Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“When the whole system is screwed up like that, you need more than a hoodoo doctor. Straightening things out for individuals isn’t enough anymore. So what you need is a gang of people whose job is to keep the energy circulating, to show other people how it’s done, and to make sure both of those go on even when the gang isn’t there.” Sher leaned back, set her hands on her knees, and looked at me.

“Do you think you’re through?” I asked. “I’m waiting for the answer to the first question. What does this have to do with the town?”

“Oh, work a little bit, Sparrow. It’ll do you good.”

I think I knew, really. I just had to line the facts up in my head. A community of people who made food and entertainments for each other, who had no store or even any regulated system of baiter. A town that had given a herd of musk oxen an escort north, and done its best to keep tigers alive. The people who saved my life because, just then, it needed doing. “Oh,” I said, and, “The whole town?”

“That’s right,” said Sherrea. “Welcome to the Hoodoo Engineers.”

That wasn’t the end of it; I had questions, she had clarifications. But not much later, I walked alone back to the farmhouse.

Or not quite alone. For company, I had my sense of something almost seen, something hovering over me, something that would be revealed eventually, whether I liked it or not. I’d thought it would be in Sherrea’s explanation, and I’d been afraid of it. Now I wished it had been. It was spoiling my appreciation of the fireflies.

I dreamed that night, for what seemed like all night. I wanted several times to wake up, and maybe even tried to; but I could no more wake up out of the world I traveled through that night than I could have woken up out of the real one.

I’m sorry. That was a bad choice of expression. However I say it, I couldn’t wake up.

It began with the pictographs, black on white. I had forgotten them, or forgotten to mention them to anyone. I was on the left end once more, and next to me the woman with the headdress was saying to me, “There’s not time. It’s not your fault, Wind and Rain it’s not, but you’ll suffer for it all the same. You can’t be taught the dance in a fistful of suns, never mind this little slot of darkness.”

The creature with the flute beside her responded, “What’s to teach? Box step, two-step, cha-cha-cha. Every living thing knows it already. Hey,” it hollered at me, “you know those little bugs in your body? The teeny tiny ones that tell everything what to do? Tell ‘em I said to lead!”

“You might try being something other than a handicap for once,” she told it. “You old liar.”

“You,” it said with sudden dignity, “are no fun. What business do you have talking about dancing, the mood you’re in? Get thee to an alehouse. Time’s a-wastin’. We’re outta here. Music, music, music!”

Three dimensions. It wasn’t a sudden transition, but until then it had been a paper-flat world. Dream logic. The creature with the flute still was, and wasn’t anymore, and was clutching my wrist and flinging me. Someone else caught me, and flung me again. I could hear the flute, but I couldn’t see it. But even more than the flute, I could hear drums, the crisp rolling voices of the drums from the village circle. I could see the drummers, male and female, gleaming with sweat, bare-shouldered, their lips drawn back in grins of exertion and delight. Someone else caught my arms.

Jammers. I was the balky axle in their wheel. They were stamping and clapping to the drums, their eyes rolled back in their heads. “Step! Step! Step!” they chanted. Their skinny arms and bony elbows were like the bare branches of trees, jerked in the wind of the beat. They held me down. The drums hammered at me, cut openings in my skin, laid their rhythm-eggs in the bloody wounds and sealed them up, to wait for hatching. That was the first time I wanted badly to wake up.

The Jammers capered around me and herded me on, through the illuminated, benighted Deeps. The buildings were lit like the street scenes in movie musicals, with flashing marquees and neon, with electricity pouring unheeded everywhere. It was a movie musical; the cast of thousands leaped and wiggled and stepped, unsynchronized, through a soundstage Nicollet Market. Both Mick Skinners were there, or rather, both bodies. So were Dana and Cassidy. A skeleton went by in a silk top hat and tailcoat, pausing only long enough to thrust its skull through the ring of Jammers and click its teeth at me.

I’d been looking at the Jammers all wrong. I’d been thinking of them as unhealthy, underfed living people. They were beautifully preserved corpses, of course. How silly of me. They danced very well.

Two long-fingered hands, rose-brown next to the Jammers’ graying skin, parted the rim of their wheel and reached in to me. I let my wrists be taken, let myself be pulled out of the ring.

The hands were attached to a woman whose blue-black hair shivered over her shoulders and down her back to her ankles. She was naked. I stared helplessly, because here in the dream-street I couldn’t look away, or go away, as I would have in waking life. It was such a strange-looking body. The soft, substantial fleshiness of the breasts, shifting and trembling like nervous pigeons when she moved; the smooth padding of stomach and thighs and wide-set hips. She wasn’t fat, but looking at her, I thought of butter and cream and molasses, and other rich things: velvet and satin, gold poured out in dim light, the lapping of warm water on the skin. She drew me close and kissed me on the lips.

Then she moved away, and a figure stepped out from behind her. This was a man, dark-skinned, and naked, too. The shoulders were as straight as mine, but broader under the red cloak fastened around his neck; tiles of muscle marked out the chest, and were blurred under the thin pelt of curled black hair. He had no distinct waist; his body narrowed from the chest to the hips, tapering and pared as a knife blade, and the hair grew over it, thinning to a stripe over his belly and widening again at the groin. His penis hung relaxed in the black brush of it, limp and wobbling. His legs were black-haired and bony-kneed. I couldn’t imagine walking in that body. I couldn’t imagine walking in hers.

I had seen them both somewhere before. Where… ah. Stylized, on the walls of China Black’s hounfor.

He also took my hands and drew me close, and kissed me on the lips. Then the picture jumped, as if someone had cut out too many frames in the splice. He closed one large milk-white hand around my neck until I couldn’t swallow, until my breath sounded like a saw going through a board, and slammed me back against the wall. And Beano said, “Nothing’s free…” And though I didn’t really feel any pain, that was the second time I wanted to wake up, and much more urgently than the first.

Continuity, even by dream-logic, broke, as if the projectionist had started the wrong reel. I was in one of the vegetable gardens, alone, wrapped in a perfect silence that never really happened in the fields. The row at my feet was half-weeded. I knelt and went back to work. Reach, pull, toss. Reach, pull, toss. It had a rhythm. It had a sound, a series of sounds—and I began to hear the drums, somewhere distant, speaking to the motion of my arm.