Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  And she laughed at the sight of former lovers and students and colleagues hurrying from the meditation dome to greet her. Zuni! Zuni! they cheered. You’ve taken your turn at last!

  “I thought it was time for me to join you,” she answered, “before I’m too old to climb mountains and swim in the sea.”

  Welcome! Welcome! they cried in all their familiar voices, and their lips brushed her face, their fingers stroked her hair, their arms encircled her.

  “And haven’t things grown wondrously?” Zuni crowed.

  Yes, the conspirators agreed. The wilds are coming back. Not everything. A fair number of birds, some butterflies, even a few of the big predators. Bears, lions, wolves.

  “And the whales?” Zuni asked.

  We don’t know yet, they answered. There are seals and otters, herring and krill, a couple runs of salmon. So there might be whales.

  Zuni touched their cheeks, their foreheads. “You’ve managed to stay healthy?”

  Well enough, they replied. Some cancers from the lingering toxins, but so far no deaths. The health patrollers know we’re here but leave us alone, watching to see how we get on. We’re afraid if we thrive, people will come pouring out of the Enclosure.

  “There’s little danger of that,” Zuni replied. “They’re likelier to launch out into space. The dread of the wild runs deep.” Gazing around at the humped green hills of the Oregon coast, the lichen-starred cliffs, and wildflowers glimmering on the beach, she added, “They’re paying a terrible price.”

  But there was no choice, the conspirators objected. Without imposing quarantine, how else would Earth have recovered?

  “Yes, of course,” Zuni murmured. “Still, it grieves me to think of all they’ve lost.”

  Touch the Earth

  The nine conspirators fled from Indiana City along separate paths. On the night chosen for the escape, Marn zigzagged through avenues and alleys, carrying her fear as if it were a dish of mercury. The last lights she passed were the neon signs at the gamepark, where the pedbelts ended and revelers caroused. Every step pushed her deeper into the unlit ruins of factories, over buckled pavement, past abandoned machinery ticking as it released the day’s heat. This was how she had wanted to flee, carrying nothing from her old life except the mask and clothes she wore, without even a flashlight to burden her.

  Smell told her when she had reached the abandoned refinery, for the scent of dust gave way to the tang of oil. In the glow from a fading sunset projected onto the dome she could make out soaring chimneys, a snarl of pipes, and giant pumps. The storage tanks echoed back the grit grit of her boots on gravel. She pressed her ear to the fifth tank, but could hear no murmur from inside. What if no one else had come? What if, after months of secret meetings, after gathering supplies for the colony, after vowing to risk their lives together in the wilds—what if the others had been seized by fear?

  Her face felt hot behind the mask. Paint flaked away with snicking sounds as she brushed her gloved hands over the tank, searching for the drain valve. When at last she found it she hesitated, a fist clenched on the spoked wheel. After spending every hour of her twenty-two years inside the Enclosure, she could not resist taking one last look back at the city’s dazzle of lights. Nearby, the gamepark glowed orange. Farther away the bio-gas plants and agrifactories flared yellow. And farther still, at the core of the city where her own chamber hummed to itself, the towers blazed toward the dome like mountains afire.

  With a shiver, she turned back to the tank, opened the valve, and peered into a tunnel of blackness. “It’s Marn,” she called. “Marn-arn,” the tank echoed back. “Code word harmony,” she added, and the tank echoed, “Harm-arm.”

  Then light flared inside, and Jurgen’s shaggy head filled the opening. “It’s about time,” he called gruffly.

  She crawled through the valve and emerged, blinking, inside the tank, her gloves and suit smeared with oil. The other eight stood there waiting, muffled in worksuits and masks. Among the voices lifted in greeting, she noticed Hinta’s throaty whisper.

  After one last glimpse of the city lights snared in the opening like stars in a telescope, Marn cranked the valve shut. Safe here with the others, surrounded by crates and tools for the settlement, she began trembling. The fear she had balanced so carefully now threatened to spill.

  “How’s our chemist?” Jurgen asked. “No problems getting here? No one followed you?”

  Marn shook her head. “I was careful.”

  “Good. We can go as soon as you’ve checked your crates.”

  Chagrined at being the last to arrive, Marn lowered her eyes until the man’s bulky shape withdrew. From a pocket she took the inventory of medicines, catalysts, acids, and chemical reagents they expected to need on the outside but would not be able to synthesize right away. While she checked her supplies, the others began pushing loaded carts into the pipe, headlamps glowing. Jurgen went first, since he had discovered this exit from the city and had marked the spot fourteen kilometers out from the dome where the pipe broke ground. As usual he wore no hood, so his black hair flared out in an unruly mane. Sol went next, walking with an old athlete’s cocky spring, then slouching Rand and gliding Hinta, each conspirator in turn with gait and posture unique as a thumbprint. Marn went last, disguising the tremor in her hands by tightly gripping the handle of her cart.

  They slogged along for hours, gasping stale air, taking gulps from an oxygen tank when they grew lightheaded. Their headlamps struck rainbow reflections from the curving walls. Like the refinery and storage tanks, the pipeline had been abandoned when climate chaos forced the banning of fossil fuels. The slap of footsteps and grating of wheels reverberated, kilometer after kilometer, until they reached the spot Jurgen had marked with a phosphorescent red X. He unholstered his laser and began to cut an opening. The others rested, close together in the gloom. Marn could smell them, could smell herself—an animal pungency. She had never been this hot, this wet, this lost in her body.

  When the laser finished its cut the section of pipe tilted outward. Cool, damp air rushed in. Daylight blinded her. Tears seeped around her closed lids, yet she wanted to look out, to see the wilds. The dome’s filtered light had given her no hint of this brilliance.

  No one spoke, no one moved. Marn squinted through a film of tears at blurred trees, bushes, stones. She had scant language for this outside world, only what she had picked up from reading. It was a muddle of browns and greens. She fixed her gaze on a single plant, its twin leaves canted upward like awnings, a bud sheltered underneath, brown-tipped, potent. If she stared long enough the bud might burst into flower, proving that she really was in the wilds.

  Jurgen broke the silence by murmuring, “Great God in the morning.”

  Hinta swayed at the lip of the opening. “Just look! Listen! And the smells!”

  Marn let out a breath, as if she had come to the surface after swimming underwater. She knew it was April, a month no different from any other inside the Enclosure, but out here it was a season of growth.

  With a shout, Jurgen clambered through the opening. The rest followed, dropping gingerly to the ground. Marn stared down at her boots, amazed to find herself actually standing on the planet. She took a few cautious steps, saw the others doing the same, all staggering about as if they were toddlers again just learning to walk. The littered soil yielded beneath her feet and sprang back, resilient. No pavement or floor had ever felt so alive. Her eyes still watered from the raw sunlight. But she could see well enough to tell it was a young forest they had reached, few of the trees thicker than her waist, the ground a tangle of briars and brush.

  Jurgen lumbered back to the pipe, pawing the greenery aside and yelling, “Let’s get the stuff unloaded. Let’s find some water and set up camp. Let’s go.”

  Rand and Sol were the ones who found the lake, a blue bowl rimmed by trees with arching branches laced in white.

  “Dogwood,” said Jurgen, expert on the names of wild things.

  By late after
noon, working with hoods thrown back, masks clammy from sweat, they had cleared a space on the shore, spread a layer of polyfilm, and inflated the dome. Long after everyone else had taken shelter inside, Jurgen kept lugging gear from the supply crates. Through the dome’s translucent skin Marn watched his burly shadow pass.

  “We’ve got to take this in small doses,” she called out to him. “Leave it for tomorrow.”

  Jurgen only grunted as he trudged back for another load.

  Beside her, Hinta lay with milky white hair spread in a halo against the somber brown floor. “He told me once that he feels most alive when he’s aching,” she said.

  “He’ll kill himself,” Marn said.

  “Not Jurgen.” Hinta rolled onto her side, propped her head on a bent arm. A shining rim of skin showed beneath the edge of her mask. “He’ll be around to bury the rest of us.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t bury anybody soon,” said Marn.

  “Let’s hope.”

  Lying on her cushion, Marn stared up at the apex of the dome where the arched sections came together, like a map of travel tubes converging on Indiana City. She imagined the city as a vast printed circuit, its millions of people so many nodes. She would already be fading from the memories of the few who knew her back there, displaced by videos or holos, flushed away by chemmies. “Did you leave anyone behind?” she asked Hinta.

  “Everybody I care about is right here,” said Hinta. “And you?”

  “I miss a few people.”

  “Anybody whose face you ever saw?”

  “A couple,” Marn admitted.

  “Did you just look, or did you touch?”

  Marn flushed. Her tongue felt prickly. Before she could answer, Hinta quickly added, “I’m sorry. That’s a rude question.”

  They lay quietly on their cushions, Marn’s heart pounding. She was ashamed to admit she had never touched anyone, skin to skin, unless perhaps in infancy, back before memory.

  Jurgen was the last to retreat inside the dome, well after nightfall. He took his place among the others, who lay in their sleeping bags, their bodies arrayed like spokes with feet pointing toward the center of the dome. Because his cushion was next to hers, Marn turned away from him before removing her work mask. She paused, the night mask in her hand, feeling the breath-moistened air on her face. Then she covered herself and lay down, became a spoke in the wheel of bodies.

  Tired but not yet drowsy, she listened to the others murmur and wheeze. She had never shared a sleeping space with anyone before, and at first their snorting and rustling disturbed her. Then as they drifted deeper, their breathing calmed and their limbs grew still. No electronic hum, no whirr of pedbelts, no blare of loudspeakers, no human clatter. Marn felt she could almost gather it in her hands, this downy silence. She imagined the wheel of bodies as a seed encased in the dome, the dome encircled by forest, the forest by continent and oceans, and so on outward, beyond Earth and solar system and Milky Way, circle beyond circle.

  For the next week Marn would not leave the dome. She mixed a starting brew for the bio-digester, and ran tests on samples of water and soil the others brought in. But she would not remove her gloves or throw back her hood or venture outside. She took showers in distilled water. At night, she dosed herself with histaphones and immunies. Groggy from the drugs, she slept behind a screen, her ears plugged against the sound of other sleepers, dreaming of her own solitary chamber back in the city.

  She woke in the mornings with the unsettling taste of the wilds in her mouth.

  Hinta left her alone. But Jurgen tried to soothe her in his bearish, rumbling way. “It’s wildershock, same as health patrollers and sea miners get. We’ve all suffered from it.”

  “I’m okay,” Marn insisted. “I run the lab, right? Isn’t that enough?”

  Then on the seventh day, at sunset, she forced herself to go out. The countryside was luminous. For a long time she lingered near the dome, fighting her dread. Maybe she should throw off her clothes and dive into the lake, drown her fear by yielding completely. The thought made her shudder.

  She turned her back on the lake. But the forest was equally troubling, with its drool of vines, maze of branches, explosion of leaves. Only the brand-new works of the settlement reassured her. Overhead, solar panels swiveled to catch the last rays of sunlight. Wind turbines spun, the whir of their blades barely audible against the rustle of leaves. Everywhere she looked, blueprints were coming to life: hydroponic tanks, methane generator, smaller domes for work and meditation clustered around the large central dome like a ring of bubbles, the whole settlement stitched together by graveled pathways.

  Marn chose the widest path and followed it with head bent down, so as not to see the anarchic green that pressed in from all sides. When at last she looked up, she found herself at the pipeline. The slab that Jurgen had cut still lay in the weeds, its unpainted inner surface dull with rust. She scuffed at the redness with her boot. Nothing rusted inside Indiana City.

  She pressed her hooded ear against the sun-warmed pipe, listening, unsure what she wanted to hear. The purr of patrol shuttles coming after them? The ticking gears of the city? The hum of her own abandoned chamber? But she heard nothing. Nobody would come for them, so long as they stayed outside, never broke the seal around the city. You could escape into wildness, if you were clever enough, but you could not return, lest you poison the Enclosure.

  “Thinking about going back?”

  Startled by the voice, Marn jerked away from the pipe. Hinta stood on the path, her mask askew, gloves crusty with dirt.

  “I was just listening,” Marn said.

  “It’s tempting, isn’t it, to go back inside where everything is measured and predictable?”

  “Yes,” Marn admitted.

  “It’s scary out here.” Freed of the hood, Hinta’s pale hair sprang into a curly ruff. “But isn’t it beautiful? Doesn’t it make you feel like you’ve finally come awake?”

  Studying her, Marn felt that Hinta might be the first person she could touch, a woman like herself, less alien, less coarse and brutish than a man. The flounce of her hair seemed as uncanny as the dusk-lit trees.

  Later that night, when all nine sat in the dome planning the next day’s work, Marn spoke for the first time of her dread. The others nodded, admitting their own fears, even Jurgen.

  “I still have to squint every time I go out through that hatch,” he said, “so I see only a bit of the wilds at a time. We’ve got to learn everything all over again. It’s hard work. But we can do it. We belong out here.”

  A murmur of agreement ran around the circle.

  “We’ve got to get back in touch with Earth,” Jurgen said. “Back in touch with our bodies.” A surge of emotion jolted his big frame, and he yanked the mask from his face.

  Marn was too dazed at first to realize what was happening. Then Hinta removed her mask, revealing a pale, delicate face, and blue eyes as quick and bright as Marn had guessed they would be. A moment later Sol stripped his mask away, then Norba and Jolon, and so on around the circle until Marn found herself pushing aside the molded husk and gaping at the others with naked face. In her entire life, she had reached this stage of intimacy with only seven people, and only after lengthy rituals of preparation. Now suddenly here were eight more. Amid the confusion of lips and cheeks and gleaming eyes, she felt at last that she was truly outside, in exile from all she had known.

  That night, a purring sound woke her, a soft drumming on the roof of the dome, and after a moment of unease she smiled. Her first rain.

  Gradually, Marn began to trust the wind and rain, the dirt and sky, and the expressions on bare faces. Sometimes as she worked outdoors she would find herself in a drowse, saturated with sun, her mind gone out.

  One afternoon, she helped Jurgen search the nearby hills for a spring to supply earth-filtered water for the fish tanks. Eventually they traced a brook to its source at the head of a ravine, where someone long ago had walled in a pool with stones. The walls had slum
ped, and from the jumble of stones, velvety with moss, water seeped downhill in glistening threads. The pool was fringed by blue flowers, their clusters of trumpet-shaped blossoms bobbing from tall stems. Jurgen had a way of stooping over any new plant, screwing up his black eyes in an effort of memory, and then declaring its name.

  “Virginia bluebells,” he announced. “Just like the pictures, only they’re alive. Amazing.”

  Marn felt her own face mirroring his pleasure. She had not gone without a mask long enough to gain control of her features, so emotions swirled across her face as wind stirred the surface of the lake. “It seems a shame to disturb the stones,” she said. “The flowers are so pretty.”

  “Call them bluebells,” Jurgen insisted. “We need to recover the old names.”

  “Yes, bluebells.”

  A grin cracked his black beard. Turning to her, his arms spreading as if to enwrap her, he bellowed, “And look at that!”

  She flinched back, but he lumbered past her, arms swung wide, and scrambled up the slope to the base of an immense tree. The gray bark of the trunk had flaked away in fist-size chips to reveal a creamy bark underneath, as if the tree were shedding. Higher up, where the branches canopied against the sky, the smooth under-bark showed through like the skin of something newborn.

  “It’s a sycamore,” Jurgen cried, almost singing the word. He slammed his chest against the rough trunk and hugged the tree.

  “You look silly,” Marn said.

  “Silly?” he roared. “How could anybody come across a great tree like this and not wrap arms around it? A sycamore! I never thought I’d see one.” He leaned back and gazed up the trunk. “The old-timers used the wood for water troughs and wagon wheels and butcher blocks.”

  Marn turned away in disgust, thinking of knives, meat, blood. Her stomach churned. That was the way with Jurgen. One minute he made her feel easy in the wilds, the next minute he shocked her.