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the sort of sentiment the Noyo Dancer would want one of his Pilgrims to have. The idea had seemed to come from without me—to be externally inspired.
     
                  But Riggs—where had the Riggs extra-life come from? Anybody who has dealings with Dancers must expect to have an occasional hallucination; even being near a Dancer will trigger them. But my Riggs-life hadn't been hallucinatory at all. I had simply been Riggs, in full, unexaggerated detail, for some three-quarters of a day. If the Riggs life had been sent me by the Noyo Dancer, how had the sending been mediated?
     
                  My first thought was that it had been Brotherly's doing. Yes, but how? He had obviously been following me waiting for something to happen, and once he was assured it had begun, he had turned back to Noyo. But Brotherly hadn't touched me, given me anything, or been in contact with me except verbally (the haymaker, I felt, didn't count). He'd behaved throughout as if he were expecting me to fall into a pit that had already been dug.
     
                  I wrestled with this for a while—I was still far from normal—as I walked along. The moon should be coming up soon, but it was still so dark that I could barely make out the lay of the road ahead of me. I was beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't start looking for a place to sleep, a place above high tide where I could build a fire with driftwood, when I saw the road ahead of me light up like a stage. It was, in fact, a dissecting theater, with a cadaver lying on the dissecting table and several students in white coats watching the demonstrator. I seemed to be looking on from a double vantage point-partly from the road, where I was actually standing, and partly from the level of the dissecting table, where I was lying. I was the cadaver. My name was Alice Lemmon.
     
                  The experience was a cross between an exceptionally vivid hallucination, and the sense of absolute identity I had had as Alvin Riggs. If you want to know how I could feel a real identity with a cadaver, I refer you to a literary work that haunted my childhood, Poe's The Case of M. Valdemar. (One of the group mothers had read it to us six-year-olds.) Alice Lemmon wasn't a "mass of detestable putridity", of course; she had been well preserved in formaldehyde. But I had a terrible sense of being chained to something cold and claylike, of an unnatural intimacy with the isolatedness of death. Sam could not even look away from Alice, since her eyelids were gone.
     
                  It was beyond enduring. I (again the tertium quid) fumbled with the strings of the medicine bag tied around my neck. I remember feeling considerable surprise that my fingers would move as I was willing them to. When I got the bag open, I squatted down close to the bluff and felt over what was in the bag. The dissection, meanwhile, was silently being carried on.
     
                  There were six or eight packets of dried herbs in the bag, a rattle, a piece of snakeskin, some loose mescal buttons, an elderwood whistle, and a polished copper disk about two inches across. Pomo Joe had got the disk from a white man, a self-styled sorcerer. It was supposed to be used for scrying. It was wrapped up in a piece of black cloth.
     
                  Handling these familiar and valued objects made me feel better, able even to look away from Alice for a moment—though of course I remained lying on the dissecting table. The moon was just clearing the horizon. I unwrapped the disk and stared at it.
     
                  But I was standing in too-dense shadow. I walked over to the seaward side of the highway. Here, with my back to the moon, I looked into the disk once more. The dissection, I saw out of the comer of eye, had moved with me, and was now being carried out against the background of the glinting surf.
     
                  I have