Dancing in Dreamtime (44 page)

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: Inside 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.