The Dancers of Noyo Read Online Free PDF Page B

unmade mattress beds, heaps of clothing, dog droppings. From the mess, he would have expected them to have cholera rather than malaria.
     
                  The latrines, too, were empty. Riggs went back to stand uncertainly on the edge of the dust cloud, listening to the shuffling of feet and the heavy repeated thud. Up close, he could see that the cloud was raised by a big circle of people, hand-in-hand, moving slowly from right to left as their hands swung back and forth. The dust was stifling.
     
                  A girl, her back to him, shuffled slowly past. On impulse Riggs put his hand on her shoulder and tried to draw her out of the circle. He'd have to talk to somebody, sometime, and the girl might as well be the one.
     
                  She resisted. Riggs kept on pulling, blinking his eyes against the swirling dust. He had to shuffle along beside her, keeping up his pull. Finally her hands slid out of those of the people on either side of her and she came stumbling out of the circle. Alvin had her free.
     
                  She was so covered with dust that she looked like an unbaked gingerbread man. "Why are you dancing?" Alvin asked. It was the first thing he could think of to say, but already he had the feeling that the situation was out of his control, beyond his command.
     
                  She looked at him unseeingly. "Sheba had puppies," she said in a fainting voice, "and my baby is so sick, and Nick is stoned again. He always beats me when he stops being stoned. He says he dances better when he's stoned." She whimpered, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. "Let me go back. I want back in the circle. I want to dance."
     
                  Alvin had felt a throb of interest at the mention of the sick baby. Reluctantly he released the girl's hands. She stood swaying for a minute. Then she pulled at the joined hands of the people shuffling past her until they parted. An instant later she was back in the dust cloud again.
     
                  Alvin didn't know what to do. If he could find the woman's baby, he might be able to get blood samples from it without asking anybody. It would avoid a lot of trouble. But where was the baby? He had found nobody in any of the buildings. Was everybody in the New Life Commune within the circle of shuffling dancers?
     
                  Once more Alvin pulled at a dancer's hands. This time it was a man, and he was less docile than the girl had been. He jerked his hands back from Alvin's touch with an angry grunt.
     
                  The CBW warrior was beginning to be stung by the desperation of the ignored. He caught the man by the shoulders and tried to swing him around to face him. The dancer staggered, but refused to yield to the pressure, and the next moment he had jerked himself loose.
     
                  "Get out," he said to Alvin in a flat, hoarse voice. He was still facing inward toward the circle. "We'd kill you if we weren't dancing. You're not a dancer. Get out of here."
     
                  "Say, listen, fella—" Alvin began indignantly, and then halted, realizing the futility of argument. What the dancer had told him wasn't so much an expression of hostility as it was a statement. He didn't belong in this place.
     
                  He tried once more, selecting a girl again. Without looking at him she swung her hand, joined to that of the man next to her, upward and back. She hit him—not un - painfully, for she was wearing a heavy ring—on the side of the chin.
     
                  The unexpectedness of the blow made Alvin wince. He was still trying to decide what to do when words, seeming to come from somewhere inside the circle, began to be heard: "Our Father, Our Father. Our Mother, Our Mother. Our Brother, Our Brother. Our Arrows will come back. Our Arrows will come