The Dancers of Noyo by Margaret St. Clair Read Free Book Online

never been much good at scrying. I suppose I had selected the copper from my scanty arsenal of "magic" with the idea of using it for a mirror. Now I saw a thin, dark face, hawk-nosed, dark-eyed. I don't know what I had been expecting, but for a minute I didn't recognize myself. I remember thinking that the dim image in the disk was an improvement on Alice, anyhow. Then something clicked, and I recognized Sam. And the next instant I was Alvin again.
     
                  A good deal of time seemed to have passed. The sun had set, there were fewer dancers in the circle, the dust was a little less dense. Alvin—the tears on his cheeks had dried long ago—was standing in the center, beside the medicine woman. She was addressing him in a series of short sentences, punctuated by sharp explosions of breath. "The dance gives joy," she said, "Hu! It restores youth, hu! It heals disease, hu! It can revive the dead, hu!" She looked intently into Alvin's eyes.
     
                  He drew back a little. A certain doubt was stirring in his mind, despite his experiences and emotions. He may have been a mass murderer, as he had called himself, but he was an intellectual one. "Revive the dead?" he said with his thickened tongue.
     
                  She nodded. "Revive the dead, hu! It can make men walk on water, pass through fire, hu! It can—"
     
                  The next minute I was Alice, back on the dissecting table. And from then on I oscillated between being Alice Lemmon, the cadaver, and Alvin Riggs, the CBW worker, like a ball bouncing. It was almost worse than just being Alice consistently. For now I felt that I was standing with a foot on either side of an abyss, and that the sides were drawing apart. I must either be split in two, or fall into the abyss.
     
                  When I was Alvin, I had no sense of having ever been either Alice or Sam. The medicine woman seemed to be giving him a feather, and exhorting to some sort of missionary action in connection with the dance. As Alice, I had some awareness of my real identity, and it was in one of those moments that I groped blindly among the herbs in my bag for something and shoved it into my mouth.
     
                  What I had got was some dried caps of Panaeolus campanulatus , the Variegata Mushroom. (I had found its name in a botany book years ago, when I was about fifteen, after getting wildly high on some specimens I had found growing near an old stable in Fort Bragg. Pomo Joe had reintroduced me to it.)
     
                  The book had said that Panaeolus is remarkable for the quickness with which it acts. Almost as soon as the saliva from chewing the mushroom began to slide down my throat, I was r o aring drunk: Alvin's world began to reel around him, and I saw the dissecting table expand and contract like a piece of bubble gum being blown in and out.
     
                  I thought this was wonderfully funny. I might still be a female cadaver, pumped full of formaldehyde and carved into sections, but I could appreciate a good joke as well as anybody. I began to laugh, the noise ranging from whining giggles to a loud , Falstaf fi an roar. Funny! I never heard of anything funnier in my life! The moon, the sea, the sky were one vast roar.
     
                  I wanted to share this quintessential comicality with somebody. I took a couple of steps in the direction of the table where I was lying. The surgeons ought to appreciate the humor of it, if anybody would. On the second step I lost my balance, teetered, and fell over on my face.
     
                  I thought that was even funnier than the expanding dissecting table had been. I laughed and laughed. Then I began to cry. Poor Alice, lying there, so cold, so lonely (Alvin I Wasn 't, currently). It was a dreadful thing to have happen to a girl.
     
                  Girl? I was Sammmm , Sammmm .