“You might try being something other than a handicap for once,” she told it. “You old liar.”

“You,” it said with sudden dignity, “are no fun. What business do you have talking about dancing, the mood you’re in? Get thee to an alehouse. Time’s a-wastin’. We’re outta here. Music, music, music!”

Three dimensions. It wasn’t a sudden transition, but until then it had been a paper-flat world. Dream logic. The creature with the flute still was, and wasn’t anymore, and was clutching my wrist and flinging me. Someone else caught me, and flung me again. I could hear the flute, but I couldn’t see it. But even more than the flute, I could hear drums, the crisp rolling voices of the drums from the village circle. I could see the drummers, male and female, gleaming with sweat, bare-shouldered, their lips drawn back in grins of exertion and delight. Someone else caught my arms.

Jammers. I was the balky axle in their wheel. They were stamping and clapping to the drums, their eyes rolled back in their heads. “Step! Step! Step!” they chanted. Their skinny arms and bony elbows were like the bare branches of trees, jerked in the wind of the beat. They held me down. The drums hammered at me, cut openings in my skin, laid their rhythm-eggs in the bloody wounds and sealed them up, to wait for hatching. That was the first time I wanted badly to wake up.

The Jammers capered around me and herded me on, through the illuminated, benighted Deeps. The buildings were lit like the street scenes in movie musicals, with flashing marquees and neon, with electricity pouring unheeded everywhere. It was a movie musical; the cast of thousands leaped and wiggled and stepped, unsynchronized, through a soundstage Nicollet Market. Both Mick Skinners were there, or rather, both bodies. So were Dana and Cassidy. A skeleton went by in a silk top hat and tailcoat, pausing only long enough to thrust its skull through the ring of Jammers and click its teeth at me.

I’d been looking at the Jammers all wrong. I’d been thinking of them as unhealthy, underfed living people. They were beautifully preserved corpses, of course. How silly of me. They danced very well.

Two long-fingered hands, rose-brown next to the Jammers’ graying skin, parted the rim of their wheel and reached in to me. I let my wrists be taken, let myself be pulled out of the ring.

The hands were attached to a woman whose blue-black hair shivered over her shoulders and down her back to her ankles. She was naked. I stared helplessly, because here in the dream-street I couldn’t look away, or go away, as I would have in waking life. It was such a strange-looking body. The soft, substantial fleshiness of the breasts, shifting and trembling like nervous pigeons when she moved; the smooth padding of stomach and thighs and wide-set hips. She wasn’t fat, but looking at her, I thought of butter and cream and molasses, and other rich things: velvet and satin, gold poured out in dim light, the lapping of warm water on the skin. She drew me close and kissed me on the lips.