He looked miserable.
She smiled wistfully. "It works for a while. You'll be able to lose yourself in Elk Charm for a time yet. It's all new and wonderful—and there's the coupling itself. Ah, yes, the coupling ..." She lost herself in the memories for a moment before sighing and returning to the subject. "The problem is that it tears at you. The lure of the Dream pulls against the lure of the person you love. And what then? You can't do both.'' She waggled a finger at him. ''Don't lift your eyebrow like that. I mean it, you can’t do both. Well, all right, don't take my word for it. You'll find out on your own anyway."
"Maybe."
She reached down and massaged her toes where they warmed by the fire. Her toenails were getting too long again. Have to trim them. "I don't know why the Wise One Above does it this way. Seems a shame, but I suppose it's just another reflection of how the universe was made in the first place."
"What are you talking about?"
"Circles. Hmm? Oh, I mean about the way every person learns things. Truths, if you will . . . laws about the way the world works. Then when people get old, they got all this stuff they've learned packed away in their brains and they can't show young men and women why it's the way they say. The young have to go out and find out everything the way the elders did. Damned inefficient—unless, of course, I'm missing something important.
"Old Six Teeth, the Spirit Man who taught me, he used to wonder if we all weren't the same person just living the same life in different ways."
She wondered, Is this the way of it? When I had the boy, I didn't have him. And now, when he's left and on his own, I get him? Is that the trick that's been played on me? The lesson I needed to learn? Perhaps that's the Spiral of teaching, that knowledge can Y be forced—only withheld. But what does that mean ?
"That doesn't make any sense. How could we live the same life in different ways in different bodies?"
"Illusion."
"What? Illusion? I don't . . . That's crazy."
"So's the whole world." She resettled herself and raised a finger to point at him. "Tell me, Little Dancer, what's real?
The world? This one?" She gestured around at the shelter and thumped her knuckles on the rock next to her. "Or . . . are the Dreams real?"
"This is real." He crossed his arms, kicking out his feet. As if to emphasize his point, he thumped his heel on the packed dirt.
"How do you know?"
"Because if I pick up one of those coals and rub it against the bottom of your foot, you'll scream."
She clapped her hands, laughing. "Will I? Or will you just think it's me screaming? Hmm? Maybe everything around you is your Dream of what the world is really like?"
"Then if I believe otherwise, you won't?"
"What if that depends on how hard you believe it? Can you be sure you really know that burning me makes me scream? Can you be sure some little part of your mind doesn't say, burn her and she'll scream? 'Cause if you burn yourself, you'll scream. Maybe it's shared reality, hmm? You think I feel pain the same way you do—so I do."
"But don't you?"
"That's not what's at issue here." She continued to jab a hard finger at him. "We're talking about how you know what you think you know."
"But I can feel you, touch you, hear you . . . and this late in the winter, smell you, too!"
"You think so. But tell me, am I always this way? What happens when you can't see, feel, and smell me? Maybe I don't exist when you walk out of that flap, hmm? Maybe Two Smokes and Elk Charm and Hungry Bull don't exist until you get back and find them where you expect they'll be. Maybe we Ye all part of your imagination of what's real."
"They exist!" he cried. "I know they do. When I get back, Three Toes will have made new dart points. Father will have snared some more elk. It'll all be there when I get back."
"Sure it will, but you can't prove that it's there right now. Do you see?"
He shook his head, bewildered. "No. It's obvious that Kb there. They have to be! Otherwise . . . otherwise ..."
"Exactly, otherwise. You see, you have no way of proving to yourself that your father really exists. You could have made up this entire world. The only person who knows this world is real is you. And you can't prove to me that it exists the way you think it does."
He gaped. "But suppose I pick up my dart and drive it through you. You'll feel it . . . die from it."
"Will I?" She leaned back and crossed her arms. "Or am I only a part of your Dream? Maybe you only imagine that I'll feel it, that I'll die. You see, you can't prove to me that I really exist!"