Betula was to see many of the Ancients' alien face, those accursed peoples whose likeness was still reviled, even in the innermost recesses of the Science Institute's archives. There were times in her exploring of the Northland wastes when she would freeze in the blank stare of a toppled statue. Often she observed the details of their daily life, even the rituals of their mating recorded on the videodiscs she found and fed to her deciphering device. Genetics was a discipline to Betula and she did not doubt the prediction in the Chichen-Itza curse. What the neo-shamans regarded as the eternal rise of evil, she took to be an aberration, rare without a doubt after centuries of genocide, but possible nonetheless. Wasn't she herself one? Still, Betula couldn't have conceived that this vanished people would so often be reborn in her sleep.

More and more each summer, while her flyglider ran its nocturnal routine of hundred-mile circles above a continent lost to a darkness unbroken by lights or campfires, Betula's dreams would take her back centuries, though only a few thousand feet below. There, not yet silenced by the howling of a wolf, a soul would be crying for a witness to its passing, someone to notice the waning of a candle at a windowpane, the drifting of snow against a closed door.

Such wanderings into the past shattered Betula's equanimity, even when the experience took her to places of lesser tragedy. In a dream she once drove a train through tunnels lined with luminous messages, past crowded stations of riotous iridescences. Another time she sat in an office as a long-fingered lass sentenced to a keyboard. Awaking, Betula shuddered at the set of her shoulders, the thrust of her breast, her lust for the young man whose smile had just done its magic on a screen long gone to dust.

And dawn would break over an ocean of greenery, the rising sun revealing a tangle of converging lines. Ahead, where a forest fire had left blackened stumps, the squared corners of fireweed growths would reveal a grid of crumbled city blocks bisected by the trace of a vanished highway. Enthralled still in the hold of her dream, Betula could imagine the place reverting to its ancient busy ways, and there she would be, an average Jane commuting to her tasks.

She tried to explain such symbiotic treks into the Ancients' very life by her deepening knowledge of their world. But she also dreamed of places she had not visited, objects she had yet to encounter in her searches of the ruins of their dwellings. Sometimes she suddenly knew details of which she had not had any inkling when her eyes had closed. Logical assumptions, educated deductions, she thought. Were her dreams the intuitive vignettes of a past smothered under the spreads of endless fields of ferns, an era's memories fragmented by the sprouting of a billion aspens? Or was her nocturnal insight simply fantasy, spontaneous fiction bred of her day's intimacy with the Ancients' relics?

Troubled, Betula often wished for the clarity of thoughts she had enjoyed when she was a junior Scientist graduating into a world where reason at last was to triumph over the myth of the Shaman, the so-called sacred words now invoked to sanctify the neo-shamans' pronouncements. Her task was plain enough then. Betula's brilliance had made her eligible for a flyer's assignment. The northward march of the species and the retreat of the ice from the Ancients' lands would be her life work. Heady days when wisdom had taken full account of Science's equations, when the Council had finally squelched the lurking of the Dark by denying Science's authority to the neo-shamans' wizardry.

***************

"How dareth thee to ask of my dream?"

In their archaic cast the words had rung from the top of the amphitheater like a thunderclap. Like hundreds of others, Betula turned back to the speaker. It was Spiranthes-the-nth, her mother, heavy with child. Risen, she was glaring at the neo-shaman stunned into silence at the lectern below. Betula noticed a crow's foot at the corner of her eyes, as if she was suppressing a smile. She would give them more of that old charlatan medicine, she thought.

"How dareth thee to speak of Science, when thy concern is of nothing but trivial fragments of tales randomly spun in a mind left adrift on the ocean of sleep?"

The neo-shaman looked puzzled.

"Hear my confession, priest," said Spiranthes, "for priest is what thou art when thy care is of a mind shilly-shallying in the intoxication of its own fantasy..."

Drowned in clamors soon silenced by the moderator's bell, the neo-shaman's objection to the insult was overruled.

"Hear me now, priest," said Spiranthes, "hear this account of my mind's wanderlust and let those present decide its scientific worth."

The neo-shaman quickly glanced at the moderator whose index finger was tapping at his bell, his half-closed eyes idly surveying a sea of faces nodding in agreement. Elbows on the lectern, the neo-Shaman sneered at Spiranthes whose voice had lowered to a drone.

"Drawn a night in my dream to the henna glow of an Ancient's forge, I happened on three spools of a copper wire slowly unwinding on redwood axles. On the largest was spun the lifeline of our institutions, the median assessed the wear of our machines, and when I knew that the smallest was timing my ebbing years, from nowhere flashed a dagger to sever the wire in a cloud of crimson."

Sighs rose from the neo-Shaman's cohorts.

"Imagine my shock, priests," the plural 's' hissing its note of derision in Spiranthes' now casual tone, "yet I am here, alive."

"And last night I dreamt a confusing jumble of embracing bodies, silent struggles of oddly behaving shapes, obscene dances of insanely driven creatures in the deep of a purple night. Not much meaning or continuity there, save for the recurring presence of the same character..."

She paused, shifting her feet, the crow's feet at her eyes widening in a pained expression. When she placed her hands on her belly, shoulders dropping, head cocked slightly, to half the audience she was the Mother incarnate while the other half was set to run for a midwife. Masterly, thought Betula as Spiranthes, eyes closed, continued in an almost inaudible drone.

"... parties, painful scenes of utter debauchery. Black rites. Orgies... and the same character always..."

Another pause while mouths gaped everywhere, the neo-shaman's eyes darting about below his furrowed brow.

"...thy spouse, priest, wearing nary a stitch."

The neo-shaman was livid, mouthing protests unheard in a cacophony of chuckles and catcalls. The bell shook a long time before Spiranthes, her hand held to the audience in a calming gesture, could be heard anew.

"Am I lying, priest, or was I dreaming?"

There were more laughs, but Spiranthes was trying the Tribune's patience. While noting a Judge staying the hand of the moderator who had taken hold of his bell, Betula was aghast. Nothing in the Institute's curriculum had prepared her for the sight of her mother admitting to erotic dreams at a joint session of the Sages, the Judges, and the Scientists. She observed on the neo-shamans' faces a certain gloating at the sight of a freak telling of her appearance at a scene of depravation. Betula would have to face the snickers, the oversexed moron jibes about her mother's descent from the original Spiranthes, the first miscegenation enthusiast in the Institute record. Betula would have to forego her trip to the coffee bar in the morning, hide in her rooms. And again Spiranthes-the-nth was lowering her voice to a hiss.

"Listen, priest, if I really dreamt such inanity, would I tell of it in the morrow? Could I be found to be embellishing my recollections? Did I make it all up to provoke your anger, or manipulate a curiosity that you proclaim to be 'scientific' in nature?"

Without waiting for an answer, she drew an apple from her cloak, held it at arm length, and let it fall. Down from tier to tier the apple bounced, to finally roll against the lectern. Downcast the neo-shaman appeared unaware of the triumphant tone in her next words.

"Priest, Science has dicta to govern its methods. One rule, fundamental to all disciplines is that experiments must be replicable."

As murmurs swept the hall, the crow's feet reappeared at Spiranthes' narrowed eyes.

"Say priest, has thou power enough to replicate my dream?"

The audience hushed, some stealing glances at the stricken faces of the neo-shaman's friends. She continued with a burden in her voice.

"Bear with me my friends, and recall the downfall of a great civilization so attuned to the discomfort of its citizens that the number of its psychologists and astrologers grew to surpass even the count of its lawyers. Sadness and depression were seen as medical emergencies to be treated by drugs easily obtained in hospital wards or by contraband. Suicide had become the most likely cause of the early death of children."

The story was well known. Some bowed their heads as Spiranthes concluded somberly.

"And when darkness came to that nation, its peoples were unable to rise from their orgy of self-indulgence and despair to ward off the onset of violence that destroyed them all."

As she sat down, a page scurried out the door behind the Judges' tribune. While the neo-shaman gathered his papers from the lectern, the first scattato of a drum rose to thunder rolls outside. Moronic as it may have been, Spiranthes-the-nth's argument had carried the day and driven Neo-shamanry from the Hall of Sciences.

NEXT CHAPTER: BURN, BABY BURN