Bone Dance

Then I looked up to find Sher standing over me. “Santos, this isn’t even the hard part,” she said.

“I don’t know what it’s a part of.”

She dropped down on the grass in front of me. In her hand was a little lantern, glass framed in tin with a squat white candle inside. She set it down between us and lit it, and a pleasant piney smell began to spread around us. “I’ll make it easy. Heck, maybe I’ll even make it boring. What do you know about hoodoo?”

“It’s magic. Crowley’s definition, about making changes in conformity with will.”

“Do you believe it works?”

“No,” I said, before I quite thought about it.

“Good. Because it does, and that’s not how.” She let me wrestle with that for a moment, her face impassive and erratically underlit. “We’re living in a closed system. Energy can’t be created or destroyed. That’s true of mental energy, too, and spirit, and emotions — all the stuff that magic and religion are about.

“People who work with those kinds of energy, the unmeasurables, have been called hoodoo doctors. Somebody’s got a lousy love life, or is being worked against by somebody else, or wants to find a better job — it’s sort of like going to the medical doctor when you’re sick.” She gri

This all sounded reassuringly like what must have been in the science book I’d delivered today. Too reassuring to be the whole of it. I fastened, in a kind of reverse self-defense, on a lurking inconsistency. “Where are the loa supposed to come into this?”

Sherrea shook her head. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear that yet.”

“Then what you just told me isn’t true?”

“I’m trying to explain it in order so it’ll make sense. Look, hoodoo isn’t sticking pins in an apple. Hoodoo is all the energy and attention you bring to what you do. Everything you do. The work of your hands, done with all your attention, becomes a container full of energy that you can transfer to somebody else. Baking bread is a hoodoo work. So’s putting in a garden. Or fixing an amplifier, or teaching someone else to. If you do it right, with your whole head, and an awareness of where it came from, and where it’s going when it leaves you. The process it’s part of. And you have to be concentrating on moving energy, not money.”

“Then this is a hobby business?”

“There’s a difference,” she said with exaggerated patience, “between getting money for what you do, and doing it for money. If you don’t do it for love, or because you think it needs doing, get out and let somebody else do it. If nobody else does it, maybe that means it shouldn’t be done.”

A moth had come to knock against the lantern. There were fireflies in the flowerbeds, and something, an owl maybe, shot out of one of the upper branches and disappeared into the darkness. I thought about the City, about the structure and rules of all its exchanges. I remembered the ones I’d taken part in, right up to the last one. “This sounds really nice. But people don’t live like that. They want what they’ve paid for. They want things evened up. Nothing,” I said, almost against my will, “is free.”

“That’s right — that’s your damn religion, isn’t it? And the rest of the congregation is full of people like Albrecht and Beano.” She was angry. Her expression was hard to read in the u

“Don’t,” I said. “Standing by the principle has become a reflex, I guess. Besides, I’ve hurt myself with it. If I give it up now, I’m saying I hurt myself for no good reason.”

“It was a good reason,” she said, very softly. The moth was louder than she was. “You’re both alive and here. You had to pay at his rates, in his currency. There wasn’t time for anything else.”

I dropped my gaze to my crossed ankles and left it there.

“Anyway, as long as you keep the energy, all kinds of energy, moving through the system, everything is free. But as soon as you block some of it off, take it out of circulation — wham. The payback is enormous. You kept your self, your energy, out of every damn thing you did, and you’re still paying for it. Albrecht is stuffing energy in boxes and hiding it in his basement as fast as it comes in, the asshole. And everybody’s paying for it.

“When the whole system is screwed up like that, you need more than a hoodoo doctor. Straightening things out for individuals isn’t enough anymore. So what you need is a gang of people whose job is to keep the energy circulating, to show other people how it’s done, and to make sure both of those go on even when the gang isn’t there.” Sher leaned back, set her hands on her knees, and looked at me.

“Do you think you’re through?” I asked. “I’m waiting for the answer to the first question. What does this have to do with the town?”

“Oh, work a little bit, Sparrow. It’ll do you good.”

I think I knew, really. I just had to line the facts up in my head. A community of people who made food and entertainments for each other, who had no store or even any regulated system of baiter. A town that had given a herd of musk oxen an escort north, and done its best to keep tigers alive. The people who saved my life because, just then, it needed doing. “Oh,” I said, and, “The whole town?”

“That’s right,” said Sherrea. “Welcome to the Hoodoo Engineers.”

That wasn’t the end of it; I had questions, she had clarifications. But not much later, I walked alone back to the farmhouse.

Or not quite alone. For company, I had my sense of something almost seen, something hovering over me, something that would be revealed eventually, whether I liked it or not. I’d thought it would be in Sherrea’s explanation, and I’d been afraid of it. Now I wished it had been. It was spoiling my appreciation of the fireflies.

Card 10: Outcome

The Tower

Waite: The ruin of the House of Life when evil has prevailed, the rending of the House of a False Doctrine.

Gray: Change or catastrophe. Freedom gained at great cost.

Crowley: His magical weapon is the sword. His magical powers are works of wrath and vengeance.

10.0: Dancing for a rainbow, sweating for the sun

I dreamed that night, for what seemed like all night. I wanted several times to wake up, and maybe even tried to; but I could no more wake up out of the world I traveled through that night than I could have woken up out of the real one.

I’m sorry. That was a bad choice of expression. However I say it, I couldn’t wake up.

It began with the pictographs, black on white. I had forgotten them, or forgotten to mention them to anyone. I was on the left end once more, and next to me the woman with the headdress was saying to me, “There’s not time. It’s not your fault, Wind and Rain it’s not, but you’ll suffer for it all the same. You can’t be taught the dance in a fistful of suns, never mind this little slot of darkness.”

The creature with the flute beside her responded, “What’s to teach? Box step, two-step, cha-cha-cha. Every living thing knows it already. Hey,” it hollered at me, “you know those little bugs in your body? The teeny tiny ones that tell everything what to do? Tell ’em I said to lead!”

“You might try being something other than a handicap for once,” she told it. “You old liar.”