The Dancers of Noyo (32 page)

             
I leaned back against the branches, waiting. Darkness got in under my eyelids, when I closed them, and drowned out the memory of light. Like a man roused too soon from sleep,
who
clings to the tatters of his dream, I
c
lung to the scraps of the splendor I had climbed through. They were torn from me, and the treacherous darkness welled over me. But enough light remained for me to be able to endure the darkness. The branches would shelter me.

             
It was a test, the first of the tests of the strength of my longing for the sunbasket vision. But nobody required that I pass it. It was my own affair.

             
I tried to think what made the darkness so terrible. The answer was so simple that it increased my fear. I was afraid that I might wander forever through the darkness, in a February midnight of the soul. I was afraid the sunbasket vision might never come.

             
(That the danger was real is shown, I think, by the disposal Bill, and several others of the chemical-conscience people, eventually made of themselves. The vision, in general outline, was the same for everybody within its range. But the details varied from person to person, and so did the final effect.)

             
It didn't occur to me to wonder, at the moment, why my longing to behold the vision was so intense. I'd never given the tribal talk about the vision any particular credence. But the longing was with me now, as real and actual as if I'd been born with it. In a sense, I suppose I had.

             
I really didn't have any choice. I wanted too much to be possessed of—"seized of", to put it in archaic English
—
I wanted too much to be possessed of the vision to let the time go by without trying for it. I stayed among the branches a moment longer, feeling how good their shelter was. Then I climbed up and out into the dark.

             
At first it wasn't as bad as I had feared it would be. I felt a rather cheap pride in my own bravery. Then the darkness caught up with me, and my memory of light was gone. I couldn't remember what I missed so much.

             
And my
amnesia
was a grinding misery, the small hours in the February night of the soul.

             
I tried to remember the word "light" but it eluded me. The best I could do was a periphrasis, a tag
about
"the uncounted laughter of the waves," which was what Aeschylus had called the glinting of light from the rippling surface of salt water. But I had forgotten what "laughter" was.

             
I wasn't disembodied; and I was my real self, Sam McGregor, who had been trained by Pomo Joe to be a medicine man. This experience didn't resemble my handful of extra-lives at all. But I don't know how I could have had such a strong sense of my own body when the space through which I moved was, so to speak, highly abstract. The fabric of it seemed more generalized than that of our
ordinary
world, perhaps more tenuous. But there was nothing tenuous or unreal about the misery I was experiencing. I was Sam McGregor, and I could have howled with misery and despa
ir
.

             
There were flickers of
...
something
...
now and then. Not light. The darkness never wavered. But it was as if, at moments, I had almost succeeded in recalling what light was. Every time this happened, I felt worse.

             
I seemed to be walking. In the abstract darkness my muscles tensed and relaxed. I wasn't any place in particular, since all places were alike in the dark, and yet I moved. I was a point wandering in search of a plane.

             
I was a man who wanted to see the Grail Vision—the sunbasket vision—and who had forgotten what "seeing" meant.

             
There came another adumbration, a moment when the idea of the idea of light seemed almost possible. It left me, and this time I knew I had reached my limit. I must get help from somewhere.

             
This is the second of the
testings
of the sunbasket vision—the moment when the seeker, desperate for rescue from the blackness, must call up all his resources and review his whole life, looking for help.

             
It is the same for everybody, though of course what is summoned up is individual. It means that the seeker must find the central point of his life. He must look for the one sacred, essential thing, and use it to pass the test.

             
I could do no more than try.

             
It was strange to be thinking without visual images. I couldn't see things in my mind as one ordinarily does, but only the dimmest of outlines, plus a kind of oral soundtrack. But I retraced my life, moving backward from Franny and the most recent days, through my training by Pomo Joe, to the books I had read as an adolescent, the g
ir
ls I had made out with, Jade Dawn, and my brothers and sisters of the tribe. I didn't neglect my extra-lives, either, for they had happened as really as the other things had.

             
Then I began to move forward again, stopping at things that seemed especially significant. I thought of enemies and friends, people I had loved and
hated,
who had helped or hindered me. I thought of Franny a good deal.

             
In the end it seemed to me that the most helpful thing had been what Kate Wimbold had said when she came out of the water. I think my lips moved. For the third time I was invoking the covenants.

             
..
.The sunbasket, the Holy Grail, was there.

             
It was simply
there,
without any epiphany, any slow, impressive dawning. This is the great secret, you
see,
what all the mystics always try to tell us; it was always there.

             
The sunbasket had been there all the time. I hadn't been able to see it. I hadn't
noticed
it.

             
The sunbasket vision existed on several levels at once.
(The darkness had gone away as soon as I had perceived the basket, not so much because the sunbasket was a source of light, as because it and darkness couldn't coexist.) It was, in the first place, a magnificent sunbasket of the kind the Pomo, unequalled basket-makers, had actually made.

             
The Pomo had used woodpecker feathers to make their best baskets a blaze of scarlet, and they had set off the burning scarlet with rows of vivid yellow feathers from other birds. The necks of such baskets were usually adorned with a rim of
ir
idescent haliotis shell, and pendants of haliotis had hung down from the rim. So it was with the basket of the vision I beheld. Only all was made in effulgence and radiance. No woodpecker's feathers ever burned with such scarlet, no haliotis shell ever commanded such a range of brilliance.

             
In the second place, the basket was not only a basket, it was, at times and unpredictably, a luminous silvery cup from the sides of which shone a white radiance. The reason for this was that the sunbasket vision had a collective authorship; and when people of western European origin think of a vision, they tend to think of the Holy Grail. So the vision was sometimes of a basket, and sometimes of a cup.

             
But finally—and this was what gave what I was seeing it quality of vision and unveiling—the sunbasket was a woman's body, it was the starry universe, it was the curvature and naissance of space. In the vision of the basket there was no otherness. Everything was one. Beholding it—and I perceived it though the back of my head, through my skin, through my whole
body, as well as through my eyes—I beheld what embraced appearances as the ocean embraces the shore. The basket was the ocean, I was the ocean,
everything
was one.

             
From this pelagic bliss I was roused by an emotion I couldn't at first identify. It was so alien to the sense of union and completion that I couldn't for a while believe in it. Then I realized I was feeling a profound, aching grief.

             
Grief?
What for? I tried to push it away, to go back to blissful unity I had felt before. After all, the basket was still there, and I had no reason to grieve. But, as if my inexplicable grief had somehow triggered the happening, the sunbasket began to burn.

             
It was consumed quietly, with a light of great beauty and tenderness. It was the most beautiful of any of the lights I had seen in the course of my whole visionary experience. I had no wish to delay the burning. My grief had gone, and I felt that what was happening was proper and right.

             
It was over. The light died away gently. I was standing in a tranquil darkness. I had had the sunbasket vision, the vision of the Holy Grail.

             
I stood for
a moment
thinking, before I opened my eyes. The vision had been coauthored. All those who had ever
Jived
on this coast, with their aspirations, fears and hopes, had contributed to it. The vision was the distillation of an interaction between the people and the land. The land remembered its old owners. At the end, the sunbasket had burned because the Pomo had burned their splendid baskets in honor of their dead.

             
I opened my eyes and looked about me. I was standing where I had been when the Dancer had died. I was still bound, and I must have been standing up all night, but I felt rested and alert.

             
The Dancer lay beside the ashes of the fire. In the east light was growing. It would soon be day.

-

             
We had breakfasted. It had been a bang-up breakfast
—
abalone steaks, acorn-meal flapjacks with wild blackberry jam, and lashings of bear jerky. I have never enjoyed a meal more. The older members of the Gualala tribe seemed less elated; they were sitting about in disconsolate attitudes, with blank or shot expressions on their faces. I felt that their experiences in the course of the vision had been considerably rougher than those of their juniors. Nobody said anything about carrying out the dead Dancer's sentence against Franny and me. Bill, the chemical-conscience man, was nowhere to be seen. A new spirit was in the a
ir
.

             
Joel, the young tribesman who had brought me the gourd of spiked water in the sweathouse, walked over to the body of the Dancer and gave it a contemptuous but timid kick. "We ought to get this thing buried," he said. "It'll start to smell."

             
While the Mandarins looked on dourly, a burial party was formed, all members tribesmen under twenty. I went along with them, glad to see the end of at least one mature Dancer. There was only one spade, and the buriers passed it from hand to hand.

             
They buried the Dancer pretty deep. While the grave
was being dug, Joel said to me, "What killed the Dancer, anyhow? That bag you threw on the fire?"

             
"I think so," I answered. "There was an herb in my bag, Ephedra
californica
, or Mormon tea. It was the smoke from that killed your Dancer." I looked at the dead android. The progress of decay had turned its skin
a light
lavender. It was a rather pretty color, actually.

             
"We always thought they were immortal," Joel said. "That's what made us so easy to push around."

             
"No, not really.
The Dancers were grown from the tissues of a man called Bennet—"

             
"I've heard of him," Joel said.