Sundance

Joy consumes them and they topple and lie still. Occasionally a limb twitches; then even this stops. They begin to dissolve. Thousands of them melt on the prairie, sinking into shapelessness, losing spherical forms, flattening, ebbing into the ground. The bonds of the molecules will no longer hold. It is the twilight of protoplasm. They perish. They vanish. For hours I walk the prairie. Now I inhale oxygen; now I eat a lemon-colored globe. Sunset begins with the ringing of leaden chimes. Black clouds make brazen trumpet calls in the east and the deepening wind is a swirl of coaly bristles. Silence comes. Night falls. I dance. I am alone.

The copter comes again, and they find you, and you do not resist as they gather you in. You are beyond bitterness. Quietly you explain what you have done and what you have learned, and why it is wrong to exterminate these people. You describe the plant you have eaten and the way it affects your senses, and as you talk of the blessed synesthesia, the texture of the wind and the sound of the clouds and the timbre of the sunlight, they nod and smile and tell you not to worry, that everything will be all right soon, and they touch something cold to your forearm, so cold that it is a whir and a buzz and the deintoxicant sinks into your vein and soon the ecstasy drains away, leaving only the exhaustion and the grief.

* * *

He says, “We never learn a thing, do we? We export all our horrors to the stars. Wipe out the Armenians, wipe out the Jews, wipe out the Tasmanians, wipe out the Indians, wipe out everyone who’s in the way, and then come here and do the same damned murderous thing. You weren’t with me out there. You didn’t dance with them. You didn’t see what a rich, complex culture the Eaters have. Let me tell you about their tribal structure. It’s dense: seven levels of matrimonial relationships, to begin with, and an exogamy factor that requires—”

Softly Ellen says, “Tom, darling, nobody’s going to harm the Eaters.”

“And the religion,” he goes on. “Nine gods, each one an aspect of the god. Holiness and wrongness both worshiped. They have hymns, prayers, a theology. And we, the emissaries of the god of wrongness—”

“We’re not exterminating them,” Michaelson says. “Won’t you understand that, Tom? This is all a fantasy of yours. You’ve been under the influence of drugs, but now we’re clearing you out. You’ll be clean in a little while. You’ll have perspective again.”

“A fantasy?” he says bitterly. “A drug dream? I stood out in the prairie and saw you drop pellets. And I watched them die and melt away. I didn’t dream that.”

“How can we convince you?” Chang asks earnestly. “What will make you believe? Shall we fly over the Eater country with you and show you how many millions there are?”

“But how many millions have been destroyed?” he demands.

They insist that he is wrong. Ellen tells him again that no one has ever desired to harm the Eaters. “This is a scientific expedition, Tom. We’re here to study them. It’s a violation of all we stand for to injure intelligent lifeforms.”

“You admit that they’re intelligent?”

“Of course. That’s never been in doubt.”

“Then why drop the pellets?” he asks. “Why slaughter them?”

“None of that has happened, Tom,” Ellen says. She takes his hand between her cool palms. “Believe us. Believe us.”

He says bitterly, “If you want me to believe you, why don’t you do the job properly? Get out the editing machine and go to work on me. You can’t simply talk me into rejecting the evidence of my own eyes.”

“You were under drugs all the time,” Michaelson says.

“I’ve never taken drugs! Except for what I ate in the meadow, when I danced—and that came after I had watched the massacre going on for weeks and weeks. Are you saying that it’s a retroactive delusion?”

“No, Tom,” Schwartz says. “You’ve had this delusion all along. It’s part of your therapy, your reconstruct. You came here programmed with it.”

“Impossible,” he says.

Ellen kisses his fevered forehead. “It was done to reconcile you to mankind, you see. You had this terrible resentment of the displacement of your people in the nineteenth century. You were unable to forgive the industrial society for scattering the Sioux, and you were terribly full of hate. Your therapist thought that if you could be made to participate in an imaginary modern extermination, if you could come to see it as a necessary operation, you’d be purged of your resentment and able to take your place in society as—”

He thrusts her away. “Don’t talk idiocy! If you knew the first thing about reconstruct therapy, you’d realize that no reputable therapist could be so shallow. There are no one-to-one correlations in reconstructs. No, don’t touch me. Keep away. Keep away.”

He will not let them persuade him that this is merely a drug-born dream. It is no fantasy, he tells himself, and it is no therapy. He rises. He goes out. They do not follow him. He takes a copter and seeks his brothers.

* * *