The Dancers of Noyo (23 page)

             
I looked at the blank, unresponsive facades of the houses. Perhaps she'd gone into one of them, though I couldn't think why. I went up the steps of the nearest house and knocked at the door. After a moment,
a
fat, slatternly woman peeped out at me. "Excuse me, but have you seen a—"

             
The woman didn't wait for me to finish. She slammed the door in my face.

             
I tried two more houses. Nobody answered at all. At the fourth house, where most of the windows were cracked, I heard heavy breathing from the other side of the door, but nobody answered my repeated knocks.

             
What should I do? I couldn't break into all the houses in Point Arena where people didn't come to the door. Where could I look for help? There was nobody to whom I could report Franny's disappearance. The only people who would have been interested in trying to find her—her tribesmen—would kill her if she were found.

             
I realized that I had always been apprehensive that what had happened at Navarro would happen to her:
a
disappearance absolute, sudden, never explained.
Where had Franny gone?

             
She wouldn't want to disappear. She'd try to get back to me. But I didn't suppose the people at Navarro had wanted to disappear either. Where had she gone?

             
I didn't think the Avengers had taken her. Franny would have made some outcry, struggled. She must either have been called away from the bike in a manner that didn't alarm her, or have been silenced, utterly and completely, before being removed. I suppose an Avenger could have come up behind her and cast a noose over her head, but Fran had extraordinarily keen senses. It was improbable. But she was gone. I couldn't get beyond that. I felt like looking under the seat of the motorbike for her.

             
I tried to collect myself. Could she, for example, have gone into the service station restroom and fainted there? I went back to the station and put my question to the proprietor. Nobody had gone into the restroom, he told me
surlily
, and opened the door of the place to prove it was empty. I went into the store once more, and the storekeeper told me, once more, that he hadn't seen anybody like the girl I was describing. Both he and the service station man were short with me; I felt I was wearing out my welcome in Point Arena. But I didn't think they were lying when they said they hadn't seen Fran.

             
It was beginning to get dark. I couldn't think what to do. I went back to the bike, which was the last place I had seen Francesca, and stood irresolutely beside it. Lights came on in the backs of several of the houses. I couldn't think what to do.

             
Finally I decided to knock on the doors of the houses where there were lights. At one house an old man, deaf but friendly enough, answered, and at another a woman shouted, "Go away!" That was all. And the old man, of course, hadn't seen Franny.

             
Three children—the first I had noticed in Point Arena
—
ran past where I was standing. They slowed down when I called after them, stared at me for a moment, and then ran off into the darkness hooting with laughter.

             
There must be something I could do. After all, I was a medicine man. I got my medicine bag out and looked over its contents. The only thing that seemed to have any possibilities was the copper disk. I could try to scry with it.

             
I made the attempt. I have never been much of a scryer, and at present I was too much upset to see even the flickering lights that herald the approach of a definite vision. I couldn't relax.

             
Finally I stopped trying. I wrapped the disk up again in the black fabric and put it back in my medicine pouch. Ever since the episode with Gee-Gee I had been wearing my pouch down the back of my neck, and I put it there now. It seemed safer that way.

             
I walked around a little. The night was dank and foggy, with a moon somewhere behind the fog. At last I sat down beside my bike on the rutted concrete sidewalk, resolved to wait there until morning. Perhaps Franny would come back yet, apologetic and smiling, with a sound, comfortable explanation of where she'd been.

             
Time wore on. I was too anxious to be hungry, but I sucked some pieces of hard candy from the bag underneath the motorbike seat. One thing that bothered me was Franny's "psychic silence". She was capable of sending out a very strong mental impulse; she had done so when she had been in danger at Mallo Pass. That I got nothing at all from her now was capable of a sinister interpretation. But it could also be regarded as showing that nothing very serious had happened, and I tried to think of it that way.

             
I dozed off several times during the night, leaning against the bike with my arms clasped around my knees. The dank cold kept waking me up. It was the kind of night when, in the pre-plague days, the foghorn at the Point Arena lighthouse would have been sounding all night. Once or twice I felt that somebody was looking at me from one of the houses, but I never saw anyone. Between dozes I decided that if Franny hadn't come back by morning I'd ride to Ukiah and ask the county agent for help. It was a forlorn hope. But it was the only one I had.

             
Not long before sunrise I had a curious dream. All night long my dozes had shown me to myself as Bennet, tremulously happy in the bliss of his dying; and now, in this latest dream, I relived the moment when Kate Wimbold came out of the sea toward me, glistening blackly in her skinsuit, with a spear in her hand.

             
Skinsuit?
She was clothed in scarlet, glowing like the sunset, with a high crown on her head. No, she was naked, a naked woman who held out her arms to me with a smile. There was -such a light around her that, after a moment, I knew she was more than a woman.

             
She was not a woman, never a woman. That part of my extra-life as Bennet had not been veridical. Kate Wimbold was a power, a principle and embodiment. My mind had embodied her as what she was. She was the female power, the Shakti of the land.

             
Somehow, this knowledge was a considerable comfort to me. I didn't have to be concerned about her if she weren't real. (Who did Kate Wimbold, if she hadn't been a mere personification, a formulation of the abstract, remind me of? Fortunately, the question didn't have to be faced.) But now she was back in the skinsuit, holding something out to me insistently,
saying
, as her face enlarged to fill my whole field of vision, "Don't you remember the
convenants
?" I knew what she was offering me, though I didn't want to look at it. It was a fat Greek coin.

             
I woke with a start. I must have slept more soundly than I realized. A man was bending over me, tapping me on the shoulder, with the glow of the dawn red around him. "You dropped this, I think," he said in a neat, precise voice, with every syllable separate and distinct. He-was holding something out to me insistently.

             
Still dazed with sleep, I put out my hand to take it, and then drew back. I was reluctant to accept anything from him.

             
"You dropped this," he repeated. Once more he extended his hand toward me.

             
I lowered my eyes to what lay in the palm of his hand. I saw a fat silvery disk with a woman's—a goddess's?
—
helmeted head on the front. It was a Greek coin, the Greek coin I had been dreaming about.

             
"I
didn't drop it," I said.

             
"You did," he contradicted. "I'm sure you did."

             
I got creakily to my feet and looked at him. I saw a tall, well-built man, youngish, with a twist at the side of the mouth. "You'd better take it," he said, shoving his hand toward me again.

             
"No. I didn't drop it."

             
"OK." he said after a second. He shrugged, dropped the coin in his pocket, and turned his back on me.

             
"Wait," I said, beginning to get more awake. "I didn't drop it, no. But I'd like to know where you got it."

             
For answer, he began to walk away. I laid my hand on his shoulder. He wrenched free, the twist of his lip an angry snarl. We stared at each other for
a
moment. Then he began to run.

             
I went pelting after him. He turned into a space between two houses, and when I got there he was nowhere in sight. But I heard a door banging up ahead.

             
I thought the sound came from the right. I ran on, around the comer. There was the door, at the side of
a
large gray house, reddish in the sunrise.

             
I opened it—it was unlocked—and went in. I was in a hallway. I heard running footsteps ahead.

             
I hesitated. It occurred to me that in entering the house I might be doing just what he wanted me to do, and the thought slowed me down. I moved on, but slowly. Then I heard feet pounding out the back way.

             
Once more I hesitated, unable to decide whether to go on chasing the man who had wakened me or to search the house. A faint noise, like the hum of a dynamo, from somewhere in the house decided me.

             
I began opening doors. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, and the windows were so duty there was hardly any light.
Everything s
me
lled damp and old.

             
The fourth room was the room with the web. It was even darker than the other rooms, but my first impression was that somebody was lying in a hammock in it. But the hammock had luminous mesh, faintly glowing red and green, and the person lying in it seemed not so much cradled in a hammock as caught in something like a trap. The mesh was denser at the two ends, head and feet, and the two colors merged into an opalescent blur. It was a cocoon of pale light.

             
It seemed to swing free, a foot or two above the floor. I could see the face of the person in it in profile, white and finely chiseled, and it had a pale glimmer, like alabaster with a light behind. It was so quiet and passive and remote that it took me a moment to realize that it was the girl I was looking for.
"Franny!"
I cried.

             
She didn't move. I started toward her. I should have touched the mesh of the web, whatever it might be made of, in two steps, but my hands went through it without resistance. I reached the other side of the room. I groped my way back to the door by which I had entered, and still hadn't touched anything.

             
What was it?
A hologram?
I looked around the dim walls, but there was nothing there, or on the floor or ceiling, that looked like a projector. She was still lying there in the web, to all appearances.
"Franny!"
I called once more. She didn't st
ir
.

             
I heard my own breathing. I had found her; but where was she? The web of light she lay in
corruscated
faintly and changed shape. It brought to my mind my dream, and the leaping green flame of the candle that had burned on the seashore when I had been Bennet. For a moment I was
Bennet, again, back in his dying body. I heard myself saying, in a rather flat and uninflected voice, "I invoke the covenants."

             
Francesca stirred. Her head moved from side to side. She toned her face toward me. Her eyes opened slowly. She was looking at me with Kate Wimbold's eyes.

             
But it was certainly Franny. A faint smile curved her lips. She seemed about to rise from the web.