Unicorns II

by Gardner Dozois

  LannaSue Sky trundled back into the living room in her robe and sat down by Paisley. "Of course you're being called." She looked at her husband. "Who can sleep with this darling here?"

  Sky tossed his braids over his shoulders—apparently, in this context, a gesture of disgust.

  "Are you afraid to let Paisley dance? Afraid that, two months later, your beloved wife might die?'' LannaSue briefly smothered a laugh, then gave up and released it. "Beloved wife, my ass. What he's afraid might die is his beloved workhorse."

  "LannaSue—"

  "Okay. I'll shut my silly mouth." She patted Paisley's knee, the one without the tea cup. "For a while, anyhow."

  The Sun Dance chief started pacing again, trying to recoup some of his pilfered authority. "If I let you dance, your dream says we must all paint ourselves like ini'putc'—ghosts."

  "I don't know. Is that what it means?"

  "I hope not. If we did that, Paisley, it would be like saying the Mauche—we Southern Utes—are dead. Dead people can't ask the Creator to give them power."

  "They can ask to be resurrected," LannaSue said.

  Sky ignored this. "Forget that, for now. Why are there Anglos in your dream—the floppy-hatted woman, the sick man?"

  Paisley shrugged. Even now, she could see them clearly—but she was fairly sure she had never met them in life.

  "You haven't told me everything," Sky said. "Your dream scared you. It scared you so bad you're afraid to tell it all."

  His keenness in this startled Paisley. Some of the Muache said that DeWayne Sky was a fraud—but he had never knowingly violated any ceremonial tradition, and his knowledge of her reaction to her own dream seemed to her a good sign.

  "Tell me," he commanded her. "Tell me even what you're afraid to tell."

  "Otherwise," LannaSue said, taking the empty tea cup for her, "he won't be able to accept you into the dance."

  Grimacing, Sky made a curt be quiet gesture.

  "I don't even know that I want to dance," Paisley admitted, her mind confusingly aboil again.

  "Not your decision," Sky said. "My decision. Tell me so I can decide. If you don't tell me, the decision's out of my hands, and it's simple: 'No way, gal. No way.' "

  Great, Paisley thought. That would keep me from dancing. And if I don't have to dance, I can leave that much sooner to look for my father. But then it struck her that if she didn't fully divulge the contents of her dream, the dream would continue to recur, and to vary with each recurrence, until it had driven her as crazy as Moonshine Coyote, a woman whose husband and three sons were all in prison and who often sat in a wheelbarrow near Highway 172 drinking cherry Kool-Aid and spitting mouthfuls at passing motorists.

  "Come on," Sky said. "You're wasting my time."

  "Yeah, you could be sawing logs," LannaSue tweaked him.

  "There's three or four things," Paisley said. "The first is those pictures the woman took." Both Skys waited expectantly for her to go on. So she told them that when her dream self had looked at the developed prints handed her by Larry Cuthair, she found that they showed only the interior of the Thirst House—no dancers, no singers, no drummers, no spectators at all. The people taking part in the event as pseudo-ghosts had become real ghosts when processed by Anglo picture-taking technology.

  Which was just another variation, Paisley now realized, on that old cultural-anthropological chestnut about the camera's ability to steal a shy African bushman's, or an innocent Amazonian cannibal's, soul. From what Paisley knew of anthropologists, though, it seemed more likely that it was the people on the taking—not the being taken—end of the camera who forfeited their souls.

  "That frightened you even in your dream," Sky said. "You tore the pictures up. You scattered the pieces."

  "Yes."

  "What else?"

  She told him about the trouble she'd had focusing on the totem on the sacred cottonwood. The brightness of the sun, and the angle at which it shone down, had been the main culprits, but it was also likely that she hadn't wanted to see what was in the tree's crotch, knowing that it wasn't Buffalo but . . . something else.

  "What?" Sky asked. "What was it?"

  LannaSue gripped Paisley's knee, reassuringly squeezed it.

  At last, Paisley told them, "My mother's face."

  Having confessed this, she could see her mother's face again—not blown to smithereens as on the night of the suicide, but as it had been before that. Beaten-looking and imploring. Except that, in the dream, her face had been as large as a bison's head.

  "Mama D'lo wants her to dance," LannaSue said. "D'lo's spirit is restless."

  "Don't jump to conclusions, woman!"

  "She has no son to dance her to rest, DeWayne. If it's to be done, Alma—Paisley here—will have to do it."

  Well, that was exactly what Whirling Goat had told her in the jail. It made sense. Mama D'lo's ini'putc' had visited Barnes in the drunk tank to ask him to assure her that she was doing exactly right in going to Sky with her seventh dream.

  Sky, however, stomped out of the living room into another part of the house. Paisley was perplexed. Maybe LannaSue had so badly provoked him that he was washing his hands of both of them. Women weren't supposed to organize or dance in the Sun Dance, although they could support the men by singing or by bringing willow bundles to them during rest periods—and yet here were two women, his own wife and a teen-age girl, one telling him how to interpret a dream and the other presenting herself to him as a would-be dancer. No wonder the poor old buck was pissed.

  But a minute later, Sky was back, holding a red-cedar flute, an instrument that—he said gruffly, sitting down on an ottoman in the middle of the room—he had made himself. Its song would help Paisley make sense of the two shredded photographs.

  "How?"

  "Shut your eyes. Hear my song. When it stops and I say you're doing something, do it.—LannaSue, turn out that lamp."

  LannaSue obeyed, and the room, an hour before dawn, was so dark that Paisley felt better closing her eyes than sitting in it trying to find enough light to see by. Sky began to play. The melody was thin, broken, and not terribly pretty. But it altogether took her, snaking in and out of her mind as if seeking a hole to go into and hide. In fact, when the melody stopped, Paisley half believed that it had found this hole.

  "A woman dancer in the Thirst House," Sky intoned, "bends down and picks up the pieces of two torn photographs."

  That's me, Paisley thought. That's me he's talking about, me he's telling me what to do. And in the darkness of her skull, inside the darkness of a boxy house inside the darkness of a stucco tepee, she saw herself clad all in white, powdered like a ghost, kneeling in the dust to gather up the scraps of treated pasteboard. As she did, Sky began to play again—the same harsh and monotonous, but compelling, tune. He kept playing until the white-clad avatar of Paisley Coldpony kneeling in the Sun Dance lodge of her own mind had picked up every single fragment of paper.

  Said Sky then, "The woman carries these pieces to the drum and spreads them out on top of it."

  The red-cedar flute crooned again, and Paisley performed in her head what Sky had just attributed to the neurological automaton—the day-dream simulation—he called "the woman." To Paisley, it felt a lot like moving a computer figure through a two-dimensional labyrinth on one of the Apple monitors that they had at school now; the sense of being two places at once was just that strong, as was her awareness that she could back out—albeit with a pang of real loss—at nearly any moment she wanted.

  "The woman fits the pieces together—into two pictures. She takes all the time she needs."

  Paisley took all the time she needed.

  The flute ceased to croon.

  Said Sky, "The woman speaks aloud. She tells everyone at the Sun Dance what the pictures show."

  The obedient self-projection in Paisley's mind stared down at the puzzle-fit photos on the drumhead. In reassembling them, she had paid their images little heed, but now she was shocked to find that one
was a picture of Samuel Taylor Coldpony—her father—standing next to the leather hatted woman who had supposedly taken the pictures They stood side by side in the corral.

  The other photo, meanwhile, was of an emaciated unicorn—or kar'tajan, as Barnes would call it—rearing at the Tree of Life in the Sun Dance lodge, its front hooves flashing like knives at the totem affixed to it.

  Startled, Paisley opened her eyes on the dark.

  "She tells them," reiterated Sky, "what the pictures show."

  Reluctantly, staring at nothing, Paisley told the Skys what her dream self had just seen.

  Laying the flute aside, her mentor said, "To find your father, Paisley, you must only find that woman."

  "What of the sick unicorn?" she blurted. That Barnes had shown her a string-figure unicorn in the jail seemed not so much a happy, as a monstrous, coincidence.

  "The unicorn and the sick Anglo in your dream," Sky said, "are different sides of the same coin."

  Like the "coin" that Barnes always carries? she wondered. But there was no way to ask Sky such a strange question, and she didn't yet know how a young man with AIDS and a kar'tajan with protruding ribs could mirror anything in each other but illness.

  No matter. Sky had an explanation: "The parents of the sick young man have turned him away, just as you think your folks have done, Sam by never coming to see you and Mama D'lo by . . ."

  LannaSue said, "She knows, DeWayne."

  "That's why you saw D'lo's face on the Tree of Life. And why his unicorn is trying to cut up the totem with its hooves."

  Suddenly, Paisley could stand no more. "You sound like one of those goddamn BIA psychologists! Like Chief Sigmund Sky of the Muache Shrinks' Association!"

  She reached across LannaSue and turned on the lamp. The sudden light made everyone in the room—eyes narrowed, mouths pursed—look constipated.

  The Sun Dance chief picked up his red-cedar flute, rose from the ottoman, and stomped off toward his tiny study. At the door, he turned and gave Paisley a bitter look.

  "Maybe I do and maybe I don't," he said. "LannaSue, find her something to eat."

  vi.

  She ate scrambled eggs, to which LannaSue had added diced green pepper and jalapeno cheese. Her hunger surprised her. Ten minutes ago, eating had been the least of her concerns.

  LannaSue was nursing a cigarette and a cup of coffee. "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

  The question surprised her even more than did the extent of her hunger. "I am grown up, LannaSue."

  "Okay. What do you want to do?"

  "Finish school. Dance in the Sun Dance. Find my father." She couldn't think what else to add.

  "You want to be a po'rat," LannaSue told her.

  LannaSue Sky's absolute certainty on this score was yet another surprise, and Paisley halted her fork in mid-ascent. "How do you know that? Hell, I don't know that."

  The Southern Utes had passed a quarter of a century without a bona fide po'rat, or shaman. They had had leaders aplenty, chiefs and organizers and tribal councilmen, but persons with powa'a—supernatural authority from the One-Above—well, the Muache had had to import such persons from the Navajos, the Jicarilla Apaches, or even the Shoshones, whose Sun Dance procedures were so lax that they let dancers suck wet towels in the Thirst House and had no ban on photography so long as the picture-takers were Indian.

  Not even DeWayne Sky, tepee or no tepee, qualified as a po'rat, although he had striven mightily to help maintain the integrity of the Bear Dance and the Sun Dance. On the other hand, not being a bonafide shaman, he hadn't tried to resurrect the mawo'gwipani, or the Round Dance, at which everyone danced to hold white diseases—smallpox, clap, polio—in check. Nor the old wedding rite in which a couple sat together in a smoke-filled tepee to prove their compatibility and faithfulness, nor the ritual of laying a baby's birth cord on an anthill to bless the child with strength and good fortune. Sky's curing powers were beyond the average, but far from impressive in the old way.

  For dynamic medicine, a true po'rat—a genuine shaman—was required, and Paisley's people not only had no one qualified, they had no candidates. Why LannaSue would suppose that she might make a candidate, much less a full-fledged medicine woman, Paisley was unable to guess. No matter how often she claimed to be grown, she knew in her heart that she was still a school girl, whose daddy had never visited her in all the years since his leavetaking and whose Mama D'lo had . . . done what she'd done. And here she was putting away scrambled eggs as if she hadn't eaten at school yesterday and gulping them down like a starved dog.

  How can I be a po'rat? Paisley wondered. How can this kindly lady see me even as a would-be medicine woman?

  "DeWayne!" LannaSue called, holding a smoked-down cigarette in front of her. "DeWayne, stop sulking and come here!"

  A moment later, Sky propped himself against the doorjamb. "You should've married a poodle, not a man."

  "De Wayne, Paisley's dream—it's calling her to be a po'rat, a medicine woman, a healer, not only a dancer."

  "You've got piñon nuts for brains, LannaSue. If you open your mouth again, they'll rattle onto the floor."

  "The sick man in her dream," said LannaSue, undeterred by this warning. Speculatively, she added, "The kar'tajan in the photo she pieced back together to your flute's song."

  "What about them?" Sky said.

  Paisley was confused again. LannaSue had just said kar'tajan, the very word that Barnes had used earlier this morning. Moreover, Sky—despite his put-on disgruntlement—was clearly heeding his wife's words, trying to follow her reasoning.

  ' 'The Sun Dance is for earning power to heal with, and the Anglo with the deadly illness in her dream requires healing. So does the kar'tajan in her dream photo—it's angry and sick, too."

  Sky was noncommittal. "So?"

  "Paisley calls for the man's healing. She wants to help him. But you say he's broken the rules, and you throw him out."

  "He has broken the rules," Sky retorted, astonishing Paisley by talking about her dream as if it were an event of which he and his wife shared a real memory. "He brought in moisture."

  "Only a name on a shirt."

  "He brought in moisture, he brought in Anglo advertising, and he brought them with the picture-taking woman."

  I only dreamed those things, Paisley thought, looking back and forth between the arguing husband and wife. And it was my dream. How can they argue about my dream?

  But another part of her mind declared, Paisley, you dreamed it seven times. It's got to be seriously considered, and DeWayne and LannaSue are doing that.

  "Fetch the god sheet, De Wayne."

  "Christ, woman, that's only to come out at the end of the Sun Dance. Next you'll be asking me to piss on the sacred fire."

  "After asking for the healing of the man you threw out, Paisley had a vision. I think it means she's to become a po'rat. Fetch the god sheet. We'll see."

  It looked for a minute that Sky might stomp off again, outraged and truculent. Paisley would not've blamed him. The god sheet, if that somewhat awkward term signified what she thought it did, was a piece of linen that the Sun Dance chief brought forth during the closing ceremonies to impress the Shoshones, Arapahos, Apaches, and Navajos who had come to take part, for only the Muache had anything so impressive to display at dance's end. That LannaSue was asking Sky to get it now, months ahead of time, for no other purpose but to determine her suitability for shamanhood—well, it staggered Paisley. She finished eating, drank the last of her coffee, stared embarrassedly at her hands.

  "He's getting it," LannaSue said. "Come on."

  They found Sky peeking around his study door into the living room, holding something—the god sheet, Paisley figured—behind it out of sight. "Not a word of this to anyone," he said, "Not a word of this from either of you pathetically shy females to anybody outside this house. Got me?"

  "Come on. Bring it out. I'll throw the rug back. You can lay it down right here." LannaSue tapped the floor with her foot
.

  "Blindfold her," Sky said.

  "What? There's nobody here but us, DeWayne."

  "Do it. In this, I'll have my way. She has to be blindfolded for the test to work. And turn that damn lamp out again."

  Blindfolded? The lamp out? Was she going to get to see the god sheet or not? All the hocus-pocus—which she couldn't relate to the time-honored rituals of either the Bear or the Sun Dance—frightened Paisley. Hell, LannaSue's notion that she had po'rat potential frightened her. Before she could say anything, though, LannaSue had tied a clean dish towel around her eyes and further insured her sightlessness by pressing a pair of Sky's sunglasses into place over the towel. Blind man's bluff.

  She could still feel, however, and when Sky billowed the sheet out and let it drift down like a provisional carpet, she felt the stirred air slap her like something wet. Moisture, when you were dry, was power, but she wasn't dry, and this whole business—now that she had told her dream and eaten—seemed peculiar. Still, she trusted the Skys, and if they thought this was the way to test her, well, it must be okay.

  LannaSue sat her down, helped her remove her shoes and socks. Then she was standing behind Paisley, her large hands gripping her shoulders. Sky retreated and returned. When his red-cedar flute began to play again (the same painful melody), LannaSue pushed her gently forward, telling her to step lightly on the god sheet.

  "Try to make a crossing," she said.

  A crossing? Paisley thought. I can make a crossing with my eyes closed—which was a joke almost good enough to laugh aloud at. But when LannaSue released her, all her fragile bravado fell part and she hesitated.

  Legend had it that the god sheet—the sacred linen—was an authentic Muache relic. At some point over the past half century, a Ute visionary who had just successfully completed the Sun Dance went walking in the hills near the dance grounds and happened upon the footprints of a stranger. This Indian was wrapped in the sheet that he'd worn into and out of the Thirst House over the three days of the dance, and it occurred to him that these footprints—they were narrow and bare—were Jesus's. The Mormons claimed that the Indians were a lost tribe of Israel, after all, and that, once upon a time, Jesus had appeared in the New World. In any case, the Ute visionary laid his cloaklike sheet atop the strange footprints, and the sheet, according to legend, absorbed them into its fabric so thoroughly that no amount of scrubbing or detergent could lift them out again.