Patrick shrugs. “It happens!”
A playing card spins between us, a seven of hearts. Inside the ring of dancers, the air is awhirl with chess pieces, feathers, peanut shells, wads of paper, and quivery blobs of water. The din of drums and voices and feet is deafening. “No, it doesn’t happen!” I shout.
“Side effects! Not to worry!” The skullcap floats above his sun-blanched hair, which stands out from his scalp like the spines of a sea urchin.
When I feel my thighs lifting from the seat, I buckle my harness. Calm down, I tell myself. Do your job. Figure it out later. I punch the coordinates, reassured by the precise clicks of the keys.
As we swing onto the dream path, the Inuit woman leaves the dance and waddles up to me. She is bowlegged and squat, wearing a sealskin tunic decorated with appliqués in the shapes of birds. “Now I sing,” she says. The others hush. She launches into a tremulous wail, peering into a drum that hangs upside down at her waist. Presently she cries, “They come!”
Patrick stoops over her, whispering calmly, “Catch them, Marie. Hold them.”
The drum emits a resonant thud. The old woman cannot have struck it, for her palms are lifted above her head. “Stay there!” she cries. She resumes wailing, shivers, breaks off, and again the drum booms. Seven times this happens. I give up trying to understand and simply watch. After the seventh boom, she reaches into the drum and draws out two egg-sized rocks, smooth and gray, like beach cobbles, and begins rubbing them together. They make the gritty sound of bare feet scuffing over a sandy floor. Pebbles ooze from her fingers, then coil in the air like a swarm of bees, forming the same teardrop shape now glowing on my screen: Sri Lanka.
I shut my eyes and hiss into the intercom: “Are you guys watching this?”
“Quite a trick,” the captain says. “How does the old gal do it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Connie, are you all right?” Lillian asks.
I take a deep breath. “I just needed to hear a sane voice.”
“Two more days,” says the captain.
When I open my eyes, the pebbles have swarmed into the shape of Madagascar. Chanting, the Inuit woman squeezes the cobbles against her temples. Patrick looms behind her, arms spread. Soon the pebbles reform as the islands of Tierra del Fuego. My hands rise from the keyboard, buoyant, and I force them back down. She yells again, cracks the stones together, and the pebbles go rushing into her fingers like bees into a hive. The drum pounds seven times, so loud my teeth clack. The old woman goes limp, and Patrick catches her. The sudden hush is broken only by the ticking of coins and pencils and chessmen settling to the deck.
Objects do not float in one-G. Pebbles do not pour out of fingers or swirl into the shapes of landmasses. I know this, yet I also know what I saw.
The crew studies the recording, but even in super slow-motion we can’t unmask the trick. “Amazing,” says the captain. “That dumpy old gal could play Las Vegas.”
Sonya Mirek refuses to look at the replay. Bent over a training manual, she says curtly, “It’s all rubbish,” one of the rare times I have heard her speak.
“If you’d been sitting there beside her, you wouldn’t be so sure,” I reply.
“Hocus-pocus. Mumbo jumbo. Only a child or a savage could be taken in.”
Her smugness infuriates me. “Which am I, child or savage?”
“You decide.”
The captain breaks in sharply. “That’s enough, you two.”
I glare at Sonya’s rigid spine, her mousy hair chopped off straight. She never lifts her gaze from the manual.
One sandal off, one sandal on, Patrick slumps into the seat next to me. Hoisting his bare foot onto the console, he attaches the half-woven belt to his toe and resumes work. “You look like you could do with a cheer-up,” he declares.
“I do, do I?”
“Bit gray around the gills.”
“Nice of you to say so.”
His booming laugh reminds me of the drum that resounded without being struck. “Must be the lights,” he says, squinting at the ceiling. “They’d make a parrot look dull.”
I brush the taut strings of his weaving. “Pretty belt.”
“It’s called a rainbow snake. Learned the pattern from Tina Cactus Owl, my Hopi sweetheart back there.” He swings his chin toward the shamans, who doze in their seats or mosey up and down the aisle, muttering.
Objects lie down now, obedient to our simulated gravity, but I remember the air flurried with castles and jokers. “What did you mean about side effects?” I ask.
“Odd things happen when the old fellas get their power cranked up. Like the way stuff floats about. I’ve had these blokes singing in my kitchen when the fridge lifted off the floor and shimmied.”
He weaves delicately, holding the bright threads between his thick fingers. My own fingers, half as thick, feel clumsy on the keyboard. “But that Inuit woman—”
“Marie? Isn’t she a wonder?”
“What was she doing with the drum?”
“Catching her helpers. She sings their names, coaxes them with sweet talk. Seal and raven. Whale, polar bear, snowy owl, arctic fox. Did you hear the bloody great thumps as they fell into the drum? She catches them, and gets them to help with the healing.”
“But those pebbles?”
“That’s how she does the healing.” He pauses to unsnarl the strings. “The pebbles show how things should be, as they were in the Dreamtime.”
“Where does she hide them? How does she control them?”
“You’ve got me, mate.”
“Doesn’t that drive you nuts, seeing without understanding?”
He ties off a thread and severs it with his teeth. “Used to. Not anymore. The longer I’m around these old bastards, the more I accept that reality’s bigger and stranger than my brain.”
The shamans dictate three paths on day six. I do my job, reciting the coordinates in my head, clinging to the certainty of numbers. With each path, the dancing becomes more delirious. The cabin fills with scudding shoes, candy wrappers, spoons. The dancers straddle their drums and ride them like horses, leaping, whirling. Their energy is phenomenal. When the Pygmy croons his dreamsong, the banging of his tiny foot on the deck sends a tremor through the ship. Luke and Patrick hold onto him, yet he shakes them like rag dolls. When the sorceress from Borneo sings, butterflies burst from her mouth and flutter about the cabin. Their wings brush my cheek. I navigate. I recite numbers. When the Lapp sings, antlers sprout from his head and grow until they rake the ceiling, and owls glide in to perch on the tips. Snow begins to fall.
Through my earphone come excited voices from the cockpit. Loudest of all is Sonya Mirek, who screeches over and over, “Savages! Savages!”
The herder of reindeer completes his song. The antlers shrink back into his skull. He stumbles away, dazed, supported by Patrick. The snow flurry ceases, and the melting flakes leave drops on my lashes. I fumble at the console. The switches and gauges make no sense.
Hands settle on my shoulders, and under their calm grip I feel myself trembling. “Easy now, Missy. Easy.”
I twist round to see Luke Easterday’s dusky, wrinkled face, his scraggly white beard, the ruff of wild hair escaping from his bowler hat. He is ancient, ages older than I will ever be. I let my head fall against the yellow zigzags of lightning on his chest, and I whisper, “I’m scared.”
“I know,” he murmurs. “You are wise to be frightened. The Dreaming is powerful. It keeps the whole universe going. We catch a pinch of that power in our machines and think we are gods! Hah! We are like spray flung up from the ocean.”
Shuddering, as after a long cry, I say, “I don’t understand.”
“The Dreaming does not explain itself to us, Missy.” His fingers stroke my forehead. “Now rest. You need to be strong for the last day.”
The seventh day begins with a smothering silence. Not a snore, not a whisper, no clink of talismans or tinkle of bells. After I open my eyes, a dream lingers: I
nside a teepee, an old woman in doeskin dress hunches over a fire and stirs a pot with a knife. Her silver braids hang down like vines. A baby is strapped to her back with a shawl, its naked feet exposed. I realize they are my feet. The baby flings out an arm, and my arm twitches. The old woman raises the knife from the pot and slicks the blade across her tongue, tasting. I peer into the pot and see fingers, kidneys, ears. The baby wails, and I hear my own voice bawling, “Grandmother!”
Yanked out of the dream, I catch the reverberations of my cry in the still cabin. I cover my mouth. Too late. The shamans begin to stir. Patrick flinches upright on his foldout bed. His blanket slips away, revealing a brawny chest matted with blond hair. “What is it?” he mumbles.
“Nothing,” I say hastily. “Only a dream.”
“Uh oh.” He plants his big feet on the deck, rubs his eyes. “Better tell it to me.”
I shake my head. “No. It’s ugly. It’s stupid.”
“Come on, then. Out with it.”
The shamans approach me, led by the gangly figure of Luke Easterday. “You must not hide your dreams, Missy,” he says. “They are given for all of us.”
They fix their glittering eyes on me. I swallow, bow my head, and quietly describe the teepee, the old woman, the pot. The shamans huddle close as Patrick translates my words in sign. When I finish, there is a sizzle of whispers, followed by dead silence. Luke eyes me soberly for several seconds before saying, “A black shaman has come for you, Missy.”
“She was brown,” I insist, realizing how irrelevant my words are as I utter them. I also realize whom I met in sleep. “It was Hawk Soars.”
“Yes,” Luke says. “Your Lakota ancestor. It is not her skin that is black, but her power.”
“She’s evil?”
“Not evil. She is hurt. She wants revenge.”
“What for?”
“The slaughter of her people, the stealing of their land.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because we feel the same about our own people, our own land. But instead of revenge, we seek healing.”
Suddenly furious, fed up with these feathered, beaded, posturing fools, I cry out, “It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m a navigator. I want no part in your myths.”
The shamans crowd around Patrick, jabbering at him, waving their arms. After they quiet down, he gives me a rueful look. “Trouble is, Connie, you may be dangerous.”
“Because of a dream, for God’s sake?”
“Because that knife-happy ancestor of yours is boiling mad.”
“She means us harm,” Luke says. “She may force you to lead us on the wrong path.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I turn for reassurance to my console. The switches are gleaming teeth. The monitors are roiling pots, filled with hands, livers, and hearts in green broth. I bite my lip to keep from screaming.
The shamans erect a slender, white-barked tree on top of my console, with its base clamped in a metal stand and its tip grazing the ceiling. Seven branches, tufted with dry leaves, curve out from the trunk.
“A birch,” Patrick says. “A holy tree in cold country.”
“What’s it for?” I ask.
Overhearing me, Luke points to his navel. “The doorway,” he explains.
“Doorway to where?”
“The depths and heights,” says the old man. “The roots go down to the underworld. The branches reach the sky.”
Our final path is a pole-to-pole orbit that will sweep out a sinuous curve over the spinning Earth. I punch the coordinates carefully, yet in my cross-checks I find a mistake that would have led us astray by several degrees, enough to spoil the shamans’ plans. I look up, and find Luke’s flinty black eyes and Patrick’s icy blue ones intently watching me.
“Problem?” says Patrick.
“No, I’ve almost got it.” Shaken, I repeat my calculations.
“Missy,” Luke says, “if the grandmother comes back, tell me, and I will deal with her.”
“I’ll do that,” I reply brusquely.
“If she invites you to go with her, you must refuse. You must.”
“Whatever you say.” I touch the keys with exaggerated care, as if I were disarming a bomb. Satisfied at last, I notify the captain. “Ready when you are, sir.”
“Good,” he replies. “Let’s get this monkey business over with, and go back downstairs.”
My right ear fills with the sober voices of the crew. No wisecracks from the engineers, no sarcasm from Captain Blake. Lillian plods through a systems check. Sonya Mirek is mum. My left ear fills with the racket of the shamans, who form their motley ring and start prancing. They are even more gaudily painted, and they bristle with more feathers, more clattering ornaments. As they circle, the air thickens with floating debris. My skin tingles.
Once again wearing the grass-green caftan with its rusty eye, Patrick settles in the chair next to me. The newly woven belt inscribes a rainbow at his waist. The playfulness has gone out of him. Now he is watchful, like a lion-tamer inside the cage with his beasts. Close though we are, we must yell to be heard above the drums and bells and moans. “Hold tight!” he shouts.
I am already clutching the edge of the console, my knuckles white.
As the shamans leap and sing, the atmosphere in the cabin becomes charged, as before a storm. The seven old women spiral in toward the center, brushing me as they pass, then they all sit down, forming a smaller ring inside the wheel of dancing men. The women begin slapping their thighs, which makes the men leap higher, cry louder.
The Bushman staggers out of the ring, throws back his head in a high-pitched wail, and flames gush from his mouth.
Fearing he’ll die, I cover my eyes with my hands.
“He’s all right,” Patrick assures me, peeling my hands away and holding them firmly in one big paw, where I let them stay.
The slapping of thighs accelerates. The men cry sharply, and in their frenzied circling they begin to glow, their chests and faces burning like embers. A headdress smolders. Where are the alarms? Why don’t the extinguishers spew foam? The cabin reeks of singed fur.
The blood slams in my head. My muscles twitch. Craving some bit of order, I count the graybeards as they wheel past. Only nine, yet they seem like a mob. I count the seated crones, whose arms thresh the air. Eight? There should be seven. I count again. Eight. Suddenly, the crone nearest to me rises. Her face is cloaked in a bird mask with a hooked copper beak. Silver braids sway against her doeskin dress. Over her shoulder, a raven-haired papoose squints at me.
“Come home with me, daughter,” the old woman whispers. Her voice is soothing, like water over stones, washing away all other sounds.
The bird mask and peeping child crowd out all other sights. “Where, Grandmother?”
“You know the place.” She rakes a finger across my brow.
An image rises in me of stony crags, blowing dust, the moon caught in the limbs of a leafless tree. I do know the place—the Black Hills, where Hawk Soars hid while soldiers killed the rest of her family. The old woman nods. “Fly us there,” she says.
Power surges through me. I tug my hands free from the grip of a hulking man with a giant eye on his chest, and fling him aside. My fingers find the keys. I start to punch in coordinates for the Black Hills, when my wrists are seized by a scarecrow with lightning on his chest. I try to lift my arms to shove him away, but his strength is greater than mine. He squeezes my wrists and bends down as though to kiss me. Instead, he puffs air into my left ear, then my right, and noise comes crashing in on me again, my vision widens to take in the cabin, the chanting women, the whirling men, and I see Patrick with an astonished expression picking himself up from the floor. My mouth fills with the tinny taste of fear.
“She came, and you did not warn me,” Luke tells me sternly.
“I didn’t realize who it was.”
“She tried to make us crash.”
“But why? Why would she hurt us?”
“She does not want us to
sing Earth back to health. She wants to hasten the end, wipe out the two-leggeds, clear the land of those who mined and paved and poisoned it.”
“She’d condemn everybody, even the innocent?”
“The innocent would be reborn on a new Earth. Her tribe and all the tribes that never caused harm to Earth would be reborn, along with all the animals and plants.” He says this with the fervor of a man who has been tempted by the same vision.
Patrick slouches up, rubbing his ribs. “What did you hit me with?”
“It wasn’t Constance,” Luke says. “It was her ancestor. The black shaman.”
I shiver, counting the crones. Seven. None wears a bird mask or carries a papoose.
“She will try again,” Luke warns.
The dancing men and drumming women put out a fierce heat, yet I keep shivering.
“Why doesn’t Connie move to the cockpit?” Patrick suggests.
Luke shakes his head. “She is our link with Earth, which she holds inside her.”
“How?” I ask, startled.
Luke points at my screens. “It pours in through your eyes.”
I look, and see India spreading away toward the rumpled quilt of the Himalayas. The sight is more familiar than my own bed. Do I carry the Earth inside me?
“While I am gone,” Luke tells Patrick, “Constance must not use her machine.”
“How can I stop her?”
The old man plucks the rainbow belt at Patrick’s waist. “Catch her with this.”
The arms of the women blur as they pound their thighs. The men whirl so fast their feet scarcely touch the floor. There is a banging on the hull and the squeal of tortured metal. In the earphone I hear Sonya Mirek shrieking and the engineers shouting and the captain bellowing for silence. The ship is breaking up, I feel certain, yet I am oddly calm.
From the inner circle, the Inuit woman, Marie, struggles upright and stumps over to me on her bowed legs. Placing a hand on my neck, she pushes me gently forward until my cheek rests on my crossed forearms atop the console. “Be still, young one,” she tells me. “You must hold us up and welcome us back.” The fat old woman clambers onto my shoulders, light as a child. With my upturned eye, I watch her grab the birch trunk and climb nimbly up. When she reaches the tip of the tree, a hole opens in the cabin roof and she vanishes through it.
Dancing in Dreamtime Page 29