The Dancers of Noyo (4 page)

             
I was convinced he'd tried to kill me. Hastily I pulled my bow off my shoulders, fitted an arrow to it,
drew
the string. "Come down!" I yelled. "Come down! Or I'll shoot." He was within easy range.

             
BL knew that if he made a move toward his bow I'd skewer him. He directed the bike toward a relatively low place in the bluff and came slithering down the slope toward me, scattering rocks and shale as he came.

             
I awaited him with fury, my arrow still at the ready. It wasn't only that he had tried to kill
me,
it was that he'd been riding my bike when he did it. His first remark, though, as he came up with me was a
disinfuriating
one: "Say, do you hear music, Bright Moon?"

             
I considered. I hadn't been conscious of much except the roar of the surf, but now that my attention was directed to it
it
did seem that I heard a high ringing in the air, golden, musical, and remote. "I guess so. I mean, it could be music. Why?"

             
"I've never been on
One
before when a Pilgrim was going down," he answered. "Maybe it's the usual thing, but it bothers me."

             
I shook my head, annoyed at being distracted from my rage.
"Never mind that.
Why are you following me? Why did you try to kill me just now? I'm not doing anything."

             
"The Dancer told me to follow you to be sure you really made the Grail Journey," he said after a very slight pause, a pause so small that I thought I had imagined it. "About the rockslide, it was an accident. I got too close to the edge. I wasn't trying to kill you. Why, I might have been hurt myself!"

             
It sounded plausible, but I kept my arrow to the string. "What would I do if I didn't make the journey?" I demanded.

             
"I
dunow
.
Goof off
somewhere, I guess. Everybody knows you're browned off at having to make the journey."

             
"Are you going to follow me all the way to Gualala?
On my motorbike?"
I asked.

             
"... No."

             
"Then turn around now. Go back to Noyo. Tell the
Dancer I promise to make the journey. I'm even"—I managed a grin I tried to make sinister—"I'm even looking forward to it. It's going to be a real experience."

             
"
Yesh
, but—" Brotherly looked distressed. "I wish I could go back. It's no pleasure to me to watch you clumping along like a duck with flat feet. But I'm supposed to stay with you until I'm positive."

             
"What keeps you from being positive? I promised. It's against the rules for a Pilgrim to be disturbed. How am I ever to have the Grail Vision if you keep bothering me?"

             
"Well—" He seemed perplexed, rubbing his bearded chin and looking at me doubtfully while the afternoon shore breeze blew around us and whipped our pants around our legs.

             
"Go on, go on," I said. I made a dismissing gesture with my bow. "Get going. And mind you take good care of my bike. Or I'll skin you alive after I get back."

             
He grinned suddenly.
"OK, Bright Moon.
I'll tell the Dancer that you're really going through with it. Good luck. I hope you see the Grail, unh, sunbasket." He wheeled my bike around and glided swiftly off.

             
I resumed my plodding—BL was right in characterizing it as flat-footed—along the highway. I was
tireder
than ever, and now that I had been made to notice it, I kept hearing the
music
. It seemed to slip in and out of my mind, beautiful and distant, not like the sound of any instruments I knew. Then suddenly it was gone, and I could never pick it up again.

             
I decided that if I had something to eat I might feel a little more alert. The highway at that point was close to a tiny sandy beach, lying between two rocky outcroppings. I worked my way through the white fence and clambered down to the water. It was pleasant to sit on the sand, eating pemmican and watching the sea birds. The beach looked as if it might harbor a few clams, but it was the wrong time of year for clams even if I'd wanted to dig for them.

             
The pemmican was strictly a synthetic product. The California Indians seem never to have had it; pemmican was a Plains Indian invention. The person who had made my batch of the stuff had mixed raisins, deer suet, dried deer meat and
a good deal of ground-up pepper
grass seeds. I suppose the peppergrass seeds were put in to give body. The result wasn't bad, really, but the raisins were a mistake. Either
that,
or the deer meat should have been dried longer. There was a mildewed taste to the stuff.

             
While I was eating, I got the bunch of passes out of my pants pocket and looked at it. It consisted of five or six thin slips of wood, about four inches long and less than an inch across, strung on a strip of leather through a hole bored in one end of the wood. Various notches and grooves had been cut in the flat of the wood. These marks were supposed, to indicate to the Dancers of the various tribes I would encounter during up journey that I was a genuine Pilgrim, entitled to safe conduct and even some hospitality. The whole idea of passes struck me as silly. I could simply have told the tribesmen I met who I was and what I wanted. We weren't at war with each other.

             
I put the passes in my pocket and stood up to go. I was beginning to feel a certain expectation, not altogether pleasant, but interested, for what lay before me. What I had told B. Love was not wholly false; I
was
looking forward to the journey. After all, what had happened to Julian could probably happen to me. I was on the edge of an experience.

             
I went back up to the road. I felt less tired than earlier. The break for food had done me good. I jogged along almost happily for a while, though I still felt that I was making remarkably poor time with my walking. I was wondering how far I was from Caspar when something made me look up. There was Brotherly, still on my motorbike, gliding slowly and silently along the height above me. There was no mistaking his jutting bushy beard.

             
"Come down here!" I bawled. I didn't think of my bow; I was too angry. I felt I could have climbed up the slope after him and pulled him off the bike all in one motion.

             
I don't know what he thought, but after a moment he came sliding down the slope with a great rattling of tawny rocks and loose shale. The slope was pretty steep, and it seemed a fifty-fifty chance that he'd be unable to stop and would go whamming into the fence and over on the rocks below. But my bike had good brakes.

             
"
Whyn't
you stop following me?" I demanded. "You know I'll make the Grail Journey. I promised to."

             
"No, I don't," he said. "I—" He wouldn't look me in the eye. He bent over the bike's handlebars and began fidgeting with something.

             
"Get off my bike," I said with sudden resolution. "We can't play tag with each other all the way down Highway One to Gualala. Get off my bike."

             
He dismounted slowly. When both his feet were on the ground he aimed a wide, loose haymaker at me. I ducked, and aimed a blow of my own at his jaw.

             
It connected, but not as solidly as I had expected. I must still be
tireder
than I realized. He blinked but stood firm, and before I could take another swipe at him I saw there was a gun in his hand. Brotherly Love was threatening me with a gun.

             
You cannot imagine what a shock this was to me. Firearms, like the other destructive gadgets of the old culture, are anathema to the tribes. I'd never seen a gun before, except in a comic book I'd found behind the desk in the lobby of the Noyo Inn. I felt like a Victorian lady confronted with a lewd drawing chalked up on a wall.

             
Surprise made me speechless. BL must have read my outrage in my face, for he said, "I'm sorry to have to use the gun. You can walk along pushing the bike, and I'll walk along beside you. But we can't take any chances. I've got to stay with you until—"

             
"Until what?"
I demanded. "I wish I could think of something adequate to call you."

             
"Never mind names. I have to stay with you until I'm sure, unh, sure you won't turn back."

             
I felt he was lying. His rather stupid face, under the beard, was contorted with the effort of his falsehood. But I didn't know what he was waiting for. He must be sure by now that I wouldn't turn back.

             
"I refuse to push my own bike," I said, and then, without a pause, "That's why the light bothered her so. Her eyelids were unusually thin."

             
My remark seemed perfectly reasonable to me. There was an autopsy going on, and the girl's eyelids had been dissected and found to be of few microns thinner than most people's.

             
BL looked at me. I had the sensation of having said something gauche
,,
something that passed the limits of good taste.

             
"OK, then," he said at last, "you go on by yourself, and I'll go back to Noyo."

             
"How do I know you can be trusted? You started back to Noyo once before. And she had that constant pain in the side because the sciatic nerves were actually inflamed."

             
"Well, I can. Be trusted, I mean." He put the gun back in his clothing and got astride my bike once more.
"Go on, McGregor.
I won't follow you anymore. We'll be expecting you back in Noyo in about six weeks."

             
He turned the bike in a wide arc and shot off back up the highway—still, I thought, on
my
bike. I couldn't imagine what had made him change his mind so abruptly. I wondered what die final result of the autopsy would be.

-

             
Alvin Biggs was a CBW worker. I was Alvin Riggs. The identity was absolute and perfect. But, since I subsequently went back to being Sam McGregor, I shall narrate my experiences as
Riggs,
and my experiences in my other extra-lives, in the third person.

             
I had been walking along watching the autopsy and wondering vaguely why Brotherly had elected to turn back, when I began to be Alvin. There were no intermediate stages. I became Alvin between one breath and the next.

             
Alvin was a little under forty, and a little overweight. At the present moment he was sweating heavily. This was partly because it was a hot day and partly because, not wanting to be turned back at the gate of the New Life Commune, he had taken the long way around.

             
He had pushed through thickets of baccharis, avoided clumps of poison oak, swatted hovering flies away from his wet forehead. Now he stood on a slight rise above the commune, touching the equipment in his pocket a little nervously. Needles, aspirator, capillary tubes, packing, labeling materials—it was all there, and it made rather a big parcel. He envied his colleagues who were working on skin irritants. All they had to do was to get skin of
scalp scrapings. People always made such a fuss when you asked them to give you a little blood.