Dreamsnake (23 page)

He flinched.

“I was with her,” Snake said. “I did what I could, but I have no dreamsnake.
I could not help her die.”

He seemed to be staring at Snake, through her.

“We are in your debt, healer,” he said. “For service to a family member, for
bringing us news of her death.” He spoke in a distressed, distracted tone, then
suddenly looked up, glaring at her. “I don’t like my family to be in debt.
There’s a payment slot at the base of the screen. The money—”

“I want no money,” Snake said.

“I can’t let you in!” he cried.

“I accept that.”

“Then what do you want?” He shook his head quickly. “Of course. Dreamsnakes.
Why won’t you believe we have none? I can’t discharge our debt with
dreamsnakes—and I’m not willing to exchange my debt to you for a debt to the
offworlders. The offworlders—” He stopped; he seemed upset.

“If the offworlders can help me, let me speak to them.”

“Even if I could, they’d refuse you.”

“If they’re human, they’ll listen to me.”

“There’s
…
some question about their humanity,”
Jesse’s brother said. “Who can tell, without tests? You don’t understand,
healer. You’ve never met them. They’re dangerous and unpredictable.”

“Let me
try.”
Snake held out her hands, palms up, a quick,
beseeching gesture, trying to make him understand her. “Other people die as
Jesse died, in agony, because there aren’t enough healers. There aren’t enough
dreamsnakes. I want to talk to the offworlders.”

“Let me pay you now, healer,” Jesse’s brother said sadly, and Snake might as
well have been back at Mountainside. “The power in Center is precariously
balanced. The council would never permit an outsider to deal with the
offworlders. The tensions are too great, and we won’t chance altering them. I’m
sorry my sister died in pain, but what you ask would risk too many more lives.”

“How can that be true?” Snake said. “A simple meeting, a single question—”

“You can’t understand, I told you that. One has to grow up here and deal with
the forces here. I’ve spent my life learning.”

“I think you have spent your life learning how to explain away your
obligations,” Snake said angrily.

“That’s a lie!” Jesse’s brother was enraged. “I would give you anything I had
it in my power to give, but you demand impossibilities. I can’t help you find
new dreamsnakes.”

“Wait,” Snake said suddenly. “Maybe you can help us in another way.”

Jesse’s brother sighed and looked away. “I’ve no time for plots and schemes,”
he said. “And neither do you. The storm is coming, healer.”

Snake glanced over her shoulder. Melissa was still nowhere to be seen. In the
distance the clouds hugged the horizon, and flurries of windblown sand skittered
back and forth between earth and sky. It was growing colder, but it was for
other reasons that she shivered. The stakes were too high to give up now. She
felt sure that if she could just get inside the city, she could seek out the
offworlders by herself. She turned back to Jesse’s brother.

“Let me come inside, in the spring. You have techniques our technology isn’t
advanced enough to let us discover.“ Suddenly, Snake smiled. Jesse was beyond
help, but others were not. Melissa was not. ”If you could teach me how to induce
regeneration—“ She was astonished that she had not thought of the possibility
before. She had been completely and selfishly concerned with dreamsnakes, with
her own prestige and honor. But so many people would benefit if the healers knew
how to regenerate muscle and nerves
…
but first she
would learn how to regenerate skin so her daughter could live unscarred. Snake
watched Jesse’s brother and found to her joy that his expression was relieved.

“That is possible,” he said. “Yes. I’ll discuss that with the council. I’ll
speak for you.”

“Thank you,” Snake said. She could hardly believe that finally,
finally,
the city people were acceding to the request of a healer. “This will help us
more than you know. If we can improve our techniques we won’t have to worry
about getting new dreamsnakes—we’ll be better at cloning them.”

Jesse’s brother had begun to frown. Snake stopped, confused by the abrupt
change.

“You’ll have the gratitude of the healers,” Snake said quickly, not knowing
what she had said wrong, so not knowing how to repair it. “And of all the people
we serve.”

“Cloning!” Jesse’s brother said. “Why do you think we’d help you with
cloning?”

“I thought you and Jesse—” She caught herself, thinking that would upset him
even more. “I merely assumed, with your advanced—”

“You’re talking about genetic manipulation!” Jesse’s brother looked ill.
“Turning our knowledge to making monsters!”

“What?” Snake asked, astonished.

“Genetic manipulation—Gods, we have enough trouble with mutation without
inducing it deliberately! You’re lucky I couldn’t let you in, healer. I’d have
to denounce you. You’d spend your life in exile with the rest of the freaks.“

Snake stared at the screen as he changed from rational acquaintance to
accuser. If he was not a clone with Jesse, then his family was so highly inbred
that deformities were inevitable without genetic manipulation. Yet what he was
saying was that the city people refused themselves that method of helping
themselves.

“I won’t have my family indebted to a freak,” he said without looking at her,
doing something with his hands. Coins clattered into the payment slot beneath
the screen. “Take your money and go!”

“People out here die because of the information you hoard!” she shouted. “You
help the drivers enslave people with your crystal rings, but you won’t help cure
people who are crippled and scarred!”

Jesse’s brother started forward in a rage. “Healer—” He stopped, looking
beyond Snake. His expression changed to horror. “How dare you come here with a
changeling? Do they exile the mother as well as the offspring out there? And you
lecture me on humanity!”

“What are you talking about?”

“You want regeneration, and you don’t even know you can’t reform mutants!
They come out the same.” He laughed bitterly, hysterically. “Go back where you
came from, healer. There can be no words between us.”

Just as his image began to fade, Snake scooped up the coins and flung them at
him. They clattered against the screen, and one jammed in the protective panel.
Gears whined, but the panel would not completely close, and Snake felt a certain
perverse satisfaction.

Snake turned away from the screen and the city to look for Melissa, and came
face to face with her daughter. Melissa’s cheeks were wet with tears. She
grabbed Snake’s hand and blindly pulled her out of the alcove.

“Melissa, we’ve got to try to set up a shelter—” Snake tried to draw back
toward the alcove. It was nearly dark, though it was morning. The clouds were no
longer gray but black, and Snake could see two separate whirlwinds.

“I found a place.” The words came hard: Melissa was still crying. “I—I hoped
they’d let you in but I was afraid they wouldn’t, so I went looking.”

Snake followed her, nearly blinded by the windblown sand. Swift and Squirrel
came unwillingly, heads down and ears flattened. Melissa took them to a low
fissure in the abrupt cliff of the mountain’s flank. The wind rose by the
moment, howling and moaning, flinging sand against their faces.

“They’re scared,” Melissa yelled above the whining wind. “Blindfolds—” She
uncovered her face, squinting hard, and covered Squirrel’s eyes with her
headcloth. Snake did the same for the gray mare. When she uncovered her mouth
and nose the wind took her breath away. Eyes streaming, holding her breath, she
led the mare after Squirrel into the cave.

The wind died away abruptly. Snake could hardly open her eyes, and she felt
as if sand had been driven into her lungs. The horses snorted and blew while
Snake and Melissa coughed and tried to blink the overwhelming sand away, brush
it from their hair and clothes, spit it out. Finally Snake managed to rub or
brush or cough away the worst of the scratchy particles, and tears washed her
eyes clean.

Melissa unwrapped her headcloth from Squirrel’s eyes, then with a sob flung
her arms around his neck.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “He saw me and sent you away.”

“The gate was locked,” Snake said. “He couldn’t have let us in if he’d wanted
to. If it weren’t for you we’d be out there in the storm.”

“But they don’t want you to come back. Because of me.”

“Melissa, he’d already decided not to help us. Believe me. What I asked him
for scared him. They don’t understand us.”

“But I heard him. I saw him looking at me. You asked for help for—for me, and
he said go away.”

Snake wished Melissa had not understood that part of the conversation, for
she had not wanted her to hope for what might never happen. “He didn’t know
you’d been burned,” Snake said. “And he didn’t care. He was looking for excuses
to get rid of me.”

Unconvinced, Melissa blankly stroked Squirrel’s neck, slipped off his bridle,
uncinched his saddle.

“If this is anybody’s fault,” Snake said, “it’s mine. I’m the one who brought
us here—” The full impact of their situation hit her as violently as the storm
winds. The faint glow of lightcells barely illuminated the cave in which they
were trapped. Snake’s voice broke in fear and frustration. “I’m the one who
brought us here, and now we’re locked outside—”

Melissa turned from Squirrel and took Snake’s hand. “Snake—Snake, I knew what
could happen. You didn’t make me follow you. I knew how sneaky and mean all
these people here can be. Everybody who trades with them says so.” She hugged
Snake, comforting her as Snake had comforted Melissa only a few days before.

All in an instant, she froze and the horses screamed and Snake heard the
furious echoing snarl of a big cat. Swift rushed past the healer and knocked her
down. As Snake struggled back to her feet to grab the bridle she glimpsed the
black panther, lashing its tail at the entrance of the cave. It snarled again
and Swift reared, pulling Snake off her feet. Melissa tried to hold Squirrel as
pony and child backed quivering into a corner. The panther sprang toward them.
Snake caught her breath as it brushed by like the wind itself, and its sleek
coat touched her hand. The panther leaped four meters up the back wall and
disappeared through a narrow fissure.

Melissa laughed shakily with relief and release of terror. Swift blew out her
breath in a high, loud, frightened snort.

“Good gods,” Snake said.

“I heard—I heard somebody say wild animals are as scared of you as you are of
them,“ Melissa said. ”But I don’t think I believe it any more.“

Snake unfastened the lantern from Swift’s saddle and held it high, toward the
fissure, wondering if human beings could follow where a big cat led. She mounted
the skittish mare and balanced herself standing on the saddle. Melissa took
Swift’s reins and calmed her.

“What are you doing?”

Snake leaned against the cave wall, stretching to cast the lantern’s light
into the passageway.

“We can’t stay here,” she said. “We’ll die of thirst or starve. Maybe there’s
a way to the city through here.” She could not see very far into the opening;
she was too far below it. But the panther had vanished. Snake heard her own
voice echo and return as if there were many chambers beyond the narrow crack.
“Or a way to something.” She turned and slid down into the saddle, dismounted,
and untacked the gray mare.

“Snake,” Melissa said softly.

“Yes?”

“Look—cover the lantern—” Melissa pointed to the rock over the entrance of
the cave. Snake shielded the lantern, and the indistinct luminous shape
brightened and reached toward her. She felt a quick chill up her spine. She held
out the lantern and moved closer to the form.

“It’s a drawing,” she said. It had only appeared to move; it was a spidery
shape crawling against the wall, merely paint. A clever optical illusion that
now, though Snake knew better, looked as if it were creeping toward her.

“I wonder what it’s for.” Melissa’s voice, too, whispered against the rock.

“Maybe it’s to lead people out—that would mean there is something farther
inside.”

“But what about Swift and Squirrel? We can’t leave them here.”

“If we don’t find something for them to eat,” Snake said gently, “they’ll
starve too.”

Melissa looked up toward the panther’s ledge, the blue light ghostly on her
scarred face.

“Melissa,” Snake said suddenly, “do you hear something?” It was a change, but
she could not figure out what it was. The black panther, screaming in the
distance? Whoever had painted the spider symbol on the wall? Her fingers curled
around the handle of the knife on her belt.

“The wind stopped!” Melissa said. She ran toward the cave entrance.

Snake followed close behind, at every instant ready to pull Melissa back from
the storm’s violence. But her daughter was right: what she had heard was not a
sound but the abrupt end of a sound she had become accustomed to.

Nothing happened. Outside, the air was absolutely still. The low dust clouds
had swept across the desert and disappeared, leaving puffy, towering
thunderheads arrayed around with rich blue sky. Snake stepped out into the
strange luminosity of the morning, and a cold breeze fluttered the robe at her
ankles.

All at once, the rain began.

Snake ran out into the drops, lifting her arms to them like a child. Squirrel
trotted past her and broke into a gallop. Swift sped by him, and they cavorted
and bucked like foals. Melissa stood still, gazing upward, letting the rain wash
her face.

The clouds, a long, wide bank of them, passed slowly overhead, now shedding
rain, now breaking for an instant of hummingbird-bright sun. Snake and Melissa
finally retreated to the shelter of the rocks, soaked and chilly and happy. A
triple rainbow arched across the sky. Snake sighed and sank down on her heels to
watch it. She was so wrapped in awe of the colors, as they alternated back and
forth through the spectrum, that she did not notice exactly when Melissa sat
close beside her. First she was not there, then she was, and Snake slipped her
arm around her daughter’s shoulders. This time Melissa relaxed against her, not
quite so poised to tear herself away from any human contact.