FSF, October 2007 Page 17

  "A very common reason for entering the spirit world is to find what has been lost. Valuable objects. Missing persons! Shamans also achieve entry in ways that are less unpleasant than purging or ingesting peyote buttons. Drumming, for instance, can effect the separation. Also, some of the most powerful shamans are known to be strong dreamers."

  Pam stared at him, then back at the poster. Her heart began to thump in her chest. “These pictures are thousands of years old,” she protested.

  "This painted shaman does not portray your experience specifically, my dear.” He trotted to the nurse's station and did some things to the computer, while Pam continued to stare at the unnerving rabbit-eared figure with its bird halo. “But these shamans of a different ancient culture,” he said a moment later, “do.” He turned the screen so Pam could see.

  It was another pictograph, done in a different style. Against a whitish, uneven surface Pam made out a pair of shapes like identical red sausages, each with four stick limbs, placed horizontally at the center of the screen. Each arm and leg terminated in a three-toed bird's foot.

  Sausages or not, stick limbs or not, there was nothing Easter Island-like about these figures. That they were in flight was unmistakable, partly owing to the fact that above and below them, and oriented in the same direction, a flock of birds was flying. These were no tiny creatures swarming like gnats around an immobile spaceman's antennae. Relative to the sausage figures these birds were large, and there were a lot of them—ten—and though they had been painted crudely, the arrangement was extremely dynamic. The shamans flew across the rock wall and the birds flew with them, supporting them, guiding them—Pam stepped to the station and leaned on it; her ears had begun to ring.

  There was writing on the screen, a caption: “Escort Birds of Fate Bell.” Below the label Pam read: “In this rare scene from Fate Bell Shelter, ten birds flank two flying shaman figures, illustrating their role as psychopomps or guardian spirits during the shamanic voyage of the soul."

  What the Sam Hill was a psychopomp? Wordlessly she looked at Humphrey, who said, “The people who made these pictures, called the Pecos River culture, lived in western Texas perhaps three thousand years ago, at approximately the same time the people in these reproductions on the walls were living here in Utah.

  "Despite the distances involved, the rock paintings of the two cultures are amazingly alike in many respects. Not in how they are painted, but in what they depict. No one is able to explain this likeness satisfactorily, or explain why it should be shared by one other culture in Baja California, and by no others in between or elsewhere.

  "But in one way—one thrilling way!—the Pecos River people were unique.” He punched some keys, and a different picture flashed on the screen: a weathered oval figure outlined in red. The interior of its torso had been painted black, with red and yellow markings. Strikingly, the torso and outspread limbs were heavily fringed in red, giving it somewhat the aspect of a paramecium with arms. Even more strikingly, the figure was headless. Two straight red lines jutted up from the neck region and two other lines crossed them at the tips; to Pam it looked rather like a child's drawing of a trolley car. The caption said: “FANTASTIC CREATURES, THE DART-HEADED FIGURES. Invariably, these creatures can be identified by the parallel lines crossed by one or two bars that substitute for its head. The cross bars often bear an oval motif that designates them as a sign for dart or lance. Some part of the body is hairy, whether just the appendages or the entire torso ... this mythical creature is so consistent and common, it must represent a well-known actor in the Pecos River cosmological cast whose role in some way informed the audience, but the intent of this morality play is no longer evident."

  Now Humphrey was making different versions of the monstrous creature flick on the computer screen. There seemed to be quite a few of them. “Dart-headed figure, Devils River.” “Dart-headed figure, Pecos River.” “Dart-headed figures, Panther Cave.” The figures had plainly been rendered by many different hands, but virtually all were fringed in dark red, as if tricked out in Daniel Boone buckskins.

  Pam wanted to get back to the escort birds, but Humphrey kept methodically displaying pictographs of the hairy headless beings. Quelling her impatience, she said, “These look powerful, but creepy. What's the fringe, is it static electricity?"

  "No,” said Humphrey, and waited. After a bit Pam looked up from the screen. All his body hair was erected. As she stared, he raised his stumpy arms to the sides and she knew at once what he was going to say.

  He said it. “They dreamed us."

  "They—"

  "Dreamed us. Three thousand years ago, the Pecos River people dreamed the Hefn."

  Pam stared at him, then at the screen. “The heads—the heads are weapons. Thought control—hypnotic suggestion. Memory excision?"

  "Yes."

  "That's—no, wait, wait a minute.” She backed off, waving her arms as if to drive the thought away. “How can you know that? These could be anything, you can't be sure they're Hefn! Unless there was a contact you never happened to mention, three thousand years ago!"

  Humphrey bent his body and perched on the nurse's desk chair. “I came across the pictures by sheerest chance, in California, in a book. When I saw them, I knew. No: when I saw them in the book, I believed. Then I saw these ancient images painted on the living rock with my own eyes, and then I did know. As you knew the Ephremites had stolen Lexi, I knew this."

  "That they dreamed the Hefn. Three thousand years ago.” Pam reached for a chair and sat in it.

  "Last February, when I was coming to see you in Salt Lake,” he said, “I made a detour. I went to Texas. Del Rio, Texas. There is no airfield. I was driven to Del Rio from Austin, Texas, in an ambulance, by a rock art expert who does not remember what he did that day."

  As always, Pam winced at this allusion to casual mindwipe—of Humphrey erasing a day out of somebody's life to satisfy his curiosity. She pushed the reaction away. “Did you take a transceiver?"

  He twisted, a Hefn shrug. “What would be the point? We open a window, we observe a shaman painting a ‘dart-headed figure’ on a cave wall. What would this reveal to us? If he told stories about these figures, we would not understand what he was saying. As you observe, the figures could be anything. But they are not,” said Humphrey fiercely, “'anything'!"

  "Before I say one more word,” Pam said, “I want to know if I'm going to remember this conversation."

  The Hefn conveyed shock. “How can you ask me this?"

  Pam thought of the hapless rock-art expert from Austin. “How can I not? Look what you're showing me!"

  Humphrey's flat eyes turned on Pam. “Have you understood nothing then, my dear? That everything is different now?"

  Pam stared back. “Why is everything different?"

  "Because,” said Humphrey, “the Hefn do not dream the future. The Hefn do not dream at all! Using a piece of finely calibrated equipment, and our mental abilities, we look into the past. But you, Pam Pruitt, one of our own from childhood, with no equipment of any sort, have dreamed an event before it occurred. Like the shamans of old, you have looked into the future."

  "Not very far into the future,” Pam protested lamely. “A few hours, maybe half a day."

  Humphrey hit another key and the image of a dart-headed figure flipped back onscreen. “These humans saw three millennia into the future. You are a Temporal Physics Apprentice, a mathematician, you understand the behavior of irrational numbers and nonlinear equations. You understand how chaos overwhelms every attempt to predict the future mathematically. But Time is One! Like the shamans of old, you have overleapt the predictive models, you have seen what will be!” As he spoke Humphrey had been tapping more keys; and now four figures shaped like bullets with arms and legs soared up the face of a cliff, trailed by a horizontal line of five large ducklike birds with outspread wings. The caption read, “Birds and anthropomorphic figures rising from a sawtooth horizon at Rio Grande Cliffs, Texas. Copy. Original inundated afte
r the construction of Armistad Reservoir."

  More escort birds, drowned ones. Pam shivered; way beyond freaky though it was, she was frankly mesmerized. Another tap, and still another image: “Rotund shaman rising in a cloud of birds. Halo Shelter on Devils River.” Tingling excitement surged through Pam, a thrill of focussed energy; she was frankly dying to know more. “These are all in Texas?"

  "Yes. But many, many rock paintings and petroglyphs from many, many ancient cultures depict birds and shamans,” Humphrey informed her. “Everywhere, birds are seen as symbolic of the flight of the human soul from the body, into the spirit world. I have delved deep into the subject of shamanism since my visit to Texas."

  "Whoa,” said Pam. “We're getting pretty far into a belief system I haven't got anymore, when we start talking about the human soul and the spirit world."

  Humphrey twinkled for the first time since catching a whiff of the approaching cobbler. “It would appear to be unnecessary for the individual to embrace the belief system, if the belief system has decided to embrace the individual.” But then he spoke in dead earnest. “You also, Pam Pruitt, must now delve deep into the subject of shamanism. Also into the subject of precognitive dreaming, which is the same subject au fond. At bottom. These matters were studied intensively by anthropologists and neurologists, before the coming of the Hefn. There is a very great deal for you to learn, whole libraries of information!"

  "Look,” said Pam, “I'll do it, I guess I want to anyway, but I wouldn't get my hopes up, I mean I wouldn't count on this being any help with the Homestead problem. It might be just something personal to me."

  "Nevertheless I shall hope,” he said fervently. “It may be our best hope. It may be all the hope we have!"

  Her thoughts went racing ahead. “Then what if I just"—she realized as she said it how good this sounded—"drop out for a while? Just go away and start learning? Jaime can take over in Salt Lake, he's ready for that."

  Humphrey never skipped a beat. “Will you go to Kentucky?"

  "Texas first. Then Kentucky.” Her personal Ground: perfect. “I'd rather nobody knew for now. We can say I'm making a retreat, brainstorming about Homeland. Not that far from the truth."

  He “nodded.” “A good provisional plan. I think you are right to tell no one. Telling could dilute the force at work in you."

  Pam nodded with him. The mystery of what her mind was developing into now begged to be solved; solve that, and the answer might bear upon the conundrum of what lay in the future for humanity and their alien overseers. That was what Humphrey obviously believed, and really he had a point. Two decades spent mining the past had not resolved the conflict; if it were possible, why not seek a solution in the future, where ancient Pecos River shamans had encountered the Hefn three thousand years ago?

  Then with a jolt she remembered. “Uh-oh—what about Lexi? I told Jaime to get custody papers ready for me to sign as soon as I got back to Salt Lake! Damn! It could take a while to find her another situation, if we even can.” The need to rescue Lexi, to get information about her not available by ordinary means, had evidently rammed the “transformation” through; but Lexi was safe now. Pam paced the reception, passing back and forth beneath monumental or attenuated red anthropomorphs sublimely indifferent to her dilemma. “It won't be easy, she needs a lot of sensitive support. I hate to put anything extra on Jaime and Claudia right now. Maybe one of the other Gaians, or like a younger couple—"

  "Couldn't I just come with you?"

  Humphrey and Pam spun around, and there, of course, was Lexi standing in the doorway, barefoot in underpants and T-shirt and her white sling. “They can kill me off. Or maybe leave me with the Pawnees till my arm gets better. I wouldn't be any trouble, honest,” she pleaded, “I could help out!"

  Shit! Before Pam could stop herself she had blurted sharply, “How long have you been standing there eavesdropping?"

  "I didn't mean to eavesdrop! I just woke up and heard you talking, and my arm was hurting, and then you said,” her voice squeaked up, she was trying not to cry, “that it was a picture of the Hefn, so I got up, I was going to come out, but then I wasn't sure if I should, and then you said—"

  Two tears spilled down her face. Stricken, Pam rushed to put her arms around Lexi, taking care not to bump the wrist. “Oh, sweetie. I'm sorry. You weren't eavesdropping at all, I shouldn't have used that word, it's our fault for talking where you might wake up and hear us.” The girl sagged against her, crying openly now, not trying to hold it in. Inwardly Pam sagged too. Her bubble of excitement had been popped, but that wasn't the worst. Given a good enough reason, she had proved as ready to betray Lexi as any of them.

  "Little Lexi, do not cry,” Humphrey said, and quietly to Pam, “Shall I take this memory away?"

  Pam shook her head; but Lexi, her face muffled in Pam's teal-green uniform shirt, said, “Could I come to Texas if I did?"

  "You can come anyway,” Pam said. “Or else neither of us will go, but from now on we stick together no matter what. I promise."

  * * * *

  Coming Attractions

  You're probably reading this issue during the dog days of summer, but here at the Spilogale factory our workers are busily stocking up on fiction for the fall and winter.

  In our December issue, we've got “Finisterra” lined up. Written by newcomer David Moles, this science fiction story is an ambitious and imaginative adventure that calls to mind the early works of Lucius Shepard.

  We've also got penciled in for December Frederic S. Durbin's creepy story of a killer encountering small-town life in the Midwest in “The Bone Man.” David Marusek and Michaela Roessner are also likely to have stories in the issue.

  Among the other stories that the Spilogale factory is producing are new ones by John Kessel, Alex Irvine, and Kate Wilhelm, to name just three. Subscribe now and join us as we try to make the new year our best one yet.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Plumage From Pegasus: Book Clubbed by Paul Di Filippo

  "The Book Club Companion has a goal: to emulate one of the most successful and evergreen how-to guides around. It would like to tell you what to expect when you're expecting to read a book.

  "To that end, the author, Diana Loevy, puts on her party hat and pulls out all the stops. She calls for everything from hole punchers (aren't you keeping a scrapbook?) to dog costumes. And she treats any literary experience as an occasion for merriment. Gauche as it might be to bake Marie Antoinette Cake in honor of the French Revolution, The Book Club Companion steers the festive reader in that direction."

  —"Which Cheese Goes Best With Faulkner?” by Janet Maslin, The New York Times, September 4, 2006.

  * * * *

  It all started innocently enough, I suppose. No one could have predicted at the beginning that our weekly book club meetings would result in over a dozen ruined marriages, the disbanding of the PTA at Edmund Wilson Middle School, several bank holdups, one full-blown international crisis, three gender-reassignment operations, and at least four separate stints at various drug-rehab clinics, not to mention an additional bushel basket of similarly upsetting incidents, all of which stood out vividly in our small town of Farblondjet, Nebraska.

  But despite all the tumult and distress, I still fondly recall the enthusiasm and high hopes we all had for our little literary salon at the start.

  We convened that first Wednesday night at Sally Peterson's house. Sally had the nicest rumpus room, with a wet bar and pool table and lots of comfy seating, and had been generous enough to volunteer her place. Originally we were going to rotate our meetings among the houses of the various members. But when Sarah Ozols protested that she'd never fit us all into her studio apartment (over in the Latvian-dominated Brindleback district, where no one trusted the street parking anyway), we all voted to make Sally's home our permanent meeting spot.

  So there we were, fifteen women who more or less all knew each other pretty well (we had tried unsuccessfully to interest a few of our hu
sbands and boyfriends in the group), holding Bloody Marys and wondering how to begin.

  "Has anyone ever been in a book club before?” asked Tina Feldman. “I certainly haven't done anything so creative myself."

  A chorus of “no's” greeted her question.

  "I didn't think so,” continued Tina. “That's why I went looking for a reference work to help us get started. Here's what I found."

  She dug a book out of her knitting bag and passed it around.

  Diana Loevy's The Book Club Companion.

  The Bible of our doom.

  We all clustered around the book, studying its light-hearted, good-natured, informative pages that taught us such clever tricks as how to entertain (and drink!) thematically. Excitement surged, and pretty soon we had concluded our first meeting by vowing to pattern ourselves completely along the lines of Loevy's guide.

  "This will be so much fun!” exclaimed Donna Starzl. “No dry literary discussions! More like a costume party or an amateur theatrical event or a support group every week!"

  "But centered around a book,” Beth Ostrander politely reminded us.

  "Of course,” said Tina. “We just have to choose our first title."

  Well, none of us wanted to venture right off the bat into the confusing domain of brand-new books, so in the end we opted for a classic: James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  "And we can watch the movie afterwards too!” shouted out Lena Bolland. Lena had had three Bloody Marys to everyone else's two. “That John Garfield was so hot!"

  "John Garfield?” I said. “I thought that was Jack Nicholson...."

  "You're both right,” said Beth. “There were two versions. But no movie-watching till you've read the actual book."

  "And don't forget,” Tina chirped in, “we're doing the whole discussion Loevy-style!"

  The next week we reconvened, and everyone had gone enthusiastically full out, totally getting into the spirit of the Loevy-style book club.

  All the girls were dressed up in period clothing, Depression-era duds they had dug out of attics. Some came in “drag,” as men with false mustaches. A few had borrowed vintage cars like the ones we saw in the annual Elks parade.