Dancing in Dreamtime (29 page)

“And the Overseers would be here in half an hour with cages and chemmies,” Jolon pointed out. The ruddy scars on her cheeks, the tension in her body, the balled fist on either knee proclaimed that she had no intention of going back.

Heads nodded in agreement. Marn knew they were right. Any contact with Indiana City would end the experiment and land them in quarantine, most likely for the rest of their lives. But she wanted the choice made clear: “And if he dies?”

No one answered. Except for the strain in their faces, they might have been meditating, or drugged. Marn recalled the vows
she had taken with them back in that echoing oil tank—to live outside for a year, a cycle of seasons, before voting to stay or return. And if they returned, to do so in secret. She remembered how Jurgen had always been the first to shove aside every obstacle. Jurgen, with sawdust on his beard, proclaiming to all the astounding properties of wood. Jurgen, stinking with sweat, laughing when the others wrinkled their noses at him. Jurgen, ripping away his mask, spreading his hands on the Earth.

Marn spoke deliberately. “It's not worth his dying. Nothing's worth it.”

Sol pinched his upper lip. “We knew there'd be accidents.”

“That's why there are nine of us,” Coyt added. “Redundancy.”

Marn could not connect their words to this body panting beneath her hand. She kept hearing him cry out in pain, kept seeing those mitts claw at his inflamed eyes. Her own vision began to blur. The others' faces merged, until they all seemed like clones of the same hostile person. For the first time in days she longed for her mask, to hide herself.

Then she heard Hinta's voice, and recognized once again the silky hair, the high cheek-bones: “I don't think he'd want us to go back inside.”

Her blue eyes, which usually made Marn think of sky, now made her think of ice. “Look,” said Marn, “this isn't a broken machine. It's Jurgen, don't you see?”

“We know, Marn, we know,” Hinta soothed. “We're not forgetting him. He's why I'm here, and why I'm going to stay.”

“I say we vote,” Jolon insisted.

“Vote, vote,” cried the others.

“All right, then,” said Hinta. “Do we take him inside?”

Like the others, Marn curled one hand in her lap, thinking furiously. Thrust one finger up—or a closed fist? That was the computer's binary choice, yes or no, too stark for human questions. How could she let him die, the first person she had ever touched? And yet this was why they had come outside, to get back in touch. Return to Indiana City would be death of another kind.

“Time,” Hinta called.

As Marn lifted her arm, the fist closed of itself, squeezed tight as if to keep hold on something. Around the circle were eight balled fists, eight refusals to go back.

Marn closed her eyes. Beneath her fingers Jurgen's hectic pulse raced on and on, against all reason.

The others padded away to the hatch, where their boots and tools waited for them, a few pausing beside Marn on their way, glancing at Jurgen, whispering in sober tones. If the largest one of us could fall so quickly, to a beast we thought was extinct, what might happen to the rest of us? That is what Marn heard in their whispers, what she read in their taut faces as they withdrew again to the day's chores.

Only Hinta stayed behind. Her eyes, no longer ice, had become sky again, a softer blue. As she lowered herself beside Marn, she sighed. Their shoulders brushed. Neither drew back. “So we wait,” Hinta said.

“We wait,” said Marn.

“He might live. Just to spite the city. Show them he can survive outdoors, do without their fancy medicines.”

Marn wanted to bury her face in that springy hair. But her lips were still gummy with Jurgen's blood. Beneath her hand his pulse shredded away the minutes.

After a while Hinta stirred. “Come on, you need a break from this.” Rising with a sensuous unfolding of her legs, she went to the dome's entrance and whistled.

Moments later, Sol ambled in. “News?” he asked.

“No,” said Hinta. “He's the same. Would you sit with him, keep him warm, spoon him some cardio if he comes to?”

Marn caught the small word—
if
.

“Sure,” Sol replied. “You going out?”

Hinta drew on her gloves, tucked her hair into the collar of her worksuit. “Marn and I want to go clear that spring.”

“No,” Marn insisted. “The spring can wait.”

“He's unconscious. He doesn't know you're here.”

“But I can't just leave him.”

“Your staying won't do him any good. You'll only make yourself sick. And we need you, we need everyone.” Hinta waited by the airlock holding a shovel, one hip thrust out in a challenge Marn could not decipher.

“Go on,” Sol urged. “We'll come get you if there's any change.”

Marn knelt beside Jurgen, hesitating. Her wrist tingled from his breath. The pulse seemed to be growing stronger. A crescent of black iris showed under each eyelid. What if he should wake, now, and find her fingers on his throat, her hair brushing his face?

Confused, she lifted her hand from the warm skin, stood up, backed away, and followed Hinta outdoors.

The rock-strewn spring, which had seemed a kilometer distant this morning when she was helping Jurgen back to the dome, was only a few minutes' walk away.

“Look at the lovely blue flowers,” Hinta said.

“Bluebells,” Marn told her. “And that's a sycamore,” she added, pointing to the gigantic piebald tree.

“Such odd names. Sounds like Jurgen's teaching.”

“Yes.” Marn took the shovel from Hinta, saying, “In case mister snake is still around.” Then she scooted down the bank amid the nodding blossoms, her boots gouging the mud.

And mister snake was still around, slashing at the shovel as soon as Marn disturbed its lair. There was the same blur of movement, like an end-knotted rope snapping, and the click of teeth against metal. The two women leapt back, and the snake withdrew. Furious, Marn realized now why she had come. She pried the stones apart with the shovel, tumbled a few, and then out the creature slithered, gliding with sinuous ease. Its wedge-shaped head was the color of copper, and its length was ringed by coppery bands. It might have been a limb off the sycamore, cast down and set moving. Nothing she had ever seen rivaled it for grace. She watched, fascinated, as a forked tongue licked out between the fangs, tasting the air.

Only when the snake lowered its head and began writhing away did she remember Jurgen lying unconscious. Hatred ran like acid in her veins. Hefting the shovel she advanced on the snake, tightening every muscle to crush it. But even before she heard Hinta crying, “No, no, let it be!” she was easing the handle onto her shoulder. The hatred passed, dissolved away by an emotion she could not name, as she watched the creature until it glided out of sight into weeds.

“He belongs here,” Hinta said. “This is his place.”

Marn nodded, half mesmerized. Now that it had vanished, the snake seemed almost legendary again, too beautiful and supple and quick to be real. She tugged the gloves away to wipe her eyes.

Hinta removed her own gloves. Without a word, she took Marn's hand.

That night, when Jurgen muttered in his sleep, “Marn? Where's Marn?” she rolled over, pulled the sleeping bag up to his throat, rested a hand on his forehead. No fever. She touched his wrist, and was reassured by the slow, steady pulse.

Relieved, she crept from the dome and into the bewildering night. The darkness buzzed with clicks and cries. From the woods came a hooting sound that might have been an owl. Was that possible? Scraps of moonlight rocked on the lake. In the water there might be more snakes, or other beasts for which she had no names, but she would go in anyway. Shrugging free of her clothes, she waded in with muscles tensed, breath held, then splashed forward as she would in a pool. But this was no sanitized water; this was whatever the lake gathered from land and sky.

Marn lay on her back and floated. The air was rank with the smell of weeds and mud. The water licked the salt from her skin, washed away the dirt, but it could not scour away the taste of Jurgen's blood or the feel of Hinta's fingers.

The night was the coolest she had ever known, as the day had been the hottest. This was what it meant to live in weather, shivering and sweating by turns.

Lit from inside, the dome appeared like a faceted globe. Marn could see the dim shapes of the others preparing for sleep. Someone would be checking on Jurgen, giving him water, making him comfortable. I should be doing it, Marn thought. But she could not yet look into his stone-dark eyes without confusion.

Afloat, she let her thoughts spread out on the water and dissolve.

Sometime later a voice called her name, and she opened her eyes on darkness spangled with stars.

“Marn! Are you all right?” came the voice. It was Hinta, her lean silhouette on the bank.

“I'm fine,” Marn answered. The water sluiced along her ribs, her thighs, as she swam toward shore.

“I saw you go out,” Hinta said. “I started to worry.”

“Time seemed—” Marn began. But she could not tell what had become of time, or of her fear. She stood up in the shallows, and could see her nakedness register in Hinta's startled gaze.

“Here's a towel,” Hinta offered.

Marn's feet sank into the muck without moving. “I'm not ready to come out yet.”

“Isn't the water cold?”

“Come see.”

For a few seconds, Hinta did not move, a slender column of darkness. Then she wriggled free of her clothes and eased into the shallows beside Marn. “Brrr,” she said. “It
is
cold.”

“Swim out with me,” Marn answered, “and you'll soon warm up.” Touching the other woman to keep contact in the dark, Marn led her away from shore.

On the morning of his thirteenth birthday, Hoagy Ferris woke to find an eros couch installed in his bedroom. He had been hoping for a more advanced model. The screen was small, the stimulus rating low. But the Freud, as his mother called it—or the Orgasm Express, as his friends called it—was potent enough for a beginner.

The eros couches Hoagy had used in friends' apartments and public arcades came loaded with sexual fantasies for every taste, but this one required the user to create fantasies of his own. Undaunted, he buckled on the helmet and soon learned to mesh his brainwaves with the simulator, using biofeedback techniques he had learned in an effort to manage his epilepsy.

At first the video stars and nubile schoolmates he summoned onto the screen were fully clothed, their images blurry. With practice, he sharpened the focus. Undressing his heroines took longer, since his knowledge of female anatomy, after four years of sex education, was still entirely theoretical. Too shy to get down to business, he carried on long conversations with his primly dressed sirens. “Do you have many friends?” he might ask.

“Not many,” the current beauty would confess. “I get awfully lonely.”

“Does your mother understand you?”

“She's forgotten what it's like to be young.”

“And your dad?”

“I never had one.”

“Me neither.”

Emboldened by these chats in which he dictated both voices, eventually Hoagy allowed a strap to glide from his heroine's shoulder, a streak of thigh to show through a slit in her gown. Once the disrobing began, it hastened forward until she lolled on the screen as naked as the sun in a cloudless sky.

Tanya Ferris had been assured by the psychiatrist that the Freud would not ply her son with fantasies but rather would train him to orchestrate his own desires. By learning to direct the flow of neural impulses, he might be able to control his epilepsy without the use of drugs. Indeed, within a few months after installation of the eros couch, Hoagy's seizures had all but ceased, and the few he suffered were mild, allowing the doctor to wean him off medications. Still, Tanya wondered if she had done the right thing by enrolling him in the timeshell experiment, with all its risks. Yet how else could she have secured treatment for him? She could never afford even the cheapest Freud, let alone the psychiatrist's fees. As it was, she and Hoagy were barely getting by on the pension she received as a retired surrogate mother. Even to buy him a new pair of shoes required weeks of scrimping.