Bone Dance

by Emma Bull

  She was so calm. Maybe she’d lived long enough with righteous anger that it had smoothed into something else. But it drove me to say, “What’s the matter? Were you jealous?”

  She leaned forward, and there was something in her face that made me shiver. “I had nothing to be jealous of. Listen and be made wise. Once upon a time in New Mexico, there was an MP named Stedmon. One dark night he annoyed me. I don’t remember the offense. The next evening he walked in on an edifying scene involving his fiancée and four men from his unit. Four being the most I could collect, from my vantage point on his fiancée, on short notice.

  “Then there was the Great Parachuting Lesson, considered by my fellows to be one of our best gags. I mounted my victim in a bar off base and dismounted in midair, just when he ought to have opened his chute. He was a little disoriented at first, I’m afraid, and as a result broke his legs.

  “The four people I killed could have matched both of those for cruelty. In fact, any Horseman could have. Every sane community kills vermin and rabid animals.”

  She jerked to her feet and strode to the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed until then how small an area the lamp illuminated; she was an arrangement of light and dark near the door. Then the arrangement moved, and I knew her hands had gone up to her face.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said. Her words were blurred, as if by her fingers. “I told you I’d developed a distaste, which was understating it a bit. I’m not proud of those incidents, and I apologize for telling them as if I am. Or for telling them at all. They’re over half a century old.”

  She was not going to get to it, the thing I was afraid of. I didn’t have to worry about it. So I was alarmed when I found myself saying, “And what was I supposed to be for?”

  I heard her take a steadying breath, and saw her hands come down. “Did you know you had something to do with us?”

  “Not at first. Never mind.”

  She stood very still; then she came back into the light in a few strides and squatted beside me, looking into my face. “You didn’t know, did you? Until tonight, when I said so?”

  “Everything in the damned bunker said ‘Property of U.S. Government’ on it,” I said bitterly. “I figured they just hadn’t gotten around to stenciling me. And I didn’t think anything hidden that well had been meant to do anybody any good.”

  “You were meant to do us some.”

  “That’s not much consolation for having been hatched full-grown out of a box.”

  Her black eyes widened, and she said, “Would you rather not have been hatched at all?” I stared down at her, silenced.

  She rose again and began to pace the room, in and out of the darkness. “I think the most elementary purpose of the chevaux was to reassure everyone else. Regular forces pointed out — and rightly, too — that if any of us were wounded or threatened with death, we were likely just to steal the nearest available body. Those of our friends and allies, for instance. The solution was to have untenanted and highly desirable bodies available as a bribe to keep us from devouring our own side. So they grew the chevaux.”

  I repeated, a little numb, “Grew them.”

  “Well, of course. Did you think you were made of bicycle parts? The chevaux were organic; hence, grown. Brought to maturity and then held until needed, probably in those boxes.”

  The boxes in which, abandoned, support systems failing slowly, eight costly, empty shells had been left to decay. Nine. But one of them had risen like a horror-movie menace to walk a changed earth, where even the living tried to avoid the sunlight. “They customized them, too,” Frances continued. “After all, a brain is a terrible thing to waste, when you can store useful skills and information in it. Languages, codes, computer programming, volleyball rules, flirting with a fan — whatever the brass considered useful. Who knows. God and you, I suppose.”

  “Electronics,” I said thickly. “Why am I neuter?”

  “I’m not sure. I think the chevaux could be modified by the rider.”

  “They could what?”

  “I told you, I’m not sure. I never met one before you. Christ, I don’t think any of them were ever deployed.”

  “Deployed. Amazing. Feels just like being alive.”

  “Life can be defined as that which admits of no comfortable acquaintance with the cemetery. By that definition, you’re more alive than I am.” The resonant voice was smooth and bitter as unsweetened chocolate.

  “I don’t know,” I said, examining my filthy shirt. “I look as if I might have just dug myself out with my fingernails.”

  That seemed to amuse her. “You could go change, you know.”

  “I would have. But… ” My voice slipped away from me.

  “But it would have meant leaving Mick and me alone in here. And,” she said slowly, “it would have meant undressing with strangers in the place. In the whole secretive fabric of your life, your body is the most private thread. Because it’s the outward sign of all your secrets.”

  I wondered if I was pale. “Gee. Do you read minds?”

  Frances snorted. “No, I attack them, stun them, and bolt them whole, like a constrictor. And I’m sluggish while digesting.”

  “I think you need sleep,” I told her, shaking my head. “And food.”

  “I always talk like this. Almost always. It whiles away the tedium of the decades. But speaking of food, where the hell is Mick?”

  A good question. He wasn’t as familiar with the Night Fair as I was, but the place was full of things to eat. If he wasn’t picky, he could have been back in twenty minutes. Unless — well, why not? Why shouldn’t he have taken the opportunity to bolt before Frances came to and started waving her rifle around again? Even in the vulnerable and addled state I’d been in when he left, why should I have expected him to do anything else? The way he’d caught Frances as she fell, brushed the hair back from her face, was no evidence to the contrary.

  I looked up to find Frances’s eyes on me, her hands curled tight on themselves. “Pack if you’re going to,” she said softly. “We’re on the street in ten minutes.”

  “What?”

  “Mick is the only person besides you and me who knows where I am. And who I am.”

  I gaped. “He wouldn’t—”

  “Wouldn’t he? Maybe not. But even so, could he keep it to himself if someone asked him strenuously enough? Or, perhaps, didn’t bother to ask?”

  I swallowed, to no effect, and said, “You’ve been looking for this guy for years. You think he’ll find Mick Skinner in an hour?”

  “I can’t afford to believe he hasn’t.”

  “I’m staying here.” I managed not to drop my eyes from hers.

  “No, you’re not,” she said agreeably.

  “They don’t want me. None of them want me. They want you.”

  “What I did to you tonight,” she replied, each word evenly spaced and without emphasis, “was nothing. Tom O’Bedlam or anyone who serves him will separate you from your desire to live and any last complacent conviction you may have about the privacy of your own mind as easily as tearing rotted cloth. Knowledge of me will gush out of your brain and your mouth and a hundred other openings that he’ll make just for that purpose. I suggest you come with me.”

  “What can I tell him? ‘Well, yeah, there’s this woman, right now she looks like this, but that might have changed; and she wants to bump you off, but you knew that already.’ ”

  “Sparrow,” she said, and stopped, and began again. “It didn’t occur to you that I might have your welfare in mind and not mine?”

  I frowned at her, and she returned my gaze, her eyebrows raised. “Why would you?”

  “Thank you, I have retained a few dried-out shreds of human decency, I think.”

  “That’s not how things work around here.”

  It was her turn to frown. “Pretend you’re someplace else, then. Go change, and gather up anything you need, within limits.”

  “Where are y — we — going?”

&
nbsp; She leaned on the corner of the desk. “Away.”

  Do you still have purposes? Mick had asked. I used mine up. I just move around. I couldn’t go to Dana, obviously; and I couldn’t go to Cassidy, because I didn’t know where that was. If I went to Sherrea, I might involve her -

  Oh, no. Think. I already had. Sherrea and Theo, Theo with a hole in him, and at the bottom of the stairs the woman Frances had ridden, Myra, and Dusty, whose craziness had come off him like heat off a griddle. Who’d pointed out, smiling, that now he knew where to find Theo and Sher if he needed them.

  “When you… when you rode that red-haired woman out back of the Underbridge. How much of her brain did you pick?”

  “Not much. I was busy, you’ll recall. Why?”

  I didn’t ask them to get involved. I didn’t ask Theo to follow me out of the building with a gun. He knew better; he’d told me so. “The two people I was with. They were still there… ”

  Some buttress of self-containment slipped loose, for an instant, behind her face, and was restored just as quickly. “If you’re going to suggest we go back,” she said, “I’ll save you the trouble. No.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because if it’s not the first place they’ll look, it’s the second.”

  “You think Myra and Dusty work for Tom Whatsisname.”

  “Worecski.” She sighed. “I didn’t, when I thought you were a better prospect. Whole hours ago. Now I’m forced to confront the notion that I backed, as it were, the wrong horse.”

  “They were after Mick Skinner.”

  “Were they?” she said, startled. “Why? Do you know?”

  “No.” I thought about the confrontation behind the Underbridge, before she’d arrived. “But they knew that he’d — that I’d been him part of the time.”

  “Now that would suggest a surprising familiarity with the process, wouldn’t it? Hmm. Go change.”

  I did. I locked the door of the bedroom, and felt no more comfortable about it than I’d expected to. Another pair of jeans, another shirt, jungle boots; it didn’t take long. I hid folding money in each boot, and coins in a bag around my neck. When I dropped the cord over my head, I realized there was already something there: Sherrea’s pendant, the two overlapping V shapes. If it was protective, it was doing a rotten job. Maybe it only worked for people who believed it would. What did I believe in? The Deal; it wouldn’t make much of an amulet. I threw a few other things in a rucksack and went to submit myself to the will of Frances.

  She looked me up and down. “That must have been a tough decision.”

  It was my turn to make my eyes wide. “Would you prefer the evening gown, or the tuxedo?”

  Frances gathered up her purloined rifle. I locked the archives and doused all the lights. We rode down to the first floor in silence. Frances, it seemed, was thinking. We got all the way to the tri-wheeler before I finally asked, “Where are we going?”

  “To the Underbridge,” she said. “I’ve had second thoughts about renewing my acquaintance with everyone involved. Mount up.”

  I looked at her sideways. Frances just smiled.

  Card 6: Ahead

  Seven of Wands

  Waite: Discussion, wordy strife, negotiations, war of trade.

  Gearhart: The individual against the community; one against many. Unequal odds.

  6.0: The house of the spirit

  “The nights are getting shorter,” I shouted over Frances’s shoulder as we rode. “Mind the east.” The sky there was a dense and velvet cobalt, over solid rooftops and shattered ones, over the feeble lamps and torches of the Fair.

  “Very nice,” said Frances.

  “That means the gates close in an hour or so.”

  “It does?”

  Well, there; that was one thing I knew that she didn’t. “That’s why they call it the Night Fair.”

  “What happens after that?”

  “Nothing. Lively as a mausoleum. The hours are shorter in the summer, but it beats staying out in the sun.”

  We were threading a narrow, noisy, busy strip of pavement bordered with vendors’ stalls. She braked as a huge, hairy gray dog shot out from between two of them and hurtled across the path, its bony joints rolling. A smooth, loam-black face topped with a brilliantly colored cylinder of a hat thrust itself in front of the windshield. “Las bujias, senora,” it said, showing small white teeth and a raised hand full of spark plugs. “Para todas las máquinas, senora, y muy baratas—” Frances growled with the throttle, and the face disappeared as we lunged forward. I peered back through the weather shell, and couldn’t find a sign of the bright hat.

  “Not to be critical,” I told her, “but if we’d gone to the gate we came in by, we’d have missed the crowds.”

  There was a pause before she said, “I was hoping we might find Mick.”

  “The place is a warren. We could pass him a dozen times in the next ten minutes and never know it.”

  “Ah, but he would,” said Frances harshly. There was a fierce, fruitless rev from the throttle. “Have you noticed many of these here tonight?”

  “What if he’s gotten into trouble?”

  “In other words, what if he hasn’t come to us because he can’t?” She turned the trike into the mouth of an alley and, to my surprise, killed the engine. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. Finally she said, “We do all want to survive. I’ve been doing it for a long time, in difficult circumstances, and I’ve done it by suspecting everyone unfailingly. I’m afraid it’s a habit now.”

  Her habits didn’t account for why we’d stopped here. “Does that mean that you don’t think Mick Skinner is in league with the devil?”

  She twisted to look at me. Her eyes didn’t look focused. “Of course I do. I told you, it’s a habit.” She turned away again.

  After a moment I said, “If you’ll open the shell, I’ll get some food. The stall’s right there; I’ll be in sight the whole time.”

  She didn’t answer, but she groped for and pulled the lever that popped the shell. I scrambled out past her as best I could.

  The smell and sound and sight of chicken frying was a swooning sensual overload; I wondered, for an instant, if that was how a caress seemed to most people. I was suddenly vague and giddy with hunger. I had always worked that way: not needing to eat all day, until I needed it desperately, like an engine that runs smoothly through a tank of alcohol and stops without warning when it’s gone. What string of adjectives had Frances hung on me, earlier? Strong, resistant to disease and poisons… She could have added cheap to operate, and rarely needs refueling. I bought chicken (“Picante,” the old woman warned, her hands fluttering, her accent terrible, “picante”) and fried potatoes and okra and buttermilk biscuits and two long bottles of homemade pear nectar. I tucked the bottles under my arm and juggled the hot paper-wrapped parcels back to the trike.

  Frances sat where I’d left her, but her wrists were crossed over the instrument panel, and her forehead was pillowed on them. Her hair had fallen forward to sweep and scatter across her near forearm. Relaxed, that arm looked surprisingly thin, and the pointed bones in her elbow seemed frail and vulnerable. Out of character.

  Sometimes wisdom arrives first in the pit of your stomach. That was where I felt it then, a little slippery twist. Of course it was out of character. That wasn’t Frances’s arm.

  I already knew that this body didn’t belong to Frances; but now I really knew it, all the many-sided shape of it. There was no relation here between the shell and the spirit, no way to judge from outside, except by the crude language of action and expression, what the person inside was. The body I was looking at was the life story, in fading ink, of a person I’d never met.

  Who was she? Would she approve of this vendetta she was being ridden on? I’d awakened, over and over, in strange places with bits of my past gone, and it had nearly driven me crazy. How long had Frances ridden this woman? Would she wake up in a new city, maybe years since her last memory, and do any
better than I had? Would she get the chance to wake up at all?

  The exhaustion belonged to the stranger’s body. The driving passion, the mind under the lash, belonged to Frances. Both needed to eat and rest. Both would suffer if they didn’t. Whoever was entitled to judge between them, it wasn’t me.

  I said, a little loudly, “Well, if you didn’t like spicy chicken, you should have said so.”

  “I love spicy chicken,” she said, and sat up. Her face was composed, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to notice, or at least to comment on, the weariness in it.

  So I said, “At the Underbridge, there’s a place where you can catch a few hours’ sleep.”

  “I’ll be fine once I eat. Now, can we eat?”

  “You’re welcome,” I replied, and began to set bundles on all the flat surfaces. There weren’t a lot of these, on or in the trike, but I ate leaning against the outside, which left her the passenger’s seat as a table. “Eat the okra first,” I warned. “It’s terrible cold.”

  And that was the last conversation for a few minutes. Except for the rattle of the paper, we were a speck of silence in the Night Fair’s tapestry of noise. I stopped chewing to listen to it. I felt like an alien object in the world-body, something it had encysted because it couldn’t cast it out. Or was it Frances who had been isolated, and I was simply standing within the radius of the effect?

  “Wish I had some coffee,” Frances said at last, around a bite of biscuit.

  I stared at her. “Nothing easier. Give me ten bucks, and I’ll be back sometime tomorrow with about twelve green coffee beans. If someone, somewhere in town, has managed to lay hands on a sackful.”

  She smiled, wry and surprisingly genuine. “I know. I think that’s the rest of my penance. To get to where coffee grows, it’s a thousand miles over bad roads full of unpleasant people. I hear there’s a slope near Taos where they’ve discovered it does pretty well, but strangers within half a mile can expect to be shot at.”