Dreams That Burn In The Night (17 page)

It wasn't a
question of security. It didn't matter if you cut your teeth on the hammer and sickle or on the
stars and stripes. It was a gathering of frightened children, a hodgepodge of military and
government personnel. There was a full crew of university egg­heads, linguists, chiropodists,
Russian spies, anyone who might know something, anyone willing to go. Quacks, religious fanatics,
candy-ass liberals going to cheer, librarians, intelligence agents from everywhere, militiamen,
army men, sailors in white suits, marines shaved bald like smart monkeys, Indian experts with
long knives and CARE packages from the state liquor stores, Indian experts with degrees in Pawnee
sex practices, phony Indians with hairy knuckles and raised eyebrow ridges, mouth breathers.
Am­bassadors and diplomats, senators and state governors, painted ladies and the criminally
insane, an indistinct group, an insepa­rable aggregation, all moving together, all running like
thunder-frightened cattle.

It began when
someone reported that all the tribes were gather­ing, some FBI informer in a position to know, a
reformed Indian with his pants down, waiting for government aid. Some sort of big powwow. Not
unusual, not unheard of. That's what the informer said, several tribes had gathered together
before, had had their lit­tle powwows. But this was different. Before the information could get
out on the difference, the reformed Indian fell asleep with a knife in his back.

It
was
different. Suddenly, with no reason given, leaving posses­sions and homes abandoned, all the
tribes began marching toward Wounded Knee. Cars, boats, airplanes, every imaginable type of
vehicle was full of Indians moving toward Wounded Knee. A cer­emony at the place where the hoop
of the nations was broken. A civil disorder. Like Kent State, like Vietnam, like Korea, one civil
disorder pretty much like any other. They could handle it. They told everyone they could handle
it.

But on the morning
of the day the tribes began moving, at 10:45 Eastern Standard time, the lights went out in New
York, the dynamos at Niagara froze solid. At Oak Ridge, the powerful
atomic reactors fell silent. In Russia, the great bear in night was
plunged into a deeper night and confusion. The clocks of the world stopped at 10:45. All over the
world, there was the non-sound of things stopping, of machines falling silent.

At 11:30 Eastern
Standard time, the only movement, the only sounds made by machines were made by vehicles moving
toward Wounded Knee. Cars full of Indians speeding down the highways long after they had run out
of gas. A twin-engine plane with two Mohawk families, gliding silently westward over Chicago,
both engines feathered, pulled at a speed that strained the wings, pulled forward with both
engines silenced while the pilot shouted into a dead headset.

It was a selective
madness. Nothing worked that had moving metal parts. Guns, cars, bicycles, garbage disposals,
electric ga­rage door openers, all the metal parts frozen solid, fused together, worthless. Only
Indians moved freely, their cars worked, their planes, everything they touched, worked. Only
Indians had guns that worked. It was stranger than New York City on a Sunday af­ternoon. Only
Indians had guns that worked. And they moved to­ward Wounded Knee over the bodies of the obstacle
course be­tween them and Wounded Knee.

Ten days it took
them to gather, ten days for the South Ameri­can peoples to float up the rivers, to come out of
the jungles and hidden places where white men had never been. Ten days to reach the ports and
catch the airplanes and boats that waited for them there. Waited there to take them to Wounded
Knee.

And the other
people of the world, they went crazy. Aliens? An invasion from another planet? A warning from
God?

The grasshopper
people, government people, military replicas of people, they all danced to the same questions.
They came run­ning, crawling on knees suspiciously like helpless fists. Moving like old age
toward Wounded Knee. They walked and rode horses. The more important of them rode in hastily
built wooden carriages that broke down frequently. In growing numbers, they marched, moved, and
crawled. In their path they found only emp­tiness and stillness, as if a storm had passed leaving
the air cleaned and purified. Like hungry junkies with needle intensity, with one goal, one vein,
they too moved on Wounded Knee.

The group mind, the
briefcase mentality, the committee of sin­gle-minded purpose found him. They found him dancing
with the
Rosebud Sioux. They found him
dancing with the Ojibway, the Cherokees, the Seminoles, the Kiowas, all the tribes of creation
spread out over the land like the buffalo. Marching and dancing, moving in the wind like the
leaves of corn, moving in one vast hoop that stretched across the flat land like one
all-encircling snake. They found him dancing with the bird people, dancing with the animal
people. They found him dancing with the fox people, the bear people, the wind river people. All
around like soft blankets, the spirits of the dead circled the dancers, circled above, moving
through the scattered bodies of their children, moving in the shadow and light.

They saw him and he
was unlike any man that had ever walked their earth. His face was fire, his shoulders were
feathered with black eagle wings, and when he laughed it was thunder and when he smiled it was
lightning.

One of the
generals, too long accustomed to a desk, too long gone from the world of men, moved forward among
the watchers, pushed his way through the rapidly forming committees and study groups. He elbowed
his way past the religious bleat, the organic cheering section, he broke through and marched
forcefully toward the dancers.

As he moved toward
the path of the great circle, the dancers began falling silently to the ground. The women, the
children, the old ones, the fierce young men, the proud young women, they all fell back to rest.
To rest.

They rested,
surrounded by whites held at bay by guns that worked, guarded by tall warriors at the edge of the
hoop, fierce-eyed men with rifles. The bodies of those who had come too close kept the others
away. Every so often, a liberal believing all men were brothers would add his body to the piles
of the dead.

The general was
undeterred. The old general walked past the guard who kept the gun pointed at his chest. For some
reason, no one made a move to shoot him. The old general walked up to one of the old
men.

"How!" the general
said, and he put his hand up, open-palmed, like a demented John Wayne. "On behalf of your
President, I—"

There was a hiss
like animal fat burning in the cook fire and the general and the rest of his sentence were
gone.

And the white
people moved back as if a spring had snapped within them. And they fled in one flowing wave. The
one who fell from the sun stood at the top of the great Hoop of the Nations,
and as one they rose up, all the peoples of the creation,
they rose up. They danced, the old and the young and the sick and the lame, all whole now, all
one.

And they danced in
clouds of ghosts, whirling around and around, and as they passed beneath the winged man, there
was the sound of a thousand things moving in darkness and light, shaking, a thousand things
moving and breaking in the time of the going away. And gently, like the stroke of soft-feathered
birds, the eyes of the man of thunder and lightning fell upon the people, his eyes touched them
and they moved quietly like dying angels, floating like memories to the sun.

Faster and faster,
the drums, the drums that went faster and faded and faster and faded and then stopped, each note
like a monument, each note rising into the air like a flight of birds. And then they were gone.
Gone. The Hoop, the spirits of the dead, the dancers, the drums of the people, all fallen into
the sun.

And the being who
fell from the sun stood alone. Alone. He spread his wings and let the sun spin above him. And the
spin of the sun rilled his wings and he left the earth. He left the earth.

Behind him on the
plain, in the silence, in the dust, a general and a New York City hustler materialized, embraced
in each other's arms. Embraced in each other's arms on sterile ground in a world that would never
grow up.

Sterile children in
a world that would never grow up.

"Environment," said
the tour guide, and he unwrapped a sand­wich.

"Active Process,"
dutifully replied the student Koapa.

"What kind of
active? What kind of process?" prompted the tour guide.

"Invisible,"
suggested the student Koapa, and he made himself invisible in demonstration of his
theory.

"Mind you keep to
the shadows," said the tour guide. "In­visibility is an anti-environment. If the Earth Persons
saw your shadow but not you making it, you might give the Earthlings trauma."

"Are they really
scientists?" said the Koapa, reappearing under the enormous tower of the 200-inch
telescope.

"Positive," said
the tour guide. "Just look in the handbook under the section heading 'Astronomy.' This type of
building is called an Observatory and that man in the white coat is looking through the giant
telescope because he is what Earthlings call an Astronomer."

"Is he honored
among his own kind, favored above all others?" asked the Koapa, carving himself into an oak-leaf
cluster and a bowling tournament trophy.

The tour guide bit
into his sandwich with cynical amity. "Those of his race have no reason to be grateful to those
who juggle with the thresholds of sensory experience in the name of haphazard
in­novation."

"I fail to
understand how these creatures perceive anything," said the Koapa, changing into a late weather
bulletin.

"But that's just
it," explained the tour guide. "They don't really understand anything. They perceive nothing, but
instead, they gain perspectives. They regard all phenomena from a fixed point of
view."

A man in a white
coat came through a doorway and ap­proached the astronomer who was looking studiously through the
telescope. He tapped the astronomer on the shoulder and said, "What do you see?"

The astronomer
looked away from the eyepiece and said, "It's going to rain."

The other man
seemed astonished. "How can you tell?" he cried.

"My corns hurt,"
said the astronomer.

The student Koapa
frowned. "I don't understand. I don't un­derstand any of it. We came all this way. All this way
only to find that long-distance is
better
than being there," complained the Koapa, turning
into a busy signal.

"Don't let it get
you down," said the tour guide. "You must
learn to be tolerant of Earth customs. Down here, it isn't logical, it isn't reasonable,
it isn't necessary, it's Earthish. That explains nothing and excuses everything."

"But I clearly
specified what I wanted," said the Koapa as he brushed a ticker tape parade off his tongue. "Take
me to your leader, I said. How could they not understand me?"

"Perhaps we expect
too much of them. We expect them to un­derstand us when we ourselves are not even sure they
understand each other," suggested the tour guide, nibbling thoughtfully on his tentacle. "You
must remember that any system of enough com­plexity embodies a quality that we call mentality or
mind. While this is fairly standard throughout the galaxy, here on Earth there is insufficient
evidence to prove it exists here."

"What about
organized religions? Surely there are intelligence patterns that. . ." began the Koapa, turning
into a Bingo board.

"We are talking
about an organized intelligence," interrupted the tour guide somewhat testily, "and that kind of
science fiction has nothing to do with it."

"But surely they
have reached the age of technology, and it is therefore logical to assume that they must have
some really com­plex cybernetic structures, is that not so?" asked the student Koapa, becoming an
automatic toilet bowl disinfectant dispenser.

"The telephone is
the most complex system yet devised by man and as such it is representative of the highest
machine intelligence on the planet."

"That is all very
interesting," said the Koapa, foaming over the side of the toilet bowl. "But how does it relate
back to my failure to communicate with the leadership of Earth intelligence, with the head of
whatever religion rules this planet?"

"The system is
complex without comprehension. It is so com­plex it is obtuse. It has lost its head and built
many in its place," replied the tour guide.

"But doesn't
someone know how to make the contact?" asked the Koapa, ionizing into a supermarket grand
opening.

The tour guide
sighed. "Who knows. None of the handbooks cover this subject. Perhaps there is a telephone
lineman in Day­ton, Ohio, who knows how to talk to God."

"And if there
isn't?"

"I'm sure the
reverse is true," said the tour guide "In either
case, there is no possibility of our establishing communication. The closest we have
come is a recording. A recording and three hundred fifty-seven wrong numbers."