John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

After an hour or so, he switched off the language CD. Time for some music. He used to sing aloud in Florence all the time because music was one of the things he missed the most. It was amazing how many tunes he knew just as fragments. And locked up in solitary, that could drive you crazy if you let it, the way the rest of a tune stayed out of reach, closed off in some neuronal backwater. In the beginning, it maddened him that there was no way to fill in the blanks. It wasn’t as if he could go online and download the song or go out and buy the CD to satisfy his curiosity.

So he went crazy buying CDs after he got back from Africa. He filled in all those blanks and more. The B-Lazy-B had a catalog of more than three thousand CDs – and a state-of-the-art sound system. It was an eclectic selection – he couldn’t be sure how his tastes might change as time went on.

The Escalade had a pretty good sound system, too. By the time he reached the Utah border, he was rapping along with Eminem.

“Oops, there goes gravity.”

“It wasn’t a weapon, at all,” Jill Apple told Burke. “It was a battery.”

Burke thought he’d misheard. “Sorry…?”

“He found a way to make a better battery. A lightweight, long-lived battery. ”

“You’re kidding,” Burke said.

“I’m not. These things made the Energizer Bunny look like a fruit fly.”

Burke laughed.

“You can imagine how excited Jack and his partner were,” Jill said.

“What partner?” Burke asked.

“He had a partner. Eli something… Salzberg! They went to grad school together. I think Eli was getting an MBA. Very smooth. He was putting together the venture-capital meetings, when Jack got the letter.”

“From?”

“The patent office. DOD decided the application should be secret. So that was that. No patent. They offered compensation – I think they came up with $150,000.”

“And how much was it worth… actually?”

“Eli thought he could get twenty-five million for a ten percent equity interest. That’s what they were asking.”

“Jesus! So what did they do?”

“They came to me,” Jill told him. “And we took it to court,” Jill replied. “But no ever wins these kinds of appeals. The hearings are closed, and the government doesn’t have to justify itself. They just say it’s in the national interest and that’s that.”

“No wonder he’s pissed,” Burke said.

“It’s eminent domain applied to intellectual property. If the government wants to put a highway through your living room, all it has to do is assert the public interest. And it’s the same with patents. The Invention Secrecy Act (it’s 35 U.S.C. 17, if you want to look it up) goes back to the cold war.”

“So how many patents have they seized?” Burke wondered.

“Something like ten thousand.”

Burke laughed in disbelief. “It’s like the X-Files!”

“Well, yeah, it is!” the lawyer replied. “There are all kinds of rumors – indestructible tires, nonaddictive opiates… Jack’s mistake was trying to make an end run around the Pentagon. That’s what got him arrested.”

“And that’s when he ran into Maddox.”

“Right.” There was a quavering noise on the line. “Can you hang on?”

“Sure.”

She came right back. “Listen, I’m supposed to be in court in ten minutes-”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I-”

“You know, you really ought to talk to Eli!”

“I’d love to. You got a number for him?”

“No, but he won’t be hard to find. He was on Bloomberg the other day, talking about Argentina. He’s got some big job with the World Bank. I think he’s based in Washington.”

Taking his laptop into the kitchen, Burke set it on the table, and prepared dinner for himself. Uninterested in cooking, he’d taken to “freebasing” ramen. This involved crushing the noodles in a baggie, and sprinkling them with the powder in the seasoning packet. The noodles would then be thoroughly shaken in the bag, after which they would be ready to eat. Uncooked, the ramen had the same texture as the crusher-run at the bottom of a bag of Cheetos.

Sitting down to his laptop, with the ramen to his left and a bottle of Jameson’s to his right, Burke went online to see what he could learn about Wilson’s namesake and his people.

The Indian messiah, Wovoka, arrived on the scene after more than fifty years of serial catastrophe and genocide. In 1830, the tribes of the east had been driven west by the Indian Removal Act. This forced migration, infamous as the Trail of Tears, confined the tribes to “Indian Territory” in what is now a part of Oklahoma. As the frontier moved west, the tribes of the Plains and the Great Basin found themselves incarcerated in open-air prisons called reservations, where they survived in a fever dream of alcohol, desperation, and disease. Nomads who had once survived – and thrived – by hunting and foraging now found themselves on unfamiliar ground, with many of their customs and religious rites forbidden by law. The desperation that resulted was compounded by a succession of “renegotiated” treaties that amounted to land grabs. Finally, the Indian tragedy verged on cataclysm when the government cut back on its deliveries of rice and wheat in the midst of a withering drought. Simply put, the Trail of Tears delivered the Indians to what they called the Starving Time.

Enter Wovoka.

It was said that he came from a family of shamans, and maybe he did. But what was certain was that he grew up on a Nevada ranch owned by a man named David Wilson, who called the boy “Jack” and gave him his own last name. In about 1889, Wovoka began to speak of a vision he’d received.

I bring you word from your fathers, the ghosts, that they are now marching to join you, led by the Messiah who came once to live on earth with the white man, but was cast out and killed by them.

In Wovoka’s vision, the white man would be driven from the Indians’ lands. The earth would be restored to abundance and plenty, and the Indians’ ancestors would return to live among them.

Wovoka preached that new land was being prepared. It would arrive from the west in the spring of 1891. The new land would cover the old land “to the depth of five times the height of a man.” In the meantime, the tribes must live in peace with themselves and the white man. Just before the new land arrived, the earth would tremble and shake, but the Indians should not be afraid. Death, disease, and the white man would vanish. The new lands would be covered with sweet grass and running water and trees, and herds of buffalo and ponies will stray over it, that my red children may eat and drink, hunt and rejoice.

But Wovoka’s revelation wasn’t only descriptive. It commanded the tribes to dance in a particular way at particular intervals. This would help to bring about the end, and the new beginning that would follow.

Almost every website used the same expression. The movement spread “like wildfire.” It was an apt simile, Burke thought. Just as forest fires jumped from one stand of trees to the next, the ghost dance religion leaped from one tribe to another. Indian leaders (among them, the Sioux’s Red Cloud and the Lakota’s Kicking Bear) traveled enormous distances to visit Wovoka in western Nevada.

Even as the message spread, it changed (as “messages” are wont to do). The new land would roll in just as Wovoka promised. But it would not just push the white man out. It would bury him.

As reports of their impending demise began to circulate, whites decided that a revolution was in the works. The “ghost dance,” they told themselves, was actually a “war dance.” The Indian vermin were planning to murder them all in their beds.