Dancing in Dreamtime (43 page)

A tall, thin, dignified old man in a red loin cloth and bowler hat startles me by asking in impeccable English, “Can you speak with spirits through your device, Missy?”

To cover my surprise, Patrick says, “Allow me to introduce Luke Easterday, from Shark Bay, Western Australia.” The old man bows, his white beard mashing against his chest, which is streaked with yellow paint in the zigzag design of lightning bolts. “Luke holds a degree in classics from Cambridge,” Patrick adds. “He's translating Ovid into his Aboriginal tongue.”

Regaining my own tongue, I say, “No, I don't speak with spirits.”

“What a pity,” the old man observes.

Patrick says, “Luke owns this first path, so he'll do the singing.”

We get the okay from ground control and fly the arc from Ross to Mongolia. The others dance, but Luke Easterday squats beside me, watching the Earth pass on my screens. Every now and again
he grunts, as though recognizing some landmark. The grunt is followed by a few minutes of singing, without any melody I can decipher. Then more watching, a grunt, a round of singing. I have no idea what it means, and the old crooner's grave manner keeps me from asking.

While we're crossing over the Gobi Desert, the Hopi woman slumps to the floor, twitches violently, and looses a high-pitched cry. The shamans bend over her, but do not intervene.

She's had a stroke, I'm sure, but as I reach for the alarm, Patrick seizes my wrist. “Not to worry,” he says. “It's a visionary trance. They all have 'em. Like epileptics, except they're in control.”

With an effort, I shut the stricken woman from my sight. Luke Easterday keeps watching the screen and singing. Presently, one of the wizards speaks to Patrick, who relays the message to me: “We've got path number two.”

We fly that second route, then a third, a fourth, each one dictated by an entranced shaman, each with its own singer. I understand nothing. The shamans caper and cry, seeming to gain energy by the hour. Long before the shutters come down for sleep, I am wrung out.

“They're singing about how Earth was made,” Patrick tells me on our third day in orbit.

I tilt him a wry look. “They know how Earth was made, do they?”

“You'd be surprised what the old codgers know.” He looms over me in his green caftan with its cunning eye. “They don't tell the same stories that astrophysicists do, I'll grant you. What they
tell about is the Dreamtime, when Creator made the stars, the sun and moon, the Earth and all its creatures.”

“And us?”

“Us, too. We came last, when Creator had bestowed all but one gift.”

Despite my skepticism, I'm intrigued. “What was that gift?”

“Singing. Telling stories. Our job was to keep the world alive by traveling across it and recalling how everything was made—the rain, the rocks, the oaks and orcas, bears and ferns.”

This mythology appears in the briefing paper, but Patrick's account makes it sound less like raving nonsense. “So when the shamans sing, they're renewing places down below?”

He pats my back, a light touch for a heavy hand. “Exactly. Mountains forget how to be mountains. Rivers tumble out of their beds. Animals lose their desire to bear young. Plants become muddled. The songs remind things of how they were in the beginning, the Dreamtime, when everything was fresh. Like tuning up an orchestra. Putting the Earth back in harmony.”

“You say all this with a straight face.”

“It's a lovely vision.”

“But is there any truth in it?”

He grins. The teeth look stunningly white in his scorched face. “There you go again with your rude questions. Let's just say my mind's open. I don't know if they can mend the blooming Earth. But I've seen the old bastards do amazing things.”

“Such as?”

“Just wait, and you'll see for yourself before this journey's over.” His ruddy face darkens, as if shadowed by a passing cloud. “Actually,” he says, “the hardest thing to believe is that our sweet planet's gone all crook.”

“Crook?”

“Sick. Out of whack. Because of us, who were supposed to care for it.”

I cannot argue with that. On my screens, Earth looks perfectly hale, a blue-and-sandy ball iced with clouds. But I am not deceived by this semblance of health, for I have flown hundreds of research missions with scientists who document the planet's ailments.

The engineers cannot resist teasing me about my drop of Lakota blood. They pretend to see a few black strands in my pale hair, a tinge of cinnamon in my vanilla skin, a hint of Asia in my cheekbones. Their hands tarry on my shoulders. So I avoid them, and spend my breaks up front with the pilots. The others work in four-hour shifts, but I am on call to the shamans around the clock, like the purring stewards. Lillian offers to spell me. “Spell her?” the captain mocks. “Why, Connie's like a firefighter. Only works in emergencies. Most of the time she loafs.”

The shamans themselves loaf all the fourth day. They play cards, finger their beads. They squat in the aisle and chew nuts, scattering hulls that crunch beneath the stewards' wheels. They mend their costumes, which have grown tattered from three days of dancing. Amid their gibberish, I catch a word or two of English. Crooked lines. Love medicine. Eternal return. Their bursts of madcap laughter make my head spin.

Patrick spends the day weaving a belt from brightly colored threads. In the morning he pins the knotted end to the arm of his seat. By afternoon the weaving has grown so long that he removes one of his sandals and loops the end of the belt around his big toe.
It makes a grotesque image—the robust man and frail threads. He has exchanged his caftan for a tie-dyed dashiki. His wayward hair is stuffed into a white skullcap. He gives no sign of realizing how preposterous he looks. The whole lazy day, he ignores me and I ignore him.

During a break the next morning, I am in the cockpit, basking in the orderly atmosphere, when his Aussie drawl pours from the speaker: “We've got a new path for you, mate!”

Lillian rolls her eyes at me. The captain grumbles about chasing wild geese. Sonya Mirek sits rigidly at her post, scowling at her instruments, ignoring me, as if she fears I carry the germs of disorder.

“Back into the lions' den,” I say.

No lions, but an elk, wolf, bear, and eagle flash by. I leap between the whirling dancers to reach my console, where Patrick waits, cradling the globe. I strain to hear him above the rattle of amulets and thunder of drums and roar of leathery throats. “This is a powerful path!” he shouts.

“Show me the route!” I holler back.

His thick finger arcs over the globe from Sri Lanka to Madagascar and the tip of Africa, crosses the South Atlantic, and stops at Tierra del Fuego. I reach for my light pen, find it floating above the desk, grab it, and start tracing coordinates. A moment later the strangeness hits me. We're not in zero-G. I lift the pen, let go, and it hangs there. I glance up in confusion.

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.