Dreamsnake by Vonda D. McIntyre Page A

why Snake could not believe a real crazy would destroy so
much so completely. The damage had been inflicted in a manner so deliberate and,
in a strange way, rational, that the madness seemed less the result of insanity
than of rage. She shivered again.
    “Come with me,” Grum said. “Crazies appear, they disappear. They’re like sand
flies, one summer you hear about them every time you turn around, the next year
nothing.”
    “I suppose you’re right.”
    “I am,” Grum said. “I know about these things. He won’t come back here, he’ll
go somewhere else, but soon we’ll all know to look for him. When we find him
we’ll take him to the menders and maybe they can make him well.”
    Snake nodded tiredly. “I hope sp.”
    She slung Squirrel’s saddle over her shoulder and picked up the serpent case.
The handle vibrated faintly as Sand slid across himself in his compartment.
    She walked with Grum toward the old woman’s camp, too tired to think anymore
about what had happened, listening gratefully to Grum’s soothing words of
comfort and sympathy. The loss of Grass, and Jesse’s death, and now this: Snake
almost wished she were superstitious, so she could believe she had been cursed.
People who believed in curses believed in ways of lifting them. Right now Snake
did not know what to think or what to believe in, or how to change the course of
misfortune her life had taken.
    “Why did he only steal my journal?” she said abruptly. “Why my maps and my
journal?”
    “Maps!” Grum said. “The crazy stole maps? I thought you’d taken them with
you. It was a crazy, then.”
    “I guess it was. It must have been.” Still, she did not convince herself.
    “Maps!” Grum said again.
    Grum’s anger and outrage seemed, for the moment, to take over for Snake’s
own. But the surprise in the old woman’s voice disturbed her.
    Snake started violently at the sharp tug on her robe. Equally startled, the
collector jumped back. Snake relaxed when she saw who it was: one of the
gleaners who picked up any bit of metal, wood, cloth, leather, the discards of
other camps, and somehow made use of it all. The collectors dressed in
multicolored robes of cloth scraps ingeniously sewn together in geometric
patterns.
    “Healer, you let us take all that? No good to you—”
    “Ao, go away!” Grum snapped. “Don’t bother the healer now. You should know
better.”
    The collector stared at the ground but did not retreat. “She can’t do with
it. We can. Let us have it. Clean it up.”
    “This is a bad time to ask.”
    “Never mind, Grum.” Snake started to tell the collector to take everything.
Perhaps they could make use of torn blankets and broken spoons; she could not.
She did not even want to see any of it again; she did not want to be reminded of
what had happened. But the collector’s request drew Snake from her questions and
her confusion and back toward reality; she recalled something Grum had said
about Ao’s people when Snake first talked to her.
    “Ao, when I vaccinate the others, will you all let me vaccinate you, too?”
    The collector looked doubtful. “Creepty-crawlies, poisons, magics,
witches—no, not for us.”
    “It’s none of that. You won’t even see the serpents.”
    “No, not for us.”
    “Then I’ll have to take all that trash out to the middle of the oasis and
sink it.”
    “Waste!” the collector cried. “No! Dirty the water? You shame my profession.
You shame yourself.”
    “I feel the same way when you won’t let me protect you against disease.
Waste. Waste of people’s lives. Unnecessary deaths.”
    The collector peered at her from beneath shaggy eyebrows. “No poisons? No
magics?”
    “None.”
    “Go last if you like,” Grum said. “You’ll see it doesn’t kill me.”
    “No creepty-crawlies?”
    Snake could not help laughing. “No.”
    “And then you give us that?” The collector gestured in the direction of
Snake’s battered