Dancing in Dreamtime (41 page)

“What for? It was a close call, but no harm done.” Carl thumped himself on the chest. “Nothing broken. And think how it'll play on the feelie. The fans will eat it up.”

Twitching uncontrollably, Graham said, “I want to go back.”

Carl gave him a searching look. “What's to get worked up about? Nobody's hurt, right? Next time one of those hombres comes along, we'll bag it before it gets close.”

“No. No more killing. I don't want any more killing.”

“Ease up, bro.” Carl rested an arm on Graham's heaving shoulders and spoke soothingly. “What say we hike on a ways, leave this pile of meat behind, and set up camp? Unwind a little? Things will look better in the morning.”

Graham could not stop trembling. But he was glad to clear away from there. As they left the mutilated hulk, which the scavengers had already begun to rip apart, he was aware of the knife hand dangling at his side.

The fray must have alarmed the stalking beasts, for that night the woods outside the ring of light were still. Yet Graham slept poorly, troubled by suffocating dreams.

In the morning things did not look better, and he said so.

Carl growled, “You going back and wait for the shuttle, stare at your belly button? The studio would love that. Look, how much farther is it to this blessed mountain?”

Graham did not care. The mountain had lost its allure. “A long day. Maybe a day and a half.”

“So if we go double time we could make it by nightfall?”

“I tell you I'm not going. I've had it.”

Jumpy with anger, Carl said, “I'm the one who got smothered under that hunk of meat, and you don't hear me bitching. You quitting on me? You hanging it up?” He seized Graham by the arms. “Because, listen, bro, if you turn back now we're done. Finito. The studio wouldn't send us across town. You hear me? And we'll be stuck earthside in boxes forever.”

Graham shook all over. “It's not worth it.”

“Not worth what?”

“The cost in lives.” Carl let out a scoffing breath, but Graham pushed on: “I'm not thinking only about last night. I'm thinking about everything we've killed—here, other planets. A road of corpses.”

After digging his fingers into Graham's arms, Carl released him. “So where can you go and not hurt a fly? Tell me that. Where can you go without killing? Where? Not Earth. The job's already finished there. An asteroid, maybe. Or some desert planet. But if you go anywhere that's got life on it, you're going to have to kill some of it to make room for yourself.”

Hoisting the rucksack, Graham faced back in the direction from which they had come. “I'm sorry, Carl. I can't. I'm burnt out. I don't have the stomach for it anymore.”

Carl swung his own pack into position, and set his face in the direction they had been traveling. “Go, then. And to hell with you. I'm going to that damn mountain.”

Neither moved to take a step. They stood side by side, eyes averted. Finally Graham said, “You don't know the way back.”

“I can still read a compass. I'll get there.”

“But I've got the trail in my head.”

Carl spat in the dirt, then scraped his boot across the stain. “You worry about saving your ass from those beasts you feel so sorry for. I'll worry about the trail.”

They touched hands roughly. Carl glared at him with eyes bruised by a sense of betrayal. Graham took the first step, and soon heard the receding clump of his brother's boots.

After less than an hour of hiking, while beasts prowled around him in a tightening circle, Graham staggered to a halt, overcome by the weight of ignorance and fear. He shoved his back against a tree. At least nothing could lunge at him from behind. What did they want? Just food? With so many, they would get a mouthful apiece. Or did they merely want to touch him, speak with him through their pincered and padded limbs? If he let them swarm over him, as the scavengers had, perhaps they would be satisfied and go away, leaving a message imprinted on his body.

“Scat!” he shouted. His heart was clenching and unclenching like a fist.

They crept nearer, bristling, giving off a sour hot smell, their spikes clattering, their bellies scraping the dirt. Even now he was doing his job, soaking it in.

Stupid brutes. He suddenly hated them with a pure white hatred. They had made him abandon his brother. Carl would never find his way back—he didn't carry the path in his head—he trusted Graham for that.

“Leave me alone!”

The stalkers clotted into a solid dark mass in the branches overhead. Graham picked up a heavy stick and flung it at them. It clattered on the underside of the canopy, and the knot of animals broke apart, then regathered like murky water.

He roared. The watchers did not move. Above, below, every direction he looked, stealthy shapes closed on him. He drew the pistol, but was shaking too hard to aim it. What did it matter where he aimed? He wanted to spray the forest with death, murder everything, drive it back, clear a path. His finger jerked and he fired wildly, wherever the gun happened to point, squeezing off burst after burst. Bodies tumbled from the canopy, slumped in the shadows, floundered among the roots, a hail of bodies, and still he kept firing, blasting away until nothing moved, no least quiver of flesh. Then he stopped, lowered his arm, horrified.

Within seconds, the scavengers began hustling out from the tangled roots to clean up his leavings. He nearly fired on them as well, but held back. Blind with shame and loathing, sobbing, he wanted to drop the gun and rucksack, strip away his clothes, wander into the woods and give himself to the beasts.

But no, he had to find his brother, had to lead him back out. Carl would be lost without him. That was a reason to keep going. Carl would be lost. Carl needed him.

Facing about, Graham set off at a jog. Immediately he felt better, as if a wound had begun to heal. He soon arrived at the place where they had separated, then he rushed on, stooping now and again to search for the faint traces of Carl's boot prints, his breath coming in rags, oblivious to the shadow-shapes that were stalking him. Several times Carl had stopped to climb a tree—no doubt to make sure he was headed toward the mountain—so Graham, who did not need to climb, kept gaining on him. By late
afternoon the trail was so fresh that the trampled grass was still unbending, and boot prints in the sand of a creek were filling with water.

Dusk was gathering like smoke among the trees when Graham finally glimpsed his brother, standing motionless in a clearing up ahead, his brawny silhouette dark against a radiant white slope. The gun was cradled in his arms. He seemed to be contemplating the mountain, from which the lamp on his helmet struck brilliant reflections.

Knowing it would be suicide to steal up on him without warning, Graham ducked behind a boulder, slipped free of his pack, and gave a shout.

Carl whirled, hit the dirt and lay on his belly, gun and lamp aimed in Graham's direction.

“Carl! Hey, I've come back!” Because of the light, Graham could not see his brother's face, but he stood up anyway, arms lifted. “Carl?” he repeated, stepping into the clear.

“Bro!” Carl shouted in a jubilant voice. Flinging down the gun, he surged to his feet and came running. He seized Graham in a hug and lifted him off the ground, yelling, “Nature boy! My broody bro! And still wearing your skin!”

Laughing, hooting until the woods rang, they held one another, rocking in a clumsy dance. After a while they pushed away to arm's length. Carl grew sober. “Come here,” he said quietly, “you've got to see this.”

It was now quite dark. The brothers followed the jiggling beams of their helmet-lamps toward the clearing. While they were a distance from the slope, Graham still could not guess what made it shine. Not snow, not minerals, not metal. Then, drawing close, he realized what it must be.

“Bones,” Carl murmured, “a whole mountain of bones.”

Graham stared in awe at the glistening pile. The forms were strange—curlicues, sprockets, hoops—but the color was a familiar calcium sheen, polished by wind and rain.

“Where'd they come from?” he whispered.

“Our hungry buddies drag them here.” Carl aimed his lamp up the scree of bones at a scurrying shape.

Transfixed by the light, one of the slinking humpbacked scavengers paused in its ascent. Loose bones gleamed from the pouches on its flanks. One of my kills? Graham wondered. He remembered the bodies swarming over him, the bone twisting in his hand. How long had they been building this mound? And why? Was it a temple? A cache? A shrine? A dumb clutter like a magpie's hoard? He thought of elephant graveyards, lemming suicides, antler heaps, whale skeletons near Inuit villages, mass graves from Roman and Nazi and Frontine holocausts—but nothing earthly would explain this glimmering peak.

Presently the scavenger resumed its climb, rousing a faint clatter. The brothers watched it labor up beyond the range of their lamps, up into darkness.

Graham released a hiss of breath. “And there's a whole string of these mountains. Think of all the deaths it took.”

“Damn near every last one on the planet, I'd guess.”

They fell silent, their lamps playing over the white slope.

Then suddenly both brothers talked at once, Carl saying, “If you hadn't come back I was a dead man. Lost. Had no idea which way was home. Bro, I was scared,” and Graham confessing, “I freaked out. Went crazy. Just started killing. I wanted to blow everything away, erase it, clear the jungle.”

Again there was a silence. What they had to tell one another would take a good deal of saying, and much of it could never be said in words.

At length, Carl asked, “You want to hang around and see it in daylight?”

Graham frowned at the vast pile. “I'd like to sit down and think and not budge until I could make sense of it. But I'm afraid I'd go mad.”

“We wouldn't live long enough to go mad. They'd be dragging our bones up there before morning. The studio told us to come here, and we came here. Now I say we head back. What do you say?”

Graham nodded silently, never taking his eyes off the gleaming slope. He knelt and fingered a bone. It was cool, slick, resistant to his touch. Above him the scavenger turned, crouching as though to spring. Graham dropped the bone and stood back. “Let's go.”

“Right.” The straps of Carl's pack creaked as he put it on. “Can you see well enough with lamps to find the way? Maybe go a couple of hours, to give us a little breathing space?”

Graham took a last dazed look at the ivory mountain. He had been coming to this place for a long time. Dozens of scavengers were hauling new trophies up the slope, the talus of bones shifting beneath them. Enveloped in this rustle of bodies, each with its shiny offering, the mountain possessed a terrible beauty. Was it beauty born of instinct, like a termite hill or bird nest? Or was it born of intellect, like pyramids and cathedrals? And if the work of mind, what did it mean? He did not know. A lifetime here would not answer the question.

“Yes,” Graham said, “I can find the way.”

He guided them unerringly. Perhaps because they moved so swiftly, or because news of their slaughter had spread through the forest, the brothers were rarely stalked on the return journey, and they left no more casualties in their wake. The trek into the wild zone had taken them six days; they reached the base camp in four. They had done their job. The studio should be satisfied, able to make from Graham's impressions another safe and stirring feelie about an unknown world.

The shuttle came for the brothers within hours, lifting them away from the field of red grass, the circle of ash-dark trees, the necklace of white peaks. Even aboard the ship, even after the recorder had been unplugged from his skull, Graham could not rid his mind of the mountain of bone. The peak rose in his memory, up and up, a glistening monument without inscription, as blank and unreadable as ice.

The shamans are dancing, their beads clicking and feathers swaying to a music I cannot hear. I can scarcely hear myself think, they are making such a hullabaloo. Circling my console, they laugh, gibber, stamp their feet, and shout in a babble of languages. A few have been drinking their private brew since we parked in orbit, but most appear to be high on the dance itself. How am I supposed to navigate in the midst of this pandemonium?

Fortunately, there is little navigating to be done until the shamans begin searching out the dream paths—whatever those might be. So I am free to sit here and observe as they whirl about me in their furs and masks and clattering ornaments. They are old, their faces weathered like driftwood. If they notice me at all, they must think me dull, an unpainted young woman in a gray jumpsuit, blond hair cut short, seated before a monitor, fingers curled over a keyboard.

For simplicity, I think of them all as shamans, yet among their tribes they go by many titles: faith keepers, witch doctors, sorcerers, magicians, wizards, healers, soothsayers, prophets. There are sixteen of them, nine graybeards and seven crones. In their great age, some plump and others withered, they seem to have passed beyond gender, into a sexless twilight. Their costumes and skin tones are as varied as their titles. The Pygmy is the darkest, a dusty
charcoal, closely rivaled by the lanky Bushman and Aborigine. The reindeer herder from Lapland is the palest, the color of moonlit snow. Between those extremes of dark and light, the Siberian and Mongolian nomads are the Earthy ginger of the steppe, the Hopi is the roasted brown of her own pottery, the Inuit is the amber of old scrimshaw—and so on through the spectrum of flesh.