The Dancers of Noyo

             
"I hear your tribe has got itself a Dancer," the county agent said. There was a faintly needling note in his voice.

             
"Um," I replied.

             
"You don't seem very enthusiastic, McGregor," he said. The needling note was more evident.

             
"Why should I be?" I asked. "It means being ordered to dance for ten hours a day for months, and at the end of it being sent on a fool's errand down the coast."

             
"Fool's errand?
I suppose you mean the quest for"—he coughed rather slightingly—"the quest for the Grail Vision."

             
"They're calling it the sunbasket vision now," I said.

             
"Sorry. It's hard for me to keep up with the tribes' latest in the Indian lore line. But you've got to admit there's nothing like a Dancer to give a tribe that certain something—that
je ne sais quoi—"
His grin had become definitely nasty.

             
"You mean a Dancer's an asset?" I said.

             
"Well, there's quite a waiting list for them."

             
"You can have them," I said. "They're nothing but flabby synthetic
Rasputins
. I can't think why the Mandarins have accepted them."

             
"T
hey
are
a bit of a nuisance," the agent said more soberly. "But if the tribes want them, I'm willing to look the other way when they cause trouble. There's nothing the California Republic wants more, right now, than to keep the tribes happy."

             
"It's the old heads that want the Dancers," I answered. "Nobody under twenty can stand them. By now, we've all had a bellyful of spiritual insight. Jade Dawn—that's the woman who says she's my mother—had me-chant
in
g 'Hare Krishna' and dropping acid by the time I was five. Yoga, Buddhahood, the Grail Vision—it's all one to me. Dancing to attain something leaves me cold."

             
"That's an odd attitude for a medicine man to take," he said lightly. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk.

             
"T
hat's different," I replied.

             
My tone must have been a little stiff, for he raised his eyebrows. "Is it? You know, McGregor, you're a bit difficult to understand. As far as the dancing goes, why don't you just
refuse to do it? The Mandarins—you mean the older generation by that, don't you?—the Mandarins can't really make you. They're too stoned, usually, to make anybody do anything."

             
"That's right, they can't. But the Dancer can. He's organized a private army, all the old activists. They call themselves the Avengers."

             
"Avengers?
Of what?"

             
"Anything the Dancer doesn't approve of, I guess
...
I
have
tried refusing to dance. Why else do you think they're making such a fuss about the grizzly bear suit? I've never worn it seriously."

             
The agent lowered his feet to the floor and sat up in his chair. "Ah, yes, back to the grizzly bear suit," he said. He picked up his bow from the desk and twanged the string absently.
"Did
you kill the young man?"

             
"No, I didn't," I answered.

             
"What killed him, then?"

             
"I think he had a heart attack. He was always having fainting spells. I listened once to his heart through a paper tube. He had a murmur and a wheeze in his chest like a wave pulling out from around a rock."

             
"What about the claw marks on his body?"

             
"Probably a cougar.
I didn't make the marks, anyhow."

             
"But you do know how to use the suit?" The agent gave me a sidelong glance.

             
"
Pomo
Joe told me the theory," I said. I shifted in my chair. Still, my conscience was perfectly clear. "I've never had it on but the one time. Nothing would ever have been said about young Billings' death, if I hadn't refused to join the Dancer's chorus lineup."

             
"Um.
Well, as I told you before, I can't assign a man to guard you at Noyo. If you want to come in to Ukiah, I can keep an eye on you. I might even be able to get you a temporary job."

             
"No, thanks," I said. "I'd rather take my chances with assassination at Noyo than live in Ukiah in the summer."

             
"You have a point there," he conceded. "If it gets too much for you, though, I'll be glad to take care of you here." He stood up. I rose too. He held out his hand to me. "Goodbye," he said. The interview was over.

             
I went out into the August sun. Ukiah is hot this time of year. My motorbike was parked in front of the courthouse. I got on and rode down the street to a service station, where I had my tanks
filled with wood alcohol. My bike—it's a steamer actually, with a wonderfully simple miniaturized steam engine—will burn just about anything, but it prefers alcohol. Now I was good for many, many miles.

             
I was glad to get out of Ukiah. The place depresses me; historically, there has always been friction between the coast dwellers and the inland types who live in the county seat. But as I slid smoothly along the narrow paved road toward Orr's
Springs
, my spirits rose.

             
For one thing, the county agent, though a bit needling, had been definitely friendly. It was decent of him to have offered me a job. For another, he'd made me feel that the Dancer could, after all, be stood up to. The trouble was that the people my own age, though they hated the whole mystic bit, confined their action against it to bitching. When the chips were down and the Dancer cracked that damned whip of his, they danced.

             
The road climbed a good deal. I had plenty of power, and it didn't bother me. There wasn't much traffic—an occasional truck from one of the communes, loaded with produce. After I got to
Comptche
, the road improved quite a lot.

             
I wondered what the Avengers would do if I kept on refusing to dance. An arrow through the heart seemed the most likely thing. On the other hand, the whole tribe knew I'd been studying with
Pomo
Joe. It might be impolitic to kill me just now.

             
It was beginning to get dark. I switched on my headlight. The air cooled sharply as I went over the crest of the coastal ridge. I turned to the right, onto highway number one, the coast highway. I could hear the sound of the surf. I went through Mendocino town, where a few artists still held out. A little before I got to Noyo, the hallucinations began.

             
They weren't especially disagreeable—a couple of amorphous birds, flying low, and a big coyote that was so realistic I almost unlimbered my bow to take a shot at it. Then I realized that, though there was a certain amount of moonlight, it wasn't casting any shadow. You always get things like that when there's a Dancer around.

             
The coyote trotted off into the darkness. I suppose the initial reason for the Mandarins' enthusiastic reception of the Dancers had been the latters' ability to produce veridical hallucinations. (Or rather, the Dancers' inability to restrain the production of hallucinations—they didn't do it on purpose.)

             
I've never been able to understand, though, why the Mandarins prize visual illusions so much. Perhaps our different attitudes are an example of what they would have called the generation gap. Poor old sods, it never seems to have occurred to them that they would ever be on the wrong side of the tap, with their juniors thinking them ineffective and wooden-headed. The Mandarins are the most self-righteous generation since Queen Nefertiti.

             
I got home about nine. Several fires had been lit in the open, and a little cooking was going on. Actually, the tribe could have lived in houses; Noyo had been a considerable settlement, and the Noyo Inn, where Pomo Joe and I hung our hats, was still in good shape. But most of the
Mandarins preferred the deliberate archaism of huts made of slabs of redwood bark. They were pleasant enough in the summer, but they tended to leak after the rains began.

             
I went over to one of the fires where a girl who was pretty certainly my half-sister was sitting. (She may have been my full sister, too. I'm not certain.) She was plaiting a basket.

             
"Hello, Joan," I said. "Anything you could spare a hungry man?"

             
Her face lit up. "Sam! I thought you might be back tonight. Yes, there's some cockle chowder. I kept it on the fire for you. It's good."

             
She ladled out the chowder for me with an abalone shell. I sat down beside her and began eating. 'It
is
good," I said. "What kind of cockles?"

             
"There's only one kind of cockle here," she said, laughing. "—Sam, Julian's back."

             
Julian was a year or so older than I. He'd left, rather unwillingly, on the Grail Quest about six weeks ago. He was the first from our tribe to make the trip—our first "graduate"—and we were all curious about what his experiences would be.