Dreamsnake

by Vonda McIntyre

  Melissa jerked back with an incoherent curse of surprise and anger. She clamped her legs against Squirrel’s sides and put the tiger-pony into a gallop from a standstill, leaning close over his neck and never looking back. In a moment the trees obscured all but the muffled thud of Squirrel’s hooves.

  Snake glared at the crazy. “How could you say such a thing to her?”

  He blinked, confused. “What did I say wrong?”

  “You follow us, you understand? Don’t go off the trail. I’ll find her and we’ll wait for you.” She cantered after Melissa. The crazy’s pained voice drifted after her.

  “But why did she do that?”

  Snake did not have to go far. Where the trail started to rise again, turning toward the slope of the valley and another mountain, Melissa stood beside Squirrel, hugging his neck as he nuzzled her shoulder. Hearing Slate approach, Melissa wiped her face on her sleeve and looked around. Snake dismounted and went toward her.

  “I was afraid you’d go a long way,” she said. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “You can’t expect a horse to run uphill just after he’s been lame,” Melissa said matter-of-factly, but with a trace of resentment.

  Snake held out the reins of Slate’s bridle. “If you want to ride hard and fast for a while you can take Slate.”

  Melissa stared at her as if trying to perceive some sarcasm in her expression that had been absent from her tone. She did not find it.

  “No,” Melissa said. “Never mind. Maybe it would help, but I’m all right. It’s just—I don’t want to forget. Well, I do, but not like that.”

  Snake nodded. “I know.”

  Melissa embraced her with one of her abrupt, self-conscious hugs. Snake held her and patted her shoulder. “He is crazy.”

  “Yeah.” Melissa drew back slowly. “I know he can help you. I’m sorry I can’t keep from hating him. I’ve tried.”

  “So have I,” Snake said.

  They sat down to wait for the crazy to come at his own slow pace.

  Before the crazy had even begun to recognize the countryside or the trail, Snake saw the broken dome. She looked at its hulking shape several moments before she realized, with a start, what it was. At first it looked like another peak of the mountain ridge; its color, gray instead of black, attracted Snake’s attention. She had expected the usual hemisphere, not a tremendous irregular surface that lay across the hillside like a quiescent amoeba. The main translucent gray was streaked with colors and reddened by afternoon sunlight. Whether the dome had been constructed in an asymmetrical form or whether it began as a round plastic bubble and was melted and deformed by the forces of the planet’s former civilization, Snake could not tell. But it had been in its present shape for a long, long time. Dirt had settled in the hollows and valleys on its surface, and trees and grass and bushes grew thick in the sheltered pockets.

  A broken dome. The words fit together strangely. Domes did not break, they did not weather, they did not change.

  Snake touched Melissa’s shoulder and pointed. Melissa saw the dome and exclaimed softly, then smiled with excitement and relief. Snake grinned back.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Snake said to the crazy.

  “Not yet,” he said. “No, not yet. I’m not ready.”

  “How do we get up there? Ride?”

  “North will see us…”

  Snake shrugged and dismounted. The way to the dome was steep and she could see no trail. “We walk, then.” She unfastened the girth-straps of the mare’s saddle. “Melissa—”

  “No!” Melissa said sharply. “I won’t stay down here while you go up there alone with that one. Squirrel and Slate will be okay and nobody will bother the case. Except maybe another crazy and they’ll deserve what they get.”

  Snake sat down on a fallen log and motioned to her daughter to sit beside her. Melissa did so, without looking up at Snake, her shoulders set in defiance.

  “I need your help,” Snake said. “I can’t succeed without you. If something happens to me—”

  “That’s not succeeding!”

  “In a way it is. Melissa…the healers need dreamsnakes. Up in that dome they have enough to use them for play. I have to find out how they got them. But if I can’t, if I don’t come back down, you’re the only way our people will know what happened to me. And why it happened. You’re the only way they’ll know about the dreamsnakes.”

  Melissa stared at the ground, rubbing the knuckles of one hand with the fingernails of the other. “This is very important to you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Melissa sighed. Her hands were fists. “All right,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Snake hugged her. “If I’m not back in, oh, two days, take Slate and Squirrel and ride north. Keep on going past Mountainside and Middlepass. It’s a long way, but there’s plenty of money in the case.” Melissa knew how to open the hidden compartment.

  “I have my wages from Mountainside,” Melissa said.

  “All right, but the other’s just as much yours. You don’t need to open the compartments Mist and Sand are in. They can survive until you get home.” For the first time she actually considered the possibility that Melissa might have to make the trip alone. “Sand is getting too fat anyway.” She forced a smile.

  “But—” Melissa cut herself off.

  “What?”

  “If something does happen to you, I couldn’t get back in time to help, not if I go all the way to the healers’ station.”

  “If I don’t come back on my own, there won’t be any way to help me. Don’t come after me by yourself. Please. I need to know you won’t.”

  “If you don’t come back in three days, I’ll go tell your people about the dreamsnakes.”

  Snake let her have the extra day, with some gratitude, in fact. “Thank you, Melissa.”

  They let the tiger-pony and the gray mare loose in a clearing near the trail. Instead of galloping into the meadow and rolling in the grass, they stood close together, watchful and nervous, their ears swiveling, nostrils wide. The crazy’s old horse stood in the shade alone, his head down. Melissa watched them, her lips tight.

  The crazy stayed where he had dismounted, staring at Snake, tears in his eyes.

  “Melissa,” Snake said, “If you do go home alone, tell them I adopted you. Then—then they’ll know you’re their daughter, too.”

  “I don’t want to be their daughter. I want to be yours.”

  “You are. No matter what.” Snake hugged her one last time, and Melissa held tight, reluctant to let her go.

  “It’ll be all right,” Snake said. “Don’t worry.”

  The crazy climbed surprisingly quickly and very noisily. Snake scrambled up a few meters of harsh black stone and grabbed his robe. “Not so fast.”

  His breath came loud and rough, from excitement, not effort. “The dreamsnakes are near,” he said. He jerked his robe from her hand and scuttled up sheer rock. The next time Snake caught him, near the top of the cliff, she grabbed him by the shoulder and made him stop.

  “We’ll go on more slowly and more quietly from here. Otherwise your friends will know we’re coming before we’re ready to have them know.”

  “The dreamsnakes—!”

  “North is between us and the dreamsnakes. If he sees you first will he let you go on?”

  “You’ll give me a dreamsnake? One of my own? Not like North?”

  “Not like North,” Snake said.

  She chinned herself over the edge of the cliff to the broken dome’s ridge. The strangeness of the place hit Snake like a physical blow. Alien plants grew all around the base of the tremendous half-collapsed structure, nearly to the cliff, leaving no clear path. What covered the ground resembled nothing Snake knew, not grass or scrub or bushes. It was a flat, borderless expanse of bright red leaf. Looking closer, Snake could see that it was more than a single tremendous leaf: each section was perhaps twice as long as she was tall, irregularly shaped, and joined at the
edges to neighboring leaves by a system of intertwining hairs. Wherever more than two leaves touched, a delicate frond rose a few handsbreadths from the intersection.

  The depressions in the surface of the dome retained some normal vegetation. But alien plants as well had reached the top of the dome. The melted hollows were filled randomly, some with ordinary green, others with bold unearthly colors. In a few of the seared, heat-sunken pockets, high above the ground, the colors warred together, one not yet having overcome the other.

  Inside the translucent dome, tall shapes showed as shadows, indistinct and strange. Between the edge of the cliff and the dome there was no cover, nor was there any other approach. Snake became painfully aware of her visibility, for she was standing silhouetted against the sky.

  The crazy clambered up beside her. “We follow the path,” he said, pointing across the flat-leaves that no trail parted.

  Snake stepped forward and put her boot carefully on the edge of the flat-leaf. Nothing happened. It was no different from stepping on an ordinary leaf. Beneath it, the ground felt as solid as any other stone.

  She started across the barely-yielding leaves, placing her feet cautiously. The crazy followed.

  “North likes new people,” he said. “He likes it when they come and ask him to let them dream.” His voice grew wistful. “Maybe he’ll like me again.”

  Snake’s boots left marks on the red flat-leaves, blazing her path across the outcropping that held the broken dome. She only looked back once: her footsteps lay in livid purple bruises against red all the way back to the cliff edge. The crazy’s trail was much fainter. He crept along behind her, a little to one side so he could always see the dome, not quite as frightened of this person North as he was attracted by the dreamsnakes.

  The half-melted oblong bubble was even larger than it looked from the cliff. Its translucent flank rose in an immense and gentle curve to the highest point of the surface, many times Snake’s height. The side she approached was streaked with multicolored veins. They did not fade to the original gray until they reached the far end of the dome, a long way to Snake’s right. To her left, the streaks grew brighter as they approached the structure’s narrower end.

  Snake reached the dome. The flat-leaves grew up along its sides to the level of her knees, but above that the plastic was clean. Snake put her face up close to the wall, peering between a stripe of orange and one of purple, cutting off the exterior light with her hands, but the shapes inside were still indistinct. Nothing moved.

  She followed the intensifying bands of color.

  As she rounded the narrow end, she saw why it was called the broken dome. Whatever had melted the surface had a power Snake could not comprehend, for it had also blasted an opening in a material she had believed indestructible. The rainbow streaks radiated from the hole along buckled plastic. The heat must have crystallized the substance, for the edges of the opening had broken away, leaving a huge jagged entrance. Globs of plastic, fluorescent colors glowing among alien plants, lay all over the ground.

  Snake approached the entrance cautiously. The crazy began his half-humming moan of fear.

  “Shh!” Snake did not turn back, but he subsided.

  Fascinated, Snake climbed through the hole. She felt the sharp edges against her palms but did not really notice them. Beyond the opening, where the side wall, when intact, had curved to form the roof, an entire archway of plastic was slumped to barely more than Snake’s height. Here and there the plastic had run and dripped and formed ropes from ceiling to floor. Snake reached out and touched one gently. It thrummed like a giant harp string, and she grabbed it quickly to silence it.

  The light inside was reddish and eerie; Snake kept blinking her eyes, trying to clear her vision. But nothing was wrong with her sight except that it could not become accustomed to the alien landscape and light. The dome had enclosed an alien jungle, now gone wild. A great vine with a stem bigger around than the largest tree Snake had ever seen climbed up the wall, huge suckers probing the now-brittle plastic, punching through to precarious holds in the dome. The vine spread a canopy across the ceiling, its bluish leaves tiny and delicate, its flowers tremendous but made up of thousands of white petals even smaller than the leaves. Snake moved farther into the dome, to where the melting, less severe, had not collapsed the ceiling. Here and there a vine crept up the edge, then dropped back to earth where the plastic was too strong to break and too slick to grasp. After the vines, the trees took over, or what passed for trees inside the dome. One stood on a hummock nearby: a tangled mass of woody stalks, or limbs, piled and twisted far above Snake’s head, spreading slowly to shape the plant into a cone with the wide end at the top, its tip buried somewhere beneath the earth.

  Recalling the crazy’s vague description, Snake pointed toward a central hill that rose almost to touch the plastic sky. “That way, hm?” She found herself whispering.

  Half-crouched behind her, the crazy mumbled something that sounded affirmative. Snake set out, passing beneath the lacy shadows of the tangle-trees and through occasional areas of colored light where the dome’s rainbow wounds filtered sunlight. As Snake walked she listened carefully, for the sound of another human voice, for the faint hissing of nested snakes, for anything. But even the air was still.

  The ground began to rise: they reached the foot of the hill. Here and there black volcanic rock pierced the topsoil, the alien earth for all Snake knew. It looked ordinary enough, but the plants growing from it did not. Here the ground cover looked like fine brown hair and had the same slick texture. The crazy led on, following a trail that was not there. Snake trudged after him. The hillside steepened and sweat beaded on her forehead.

  They climbed higher, and still no one challenged them. The sweat on Snake’s face dried: the air was growing cooler. The crazy, grinning and mumbling to himself, climbed more eagerly. The coolness became a whisper of air running downhill like water. Snake had expected the hilltop, right up under the crown of the dome, to be warm with trapped heat. But the higher she climbed, the colder and stronger the breeze became.

  They entered a stand of trees similar to the ones below, still formed from tangled branches and compact twisted roots, but only a few meters high. They clustered together in small groves of three or more, deforming each other’s symmetry. The forest thickened. Finally, winding between the twisted trunks, a pathway appeared. As the forest closed in over her, Snake caught up with the crazy and stopped him.

  “From now on stay behind me, all right?”

  He nodded without looking at her.

  The dome diffused sunlight so nothing cast a shadow, but the light was barely bright enough to penetrate the twisting, knotted branches just overhead. Tiny leaves shivered in the cold breeze that blew through the forest corridor. Snake moved forward. The rocks beneath her boots had given way to a soft trail of humus and fallen leaves.

  To the right a tremendous chunk of stone rose up out of the hillside at a gentle slant, forming a ledge that would overlook the larger part of the dome. Snake considered climbing out on it, but it was too exposed. She did not want North to be able to accuse her of spying, and she did not want him to know of her presence until she walked into his camp. Pressing on, she shivered, for the breeze had become a cold wind.

  She glanced around to be sure the crazy was following her. As she did, he scurried up the rock ledge, waving his arms. Startled, Snake hesitated. Her first thought was that he had decided again to die. In that instant Melissa dashed after him.

  “North!” he cried, and Melissa flung herself at his knees, hitting him with her shoulder and knocking him down. Snake ran toward them as Melissa fought to keep him from getting up and he fought to free himself. His single shout echoed and re-echoed, rebounding from the walls and the half-melted undulations of the dome.

  Snake knelt and pulled Melissa away from the crazy, as gently as she could. The crazy lurched around, ready to scream again, but Snake drew her knife and held it beneath his chin. Her other hand was clenche
d in a fist. She opened it slowly and slapped the ground hard.

  “Why did you do that? Why? We had an agreement.”

  “North—” he whispered. “North will be angry with me. But if I bring him new people…” His voice trailed off. Snake looked at Melissa, and Melissa looked at the ground.

  “I didn’t promise not to follow you,” she said. “I made sure of that. I know it’s cheating, but…” She raised her head and met Snake’s gaze. “There are things you don’t know about people. You trust them too much. There are things I don’t know, a lot of them, I know that, but they’re different things.”

  “It’s all right,” Snake said. “You’re right, I did trust him too much. Thank you for stopping him.”

  Melissa shrugged. “A lot of good I did. They know we’re here now, wherever they are.”

  Snake slid her knife back into its sheath. “Melissa, you’ve got to get out of the dome.”

  “Please come with me,” Melissa said. “Nothing makes any sense around here.”

  “Someone has to tell our people about this place.”

  “I don’t care about your people! I care about you! How can I go to them and tell them I let you get killed?”

  “Melissa, please, there isn’t time to argue.”

  “You should let me stay with you,” Melissa said. She turned around, shoulders slumped, and started down the trail.

  “You’ll get your wish, little one.” The voice was deep and courteous.

  For an instant Snake thought the crazy had spoken in a normal tone, but he was cowering on the bare rock beside her, and a fourth person now stood on the trail. His form was eerie in the dim light, for he was very tall, pathologically tall: pituitary gigantism, Snake thought. Beneath the dense tangle-trees he had to stoop. Emaciation accentuated every asymmetry of his body. He was dressed all in white, and he was albino as well, with chalk-white hair and eyebrows and eyelashes, and very pale blue eyes. Melissa, stopping short, stared up at him and then backed away.

  “North!” the crazy cried. “North, I brought new people. And I warned you, I didn’t let them sneak up on you. Did you hear me?”