesia and Buddhism. Put the pieces together, and the sum was totally strange.