Tom O'Bedlam

1

This time something had told Tom to try going westward. West was a good direction, he figured. You head for the sunset, maybe you can walk right off the edge into the stars.

Late on a July afternoon he came struggling up the slope of a steep dry wash and paused in a parched field to catch his breath and look around. This was about a hundred, hundred-fifty miles east of Sacramento, on the thirsty side of the mountains, in the third year of the new century. They said this was the century in which all the miseries were supposed finally to end. Maybe they really would, Tom thought. But you couldn’t count on it.

Just up ahead he saw seven or eight men in ragged clothes, gathered around an old ground-effect van with jagged red-and-yellow lightning bolts painted on its rusting flanks. It was hard to tell whether they were repairing the van or stealing it, or both. Two of them were underneath, with their heads and shoulders poking into the propeller gearbox, and one was fiddling with the air intake filter. The rest were leaning against the van’s rear gate in a cozy proprietary way. All of them were armed. No one paid any attention to Tom at all.

“Poor Tom,” he said tentatively, testing the situation. “Hungry Tom.” There didn’t seem to be any danger, though out here in the wild country you could never be sure. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, hoping one of them would notice him. He was a tall, lean, sinewy man with dark, tangled hair, somewhere around thirty-three, thirty-five years old: he gave various answers when he was asked, which wasn’t often. “Anything for Tom?” he ventured. “Tom’s hungry.”

Still no one as much as glanced toward him. He might as well have been invisible. He shrugged and took his finger-piano from his pack, and began to strum the little metal keys. Quietly he sang:

They went on ignoring him. That was all right with Tom. It was a lot better than being beaten up. They could see he was harmless, and most likely they’d help him out, sooner or later, if only to get rid of him. People generally did, even the really wild ones, the killer bandidos: not even they would want to hurt a poor crazy simpleton. Sooner or later, he figured, they’d let him have a bit of bread and a gulp or two of beer, and he’d thank them and move onward, westward, toward San Francisco or Mendocino or one of those places. But five minutes more went by, and they continued not to acknowledge his presence. It was almost like a game they were playing with him.

Just then a hot, biting wind rose up suddenly out of the east. They paid attention to that. “Here comes the bad news breeze,” muttered a short thick-featured red-haired man, and they all nodded and swore. “God damn, just what we need, a wind full of hard garbage,” the red-haired man said. Scowling, glaring, he hunched himself down into his shoulders as if that would protect him from whatever radioactivity the wind might be carrying.

“Turn on the props, Charley,” said one with blue eyes and rough, pitted skin. “Let’s blow the stuff back into Nevada where it came from, hey?”

“Yeah. Sure,” one of the others said, a little sour-faced Latino. “That’s what we oughta do. Sure. Christ, blow it right back there.”

Tom shivered. The wind was a mean one. The east wind always was. But it felt clean to him. He could usually tell when radiation was sailing on the wind that blew out of the dusted places. It set up a tingling sensation inside his skull, from an area just above his left ear to the edge of his eyebrow ridge. He didn’t feel that now.

He felt something else, though, something that was getting to be very familiar. It was a sound deep in his brain, the roaring rush of sound that told him that one of his visions was starting to stir in him. And then cascades of green light began to sweep through his mind.

He wasn’t surprised that it was happening here, now, in this place, at this hour, among these men. An east wind could do it to him, sometimes. Or a particular kind of light late in the day, or the coming of cold, clear air after a rainstorm. Or when he was with strangers who didn’t seem to like him. It didn’t take much. It didn’t take anything at all, a lot of the time. His mind was always on the edge of some sort of vision. They were boiling inside him, ready to seize control when the moment came. Strange images and textures forever churned in his head. He never fought them any longer. At first he had, because he thought they meant he was going crazy. But by now he didn’t care whether he was crazy or not, and he knew that fighting the visions would give him a headache at best, or if he struggled really hard he might get knocked to his knees, but in any case there was nothing he could do to keep the visions from coming on. It was impossible to hold them back, only to bang and jangle them around a little, and when he tried that he was the one who got most of the banging and jangling. Besides, the visions were the best thing that had ever happened to him. By now he loved his visions.

One was happening now, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Coming on now, for sure. The green world again. Tom smiled. He relaxed and yielded himself to it.

Hello, green world! Coming for to carry me home?

Golden-green sunlight glimmered on smooth alien hills. He heard the surging and crashing of a distant turquoise sea. The heavy air was thick as velvet, sweet as wine. Shining elegant crystalline forms, still indistinct but rapidly coming into sharp focus, were beginning to glide across the screen of Tom’s soul: tall fragile figures that seemed to be fashioned of iridescent glass of many colors. They moved with astonishing grace. Their bodies were long and slender, with mirror-bright limbs sharp as spears. Their faceted eyes, glittering with wisdom, were set in rows of three on each of the four sides of their tapering diamond-shaped heads. It wasn’t the first time Tom had seen them. He knew who they were: the aristocrats, the princes and dukes and countesses and such, of that lovely green place.

Through the vision he could still dimly make out the seven or eight scruffy men clustered around the ground-effect van. He had to tell them what he was seeing. He always did, whenever he was with other people when a vision struck. “It’s the green world,” he said. “You see the light? Can you? Can you? It’s like a flood of emeralds pouring down from the sky.” He stood with his legs braced far apart, his head thrown back, his shoulders curving around as if they were trying to meet behind him. Words spilled from his lips. “Look, there are seven crystallines walking toward the Summer Palace. Three females, two males, two of the other kind. Jesus, how beautiful! Like diamonds all up and down their skins. And their eyes, their eyes! Oh, God, have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

“Hey, what kind of nut do we have here?” someone asked.

Tom barely heard. These ragged strangers hardly seemed real to him now. What was real was the lords and ladies of the green world, strolling in splendor through glades and mists. He gestured toward them. “That’s the Misilyne Triad, d’ye see? The three in the center, the tallest. And that’s Vuruun, who was ambassador to the Nine Suns under the old dynasty. And that one—oh, look there, toward the east! It’s the green aurora starting! Jesus, it’s like the sky’s on fire burning green, isn’t it? They see it too. They’re all pointing, staring—you see how excited they are? I’ve never seen them excited before. But something like this—”

“A nut, all right. A real case. You could tell, right away, first thing when he walked up.”

“Some of these crazies, they can get damn ugly when the fit’s on them. I heard stories. They bust loose, you can’t even tie them down, they’re so strong.”

“You think he’s that bad?”

“Who knows? You ever see anybody this crazy?”

“Hey, crazy man! Hey, you hear me?”

“Let him be, Stidge.”

“Hey, crazy man! Hey, nutso!”

Voices. Faint, far-off, blurred. Ghost-voices, buzzing and droning about him. What they were saying didn’t matter. Tom’s eyes were glowing. The green aurora whirled and blazed in the eastern sky. Lord Vuruun was worshipping it, holding his four translucent arms outstretched. The Triad was embracing. Music was coming from somewhere, now, a heavenly music resonating from world to world. The voices were only a tiny scratching sound lost somewhere within that great mantle of music.

Then someone hit him hard in the stomach, and he doubled over, gagging and gasping and coughing. The green world whirled wildly around him and the image began to break up. Stunned, Tom rocked back and forth, not knowing where he was.

“Stidge! Let him be!”

Another punch, even harder. It dizzied him. Tom dropped to his knees and stared with unfocused eyes at brown wisps of withered grass. A thin stream erupted from him. It felt like his guts ripping loose and spewing out of his mouth. It was a mistake to have let himself fall down, he knew. They were going to start kicking him now. Something like this had happened to him last year up in Idaho, and his ribs had been six weeks healing.

“Dumb—crazy—nut—”

“Stidge! Damn you, Stidge!”

Three kicks. Tom huddled low, fighting the pain. In some corner of his mind one last fragment of the vision remained, a sleek and gleaming crystalline shape, unrecognizable, vanishing. Then he heard shouts, curses, threats. He was aware that a fight was going on around him. He kept his eyes closed and drew his breath carefully, listening for the inner scrape of bone on bone. But nothing appeared to be broken.

“Can you stand up?” a quiet voice asked, a little while later. “Come on. Nobody’s going to hurt you now. Look at me. Hey, guy, look at me.”

Hesitantly Tom opened his eyes. A man whose face he did not know, a man with a short-cropped dense black beard and deep dark rings under his eyes—one of those who had been working inside the gearbox before, most likely—was crouching beside him. He looked just about as mean and rough as the others, but somehow there seemed to be something gentler about him. Tom nodded, and the man put his hands to Tom’s elbows and delicately lifted him.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so. Just shook, some. More than some.”

Tom glanced around. The red-haired man was slumped down by the side of the van, spitting up blood and glaring. The others were standing back in a loose semicircle, frowning uneasily.

“Who are you?” the black-bearded man asked.

“He’s just a fucking nut!” the red-haired one said.

“Shut up, Stidge.” To Tom the man said again, “What’s your name?”

“Tom.”

“Just Tom?”

Tom shrugged. “Just Tom, yeah.”

“Tom from where?”

“Idaho, last. Heading for California.”

“You’re in California,” the black-bearded man said. “You going toward San Francisco?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter a whole lot, does it?”

“Get him out of here,” Stidge said. He was on his feet again. “God damn you, Charley, get that nut out of here before I—”

The black-bearded man turned. “Christ, Stidge, you’re asking for a whole lot of trouble.” He brought his right arm up across his chest and cocked it. There was a laser bracelet on his wrist, with the yellow “ready” light glowing. Stidge looked at it in astonishment.

“Jesus, Charley!”

“Just sit back down over there, man.”

“Jesus, he’s only a nut!”

“Well, he’s my nut now. Anybody hurt him, he’s gonna get hard light through his belly. Okay, Stidge?”

The red-haired man was silent.

Charley said to Tom, “You hungry?”

“You bet.”

“We’ll give you something. You can stay with us a few days, if you like. We’ll be going toward Frisco if we can ever get this van moving.” His dark-ringed eyes scanned Tom closely. “You carrying anything?”

Tom patted his backpack uncertainly. “Carrying?”

“Weapons. Knife, gun, spike, bracelet, anything?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Walking around unarmed out here? Stidge is right. You got to be crazy.” Charley flicked a finger toward the blue-eyed pitted-faced man. “Hey, Buffalo, lend Tom a spike or something, you hear? He needs to be carrying something.”

Buffalo held out a thin shining metal strip with a handle at one end and a teardrop-shaped point at the other. “You know how to use a spike?” he asked. Tom simply stared at it. “Go on,” Buffalo said. “Take it.”

“I don’t want it,” Tom said. “Someone wants to hurt me, I figure that’s his problem, not mine. Poor Tom doesn’t hurt people. Poor Tom doesn’t want any spike. But thanks. Thanks anyway.”

Charley studied him a long moment. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Charley told him, shaking his head. “Okay. Whatever you say.”

“They don’t come no crazier, do they?” the little Latino asked. “We give him a spike, he smiles and says no thanks. Out of his head crazy. Out of his head.”

“There’s crazy and crazy,” said Charley. “Maybe he knows what he’s doing. You carry a spike, you likely to annoy somebody who’s got a bigger spike. You don’t carry any, maybe they let you pass. You see?” Charley grinned. He clapped his hand down on Tom’s bony shoulder, hard, and squeezed. “You’re my man, Tom. You and me, we going to learn a lot from each other, I bet. Anyone here touches you, you let me know, I’ll make him sorry.”

Buffalo said, “You want to finish on the van now, Charley?”

“To hell with it. Be too dark to work, another couple hours. Let’s get us some jackasses for dinner and we can do the van in the morning. You know how to build a fire, Tom?”

“Sure.”

“All right, build one. Don’t start no conflagration, though. We don’t want to call attention to ourselves.”

Charley began pointing, sending his men off in different directions. Plainly they were his men. Stidge was the last to go, limping off sullenly, pausing to glower at Tom as though telling him that the only thing keeping him alive was Charley’s protection, but that Charley wouldn’t always be there to protect him. Tom took no notice. The world was full of men like Stidge; so far Tom had managed to cope with them well enough.

He found a bare place in the dry grass that looked good for making a fire and began to arrange twigs and other bits of kindling. He had been working for about ten minutes, and the fire was going nicely, when he became aware that Charley had returned and was standing behind him, watching.

“Tom?”

“Yeah, Charley?”

The black-bearded man hunkered down next to him and tossed a narrow log on the fire. “Good job,” he said. “I like a neat fire, everything lined up straight like this.” He moved a little closer to Tom and peered around this way and that as if making sure no one else was nearby. “I heard what you were saying when you were in that fit,” Charley went on. His voice was low, barely more than a whisper. “About the green world. About the crystal people. Their shining skins. Their eyes, like diamonds. How did you say the eyes were arranged?”

“In rows of three, on each side of their heads.”

“Four sides to the head?”

“Four, yes.”

Charley was silent a while, poking at the fire. Then he said, in an even quieter voice, “I dreamed of a place just like that, about six nights ago. And then again night before last. Green sky, crystal people, eyes like diamonds, four rows of three around their heads. I saw it like I was seeing it in a show. And now you come along talking about the same place, shouting it out like you’re possessed, and it’s just the same place I saw. How in hell is that possible, that we could both have the same crazy dream? You tell me: How in hell is that possible?”

2

THEsun was still half an hour on the far side of the Sierra Nevada when Elszabet awoke and stepped out on the porch of her cabin, naked, just the way she had slept. The coolness of the summer morning enfolded her. A soft blanket of fog lingered on out of the night, shrouding the tops of the redwoods and drifting more thinly down to ground level.

Beautiful, she thought. From all sides came the quiet plunking sounds of condensation, clear cool droplets falling from the lofty branches and hitting the soft carpet of deep brown duff. The hundreds of sword-ferns on the hillside in front of her cabin glistened as though they had been polished. Beautiful. Beautiful. Even the bluejays, shrieking as they started their day’s work, seemed beautiful.

An altogether gorgeous morning. There was no other kind here, winter or summer. You had to like to be an early riser, here at the Nepenthe Center, because all the useful mindpick work necessarily was done before breakfast. But that was all right. Elszabet couldn’t imagine not liking to awaken at dawn, when the dawn was a dawn like this. And there was no reason not to go to sleep early. What was there to do in the evenings, out here in the boonies hundreds of miles north of San Francisco?

She touched the face of her watch and the morning’s schedule came scrolling up in clear glowing letters:

A quick delicious shower, using the outdoor rig behind her cabin, first. Then she slipped into shorts and halter and made a fast breakfast of cider and cheese. No sense bothering to go all the way up to the staff mess hall this early in the morning. By five of six Elszabet was on her way up the steps of A Cabin, taking them two at a time. Father Christie was there already, slouched in the mindpick chair while Teddy Lansford bustled around him getting the pick set up.

Father Christie didn’t look good. He rarely did, this hour of the morning. This morning he seemed even farther off center than usual: pale, sweaty-jowled, yellowish around the eyeballs, almost a little dazed-looking. He was a short plump man, forty-five or so, with a great mass of curling grayish hair and a soft pleading face. Today he was wearing his clerical outfit, which never managed to look as though it fit him. The collar was soiled; the black jacket was rumpled and askew as if he had buttoned it incorrectly.

But he brightened as she entered: phony brightness, stage cheer. “Good morning, Elszabet. What a lovely sight you are!”

“Am I?” She smiled. He was always full of little compliments. Always trying for little peeks at her thighs and breasts, too, whenever he thought she wouldn’t notice. “You sleep well, Father?”

“I’ve had better nights.”

“Also worse ones?”

“Worse also, I suppose.” His hands were trembling. If she hadn’t known better, she would have guessed he’d been drinking. But of course that was impossible. You didn’t drink any more, not even on the sly, once you had had a conscience chip implanted in your esophagus.

Lansford called out from the control console, “Blood sugar okay, respiration, iodine uptake, everything checks. Delta waves present and fully secured. Everything looks fine. I’m popping the Father’s pick module into the slot now. Elszabet?”

“Hold it a second. What reading do you get on mood?”

“The usual mild depression, and—hey, no, not depression, it’s agitation, actually. What the hell, Father, you’re supposed to be depressed this time of morning!”

“I’m sorry,” said Father Christie meekly. The comers of his lips were twitching. “Does that upset your programming for me?”

The technician laughed. “This machine, it can compensate for anything. It’s already done it. We’re all set if you are. You ready for the pick, Father?”

“Any time,” he said, not sounding as if he meant it.

“Elszabet? Okay?”

“No, wait,” Elszabet said to Lansford. “Look at the lines there. Screen two. He’s past threshold on anxiety. I want to talk to him first.”

“Should I stay?” the technician asked without much show of concern.

“You go over to B and set up for Mr. Ferguson, okay? Give me a couple of minutes alone with the Father.”

“Sure thing,” Lansford said, and went out.

The priest peered up at Elszabet, blinking like an uncomfortable schoolboy about to be lectured by a truant officer. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

“I don’t quite think so.”

“No. No, I’m not.”

Gently she said, “What is it then, Father?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Are you frightened of the pick?”

“No. Why should I be? I’ve gone under the pick plenty of times before, haven’t I?” He looked at her in sudden uncertainty. “Haven’t I?”

“Over a hundred times. You’ve been here four months.”

“That’s what I thought. April, May, June, July. The pick’s nothing new for me. Why should I be scared of it?”

“No reason at all. The pick’s an instrument of healing. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“But your lines are all over the screen. Something’s got you up in a turmoil this morning, and it must have been something that happened in the night, yes? Because your readings were fine yesterday. What was it, Father? A dream?”

He fidgeted. He was looking worse and worse by the moment.

“Can we go outside, Elszabet? I think some fresh air would do me good.”

“Of course. I was thinking the same thing.”

Elszabet led him out to the back porch of the little wooden building and made him stand still beside her, inhaling deeply. She towered over him, almost a head and a half taller; but then, she towered over many men. All the same, the difference in height made him seem even more like a bewildered boy, though he was ten years older than she was. She could sense the physical need in him, the inarticulate urge to touch her and the powerful fear of doing it. After a moment she took his hand in hers. It was within the rules of the Center to offer the patients some physical comfort.

“Elszabet,” he said. “What a beautiful name. And strange. Almost Elizabeth, but not quite.”

“Almost Hungarian,” she said. “But not quite. There was an actress, Hungarian, very big in the lasers in the mid-twenty-first century, Erzsebet Szabo. My mother was her biggest fan. Named me for her. Spelled it wrong.” Elszabet chuckled. “My mother was never much on spelling.” She had told Father Christie about her name at least thirty times before. But of course he forgot everything every morning, when the mindpick flushed him clean of short-term recollections and an unpredictable quantity of the long-term ones. After a bit she said, “What frightened you last night, Father?”

“Nothing.”

“But you’re ambivalent about undergoing pick today?”

“Yes.”

“Why is that?”

“You promise you won’t put this in my records?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure I can promise that.”

“Then I might not tell you.”

“Is it that embarrassing?”

“It might be, if it got back to the archdiocese.”

“Church stuff? Well, I can be discreet about that. Your bishop doesn’t have access to Center records, you know.”

“Is that true?”

“You know it is.”

He nodded. A little color came into his face. “What it is, Elszabet, is that I had a vision last night, and I’m not sure I want to surrender my memory of it to the pick.”

“A vision?”

“A very powerful vision. A wonderful and surprising vision.”

“The pick might take it from you,” she said. “Very probably will.”

“Yes.”

“But if you want to be healed, Father, you have to give yourself up totally to the pick. Yielding the good stuff along with the bad. Later on, you’ll integrate your spirit and you’ll be free of the pick. But for now—”

“I understand. Even so—”

“Do you want to tell me about the vision?”

He reddened and squirmed.

“You don’t have to. But it might help to tell me.”

“All right. All right.”

He was silent, working at it. Then in a desperate rush he blurted, “What it was, I saw God in His heavens, Elszabet!”

She smiled, trying to keep it sincere and unpatronizing. Gently she said, “How wonderful that must have been, Father.”

“More than you can imagine. More than anyone can.” He was trembling again. He was beginning to weep, and long wet tracks gleamed on his face. “Don’t you see, Elszabet, I have no faith. I have no faith. If I ever did, it went away from me long ago. Isn’t that pathetic? Isn’t it a joke? That classic clown, the priest who doesn’t believe. The Church is just my job, don’t you see? And I’m not even very good at that, but I do my diocesan duties, I make my calls, I practice my profession the way a lawyer or an accountant does, I—” He caught himself. “Anyway, for God to come to me—not to the pope, not to the cardinal, but to me, me without faith—!”

“What was it like, the vision? Can you say?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I can tell you. It was the most vivid thing possible. There was purple light in the sky, like a veil, a luminous veil hanging across the sky, and nine suns were shining at once, like jewels. An orange one, a blue one, a yellow one like ours, all kinds of colors crossing and mixing. The shadows were fantastic. Nine suns! And then He came into view. I saw Him on his throne, Elszabet. Gigantic. Majestic. Lord of Lords, who else could that have been, with nine suns for His footstools! His brow—His forehead—light streamed from it, grace, love. More than that: holiness, sanctity, the divine force. That’s what came from Him. A sense that I was seeing a being of the highest wisdom and power, a mighty and terrible god. I tell you, it was overwhelming. The sweat was pouring off me. I was sobbing, I was wailing, I thought I’d have a heart attack, it was so wondrous.” The priest paused and squinted at her quickly, a furtive worried glance. Then, without looking at her, he said in a low anguished voice full of shame, “Just one thing, though. You know, they say we’re made in His image? It isn’t so. He isn’t anything like us. I know that what I saw was God: I am as convinced of that as I am that Jesus is my Savior. But He doesn’t look anything like us.”

“What does he look like, then?”

“I can’t begin to say. That’s the part I don’t dare share, not even with you. But He looked—not—human. Splendid, magnificent, but—not—human.”

Elszabet had no idea how to respond to that. Again she gave him her professional smile, warm, encouraging.

He said, “I need to keep that vision, Elszabet. It’s the thing I’ve prayed for all my life. The presence of the divine, illuminating my spirit. How can I give that up now that I’ve experienced it?”

“You need to give yourself over to the pick, Father. The pick will heal you. You know that.”

“I know that, yes. But the vision—those nine suns—”

“Perhaps it’ll stay with you even after the pick.”

“And if not?” His brow darkened. “I think I want to withdraw from treatment.”

“You know that’s not possible.”

“The vision—”

“If you lose it, surely it’ll be granted you again. If God has revealed Himself to you this night, do you think He’ll abandon you afterward? Do you? He will return. What opened for you in this night just past will open for you again. The nine suns—the Father on His throne—”

“Oh, do you think so, Elszabet?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Trust me,” she said. “Trust God, Father.”

“Yes.”

“Come on, now. Shall we go back inside?”

The priest looked transfigured. “Yes. Certainly.”

“And I’ll send Lansford over to you?”

“Of course.” Tears were cascading down his cheeks. She had never seen him as animated as this, as vigorous, as alive.

Over in B Cabin, Lansford had the pick set up for Ed Ferguson, who seemed annoyed by the delay. “You go across to the Father,” Elszabet told Lansford. “I’ll take care of Mr. Ferguson.” The technician nodded. Ferguson, a chilly-faced man of about fifty who had been convicted of some vast and preposterous real-estate swindle before being sent to Nepenthe Center, began telling her about a trip to Mendocino that he wanted to take this weekend to meet a woman who’d be podding up from San Francisco to see him, but Elszabet listened with only half an ear. Her mind was full of Father Christie’s vision. How radiant the poor bedraggled incompetent priest had become while telling the tale. No wonder he feared going under the pick this morning. Losing the one bit of divine grace, weird and garbled though it might be, that had ever been vouchsafed him.

When Elszabet was done with Ferguson and had looked in on the third cabin, where Alleluia, the synthetic woman, was being treated, she hurried back to A Cabin. Father Christie was sitting up, smiling in the amiable muddled way characteristic of someone who has just had his mind swept clean of a host of memories. Donna, the morning recovery nurse, was with him, running him through his basic recall routines—making sure he still knew his own name, the year, where he was and why. The pick was supposed to remove just the short-term memories, but it could abrade more deeply, sometimes a lot more deeply. Elszabet nodded to the younger woman. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll take over, thanks.” She was surprised how hard her heart was pounding. When Donna had gone, Elszabet sat down beside the priest and put her hand lightly on his wrist. “Well, how’s the Father now?” she asked. “You look nice and relaxed.”

“Oh, yes, Elizabeth. Very relaxed.”

“Elszabet,” she reminded him gently.

“Ah. Of course.”

She leaned close. He was trying to stare down the front of her halter. Good for him, she thought. “Tell me,” she said. “Have you ever had a dream in which you saw nine suns in the sky all at once?”

“Nine suns?” he said blankly. “Nine suns all at once?”

3

Jaspin was late leaving his apartment in San Diego that morning. That wasn’t unusual for him. When he finally got himself into gear he hurried down the freeway to the Chula Vista turnoff, swung inland, took the Otay Valley shunt toward the unmonitored county roads. Twenty minutes later he came to the roadblock set up by the tumbondé people as he was crossing a dry hot plateau.

They had the road completely closed, which was flat-out illegal, but no one in San Diego County was likely to try to tell the tumbondé folks what to do. An energy wall ran across the highway from shoulder to shoulder, and six or seven somber-looking bronze-skinned men with wide cheekbony faces were standing behind it, arms folded. They wore tumbondé costumes: silver jackets, tight black leggings with red piping, wide black sombreros, crescent-moon pendants dangling on their chests. They appeared to be wearing masks, too, but they weren’t; those were simply their faces, aloof, impassive. None of them seemed the least bit interested in the pale gringo in the old battered car. But Jaspin knew the routine. He leaned out and said, “Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come.”

“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” replied one of the tumbondé men.

“Senhor Papamacer teaches. Senhora Aglaibahi is our mother. Rei Ceupassear rules.”

“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga.”

He was doing all right so far. “Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come,” Jaspin said a second time.

“The parking is two kilometer,” said one of the tumbondé men indifferently. “Then you walk five hundred meter. Better you run: is already starting, the procession.”

“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” Jaspin said, as the barrier winked out. He drove past the unsmiling guards and down the dusty potholed road until he saw small boys waving him toward the parking lot. There were at least a thousand cars there, most of them even older than his own. He found a nook under a huge old oak tree, left the car there, set out at a trot down the road. Though it was not yet noon, the heat was intense. It felt like Arizona heat, no moisture in it at all, a pure furnace. He tried to imagine what it was like to stand around in black pants and a black sombrero under midday sunlight in that heat.

In a few minutes he caught sight of the congregation, milling chaotically on a high knoll just off the road. There were thousands of them, some dressed in full tumbondé gear but most, like him, in ordinary street clothes. They were carrying banners, placards, little images of the great ones. From unseen loudspeakers came a deep, unhurried, relentless drumming. The ground shook. They probably had it wired, Jaspin thought. Electrostatic nodes all over the place, and synchronized pulsation chips. Tumbondé might be primitive and elemental but it didn’t seem to scorn technology.

He found a place at the edge of the crowd. Far ahead, halfway up the hillside, he saw the colossal papier-mache statues of the divinities being carried on poles by sweating brawny men. Jaspin recognized each one: that was Prete Noir the Negus, that one was the thunder-serpent Narbail, that was O Minotauro the bull, that was Rei Ceupassear. And those two, the biggest of all, were the true great ones, Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga, the gods from deepest space. Jaspin shivered in the heat. Crazy as this stuff was, it had undeniable power.

A slender young woman jammed up behind him twisted around to face him and said, “Pardon me. You’re Dr. Jaspin, aren’t you? From UCLA?”

He looked at her as if she had bitten his arm. She was twenty-three, twenty-four, stringy blonde hair, white blouse open to the waist. Her eyes looked a little glazed. The marks of Maguali-ga were painted across her very minimal breasts in purple and orange. Jaspin didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean anything. He had forgotten a lot of people in the last few years.

Gruffly he said, “Sorry. Wrong guy.”

“I was sure you were him. I audited his course in ninety-nine. I thought it was really profound.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her, smiling vacantly, and moved away, elbowing through. She made the sign of Rei Ceupassear at him, as a kind of benediction. Forgiveness. Screw you and your forgiveness, Jaspin thought. Then he was instantly sorry. But he drilled forward, burrowing into the crowd.

This was a low time in Jaspin’s life. Somehow things had begun falling apart for him right about the year that the blonde girl said she had sat in on his classes, and he had not yet figured out why. He was thirty-four. There were days when he felt three times as old as that: heavy leaden days, ass-dragging days, sometimes a month of them in a row. The university had dismissed him, for cause, early in ’02. He hadn’t quite managed to begin his dissertation then—the doctorate that the blonde girl had conferred on him existed only in her imagination. What he had been was an assistant professor in the anthropology department, and he hadn’t realized what a rare privilege it was in those times to have a cushy job in one of the few remaining universities. He realized it now. But what he was now was nothing at all.

“Maguali-ga! Maguali-ga!” they were yelling on all sides. Jaspin took up the cry. “Maguali-ga!” He started to move, letting himself be swept onward, up toward the vast swaying statues shimmering in the heat.

He had been coming to the tumbondé processions for five months now; this was his eighth one. He wasn’t entirely sure why he came. Part of it, he knew, was professional curiosity. He still thought of himself on some level as an anthropologist, and here was anthropology raw and wild, on the hoof, this apocalyptic messianic cult of star-god worshippers that had sprung up in the drab wastelands east of San Diego. Jaspin’s specialty had been contemporary irrationality: he had hoped to write a massive book that would explain the modern world to itself and make some sense out of the madhouse that the good people of the late twenty-first century had handed on to their descendants. Tumbondé was the craziest thing going; Jaspin had been drawn irresistibly toward it, as if by infiltrating it and analyzing it and reporting on it he might somehow be able to rehabilitate his broken academic career. But there was more to his being here than that. He admitted to himself that he felt some kind of hunger, some emptiness of the spirit that he dreamed he might satisfy here. God only knew how, though.

“Chungirá-He-Will-Come!” Jaspin shouted, and forced his way through the crowds.

The excitement all around him was contagious. He could feel his pulse rising and his throat going dry. People were dancing in place, feet rooted, shoulders wriggling, arms flung this way and that. He saw the blonde girl again a dozen meters away, lost in some kind of trance. Maguali-ga the god of the gateway had come to collect her spirit.

There were very few Anglos in the crowd. Tumbondé had emerged out of the Latino-African refugee community that had come crowding into the San Diego area after the Dust War, and most of these people were dark-skinned or outright black. The cult was an international stew, a mix of Brazilian and Guinean stuff with an underlay of something Haitian, and of course it had taken on a Mexican tinge too; you couldn’t have any kind of apocalyptic cult operating this close to the border without very quickly having it acquire a subtle Aztec coloration. But it was more ecstatic in nature than the usual Mexican variety—less death, more transfiguration.

“Maguali-ga!” a tremendous voice roared. “Take me, Maguali-ga!”

To Jaspin’s astonishment he realized the voice was his own.

All right. All right. Just go with it, he told himself. He felt suddenly Brentwood, sure, jumping around with the pagan shvartzers on a sizzling hillside in the middle of July—well, why the hell not? Go with it, kid.

He was close enough now to see the leaders of the procession, rising awesomely above all the rest in their stiltlike platform shoes: there was Senhor Papamacer, there was Senhora Aglaibahi beside him, and surrounding them were the eleven members of the Inner Host. A kind of golden nimbus of sunlight flickered around all thirteen of them. Jaspin wondered how they worked that trick; for trick it surely must be. Their own explanation was simply that they were magnets for cosmic energy.

“The force it comes from the seven galaxies,” Senhor Papamacer had told the Times reporter. “It is the great light that bears the power of salvation. Once it shined on Egypt, and then on Tibet, and then on the place of the gods in Yucatan; and it has been on Jerusalem and in the sacred shrine of the Andes, and now it is here, which is the sixth of the Seven Places. Soon it will move to the Seventh Place, which is the North Pole, when Maguali-ga will open the gateway and Chungirá He-Will-Come will break through to our world, bringing the wealth of the stars for those who love him. And that will be the time of the ending, which will be the new beginning.” That time, Senhor Papamacer had said, was not far off.

Jaspin heard the bleating of tethered goats over all the other sounds. He heard the low mournful voice of the sacrificial white bull that he knew was in the hut at the top of the hill.

Now he saw the masked dancers, cutting through the mob, seven of them representing the seven benevolent galaxies. Their faces were hidden by glittering metallic shields and their bodies, which were bare, bore ornaments in the shape of suns and moons and planets. On their heads were red metal domes bright as mirrors, from which blinding shafts of reflected sunlight bounced like spears. They carried gourd rattles and castanets, and they were chanting fiercely:

An invocation. He fell in behind them, chanting, flinging his arms around. To his left, a plump woman in green robes was saying over and over in Spanish “Forgive our sins forgive our sins” and on the other side of him a leathery-looking black man bare to the waist was muttering in thick French, “The sun rises in the east, the sun sets in Guinea. The sun rises in the east, the sun sets in Guinea.” The drums were louder and faster, now. Up the hill. Up. Animals were screeching in terror and pain somewhere: the sacrifices were beginning.

Jaspin found himself standing on the lip of a huge ditch. It was full almost to the brim with the most amazing assortment of things: jewelry, coins, dolls, entertainment cubes, family photographs, clothing, toys, electronic gadgets, weapons, tools, packages of food. He knew what to do. This was the Well of Sacrifice: you had to rid yourself of something that was precious to you, by way of recognizing that you would not need such things once the gods came from the stars bringing incalculable wealth to all the suffering people of Earth. You must make a gift to the Earth, said Senhor Papamacer, if you wish the Earth to draw gifts from the stars. It didn’t matter if what you threw into the ditch wasn’t generally considered precious; it had to be precious to you. Jaspin had an offering ready—his wristwatch, probably the last valuable thing except for his books that he had not yet pawned, a sleek IBM job with nine function nodes. It was worth at least a thousand.

This is lunacy, he thought.

“To Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” he said, and hurled the shining watch far out into the cluttered ditch.

Then he was swept on, upward, to the place of communion. The blood of goats and sheep was flowing there; they had not yet sacrificed the bull. Jaspin, trembling and shivering, found himself face to face with Senhora Aglaibahi, the virgin mother, the goddess on Earth. She seemed about three meters tall; her black hair was dusted with mirror-dust, her eyes were outlined in fiery scarlet, her bare heavy dark-tipped breasts glistened with the markings of Maguali-ga. She touched her fingertip to his arm and he felt a little sting, as though she had stuck him with a needle or tapped him with a shocker. He lurched on past her, past the even more gigantic form of Senhor Papamacer, past the papier-mâché figures of the gods Narbail and Prete Noir and O Minotauro and the star-rover Rei Ceupassear, and onward around a bare charred place that was sacred to Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga.

Somewhere on the far side of that he felt himself growing dizzy and beginning to lose consciousness. The heat, he thought, the excitement, the mobs, the hysteria. He tottered, nearly fell, struggled to stay upright, fearing that he would be trampled if he let himself go down. He found a tree at the summit of the hill and clung to it as wave after wave of astounding vertigo came over him. It seemed to him that he was breaking free of the land, that he was being hurled by some enormous centrifugal power into the far reaches of the universe.

As he soared through space he saw Chungirá-He-Will-Come.

The god of the gateway was a great bizarre golden figure with curving ram’s-horns, the strangest being that Jaspin had ever seen, rising out of a block of pure shining alabaster that covered it—him—to the waist. Over its—his—left shoulder was an immense sun, dark red, filling half the purplish sky; it seemed to be swelling and pulsing, blowing up like an enormous balloon. There was a second sun over the god’s right shoulder, a blue one, fluctuating in sudden violent bursts of light. Between the two suns streamed a bridge of brilliantly glowing matter, like a fiery arch in the heavens.

“My time is soon,” said Chungirá-He-Will-Come. “You will enter into my embrace, child. And all will be well.”

Then the figure vanished. The red star and the blue one could no longer be seen. Jaspin clutched at the air but he was unable to bring back what he had just beheld. The wondrous moment was over.

He began to shake. He had never experienced anything remotely like this before. It stunned him; it was devastating; he could not move, he could not breathe. For an instant he had been touched by a god. There was no explanation for it and he would not seek one. Just this once he had broken through into something that passed all his understanding, something that was so very much bigger than Barry Jaspin that he could lose himself utterly in it. Good Christ, he thought, can it really be that there are titanic space-beings out there, that the tumbondé people have a pipeline across half the universe to God knows where, that these creatures are watching over our world from a jillion light years away, that they are coming to us to govern us and change our lives? It has to be just a hallucination—doesn’t it? The heat, the crowds, maybe a drug the Senhora slipped into me?

He opened his eyes. He was lying under a tree, and the thin blonde girl was bending over him. Her blouse was still open, but the Maguali-ga markings on her breasts were smeared and blurred, and her skin was shining with sweat.

“I saw you pass out,” she said. “I was afraid you’d get hurt. Can I help you up? You look so strange, Dr. Jaspin!”

He didn’t bother to deny that he was Jaspin. In a voice strangled with awe he said, “I can’t believe it. I absolutely can’t believe it. I saw him. I could have reached out and put my hand on him. Not that I would have dared.”

“Saw whom, Dr. Jaspin?”

“You didn’t? See him?”

“You mean Senhor Papamacer?”

“I mean Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” said Jaspin. “Looking at me from a planet of some other galaxy. Christ Almighty, it was the real thing! I never doubted it.” He felt shrouded in a numinous aura; he felt himself exalted by the divine touch. Some part of him, he knew, was Chungirá-He-Will-Come, and always would be. But in another moment it all started to flee and fade; and a moment after that he was no one but miserable, screwed-up Barry Jaspin again, lying sweaty and exhausted on a torrid hillside with thousands of people shouting and chanting and passing out all around him, and frightened animals bleating, and drums shaking the ground like nine-point-five Richter. He sat up and looked at the blonde girl and saw the awe and wonder reflected in her face. It was as if she too had seen Chungirá-He-Will-Come in his eyes, for that little moment before the ecstasy faded. And without warning the most terrible sadness he had ever known came over him, and he began to cry, dry racking tears and uncontrollable sobs.

4

When they were finished working him over down in B Cabin, Ferguson made his way slowly up the hill to the dorm, feeling lightheaded and seasick. It was the same old afterward feeling that he had every morning at this time. He knew it was the same every morning because the molecular recorder he carried illicitly under his signet ring told him so. It remembered things for him. He tapped the ring twice and the recorder told him, “You feel crappy and disoriented right now because they just picked your mind. Don’t worry about it. These shits can’t grind you down, boy.” He had that message programmed right at the top: the recorder gave it to him first thing after pick, every morning.

Wisps of fog drifted through the trees. Everything looked damp and shining. Holy Jesus, and this is July, he thought. Feels like February. He could never get used to Northern California. He missed the Los Angeles heat, the dryness, even the smog. That was the one thing the scientists were never going to get rid of, he thought, the smog. They had it in L.A. when there was nobody but Indians living there. Maybe even when just dinosaurs. They were going to have it forever.

Ferguson thumbed the ring again and his voice said, “Lacy’s coming up from San Francisco this weekend. She’ll be staying in Mendo and she hopes you can get leave to visit her Saturday and Sunday. Give her a call right after breakfast. The number is—”

He frowned and hit the ring twice more, digging into deeper memory. “Request Lacy,” he said.

The recorder said, “Lacy Meyers lives in San Francisco, red hair, high cheekbones, thirty-one years old, single, you met her in January oh-two, worked with you on the Betelgeuse Five deal. She can only come when she’s on top. Birthday is March tenth. Home address and phone—”

“Thanks,” he said. Living with pick, it was like writing your autobiography on water. But he didn’t plan on living this way forever.

He went into the dorm, down the long brightly lit hall into the third room on the left, which, according to the orderly who had done recall routine with him today, he shared with two roommates, an Indian who called himself Nick Double Rainbow and a Chic named Tomás Menendez. Neither one seemed to be around at the moment: probably out getting picked, second shift. Ferguson stood wavering in the middle of the room, not sure which corner was his. One bed had a bunch of cubes on it; he picked one up and pressed it and it said something to him in Spanish. Okay. That was easy. The bed opposite it was covered with a bright red blanket marked with crisscross patterns. Indian stuff, he figured. By elimination that leaves this one over here, must be mine.

God, I hate this shit, he thought. Starting every day like a newborn baby.

The one thing he hadn’t forgotten was why he was here. It was either this or Rehab Two, and they were a lot rougher with you at Rehab Two. When you got out of there you were somebody else, meek and mild, fit only for pruning roses. They had intended to send him there after his conviction on the space scam, but he had flipped out, or had pretended to—he wasn’t sure which any more—and his lawyer had gotten him a year at Nepenthe instead. “This man is no criminal,” the lawyer had said. “He is as much a victim as anyone.” True? Ferguson didn’t know any more. Maybe he genuinely did have that mental thing, that Gelbard’s syndrome, or maybe it had only been one more seam. Whatever it was, they were curing him of it here. Sure.

He flopped out of his bed and pushed his thumb down on the phone’s print-plate. “Outside line,” he said.

The computer voice replied, “I have one message for you. Do you want it first, Mr. Ferguson?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“It’s from your wife. In regard to her visit, scheduled for next Tuesday. She will arrive this morning instead, ten-thirty hours.”

“Holy suffering Jesus,” Ferguson said. “You’re kidding. Today? What day is today?”

“Friday, July 21, 2103.”

“And how long is she planning to stay?”

“Until 1500 hours Sunday.”

There went the weekend with Lacy, for sure. Son of a bitch. Even here in this place he worked hard to keep everything lined up the way he wanted it, but it was too hard, goddamned near impossible when you could never remember anything from one day to the next, and nothing ever seemed to stay in position. Son of a bitch. Coming for her conjugal four days early! Furiously he said, “You sure? Dr. Lewis authorized the change of date? This has to be a mix-up.”

“The authorization number is—”

“Never mind. Listen, there’s a bad mix-up here. I’m due for external leave on Saturday. You’ve got something down there about my applying for an external leave for this weekend, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Ferguson, there’s nothing of that—”

“Check again.”

“There’s no record of any application for external leave.”

“It’s got to be there. There’s been some mistake.” Try arguing with a computer, Ferguson thought, despondent. “I know I applied. You keep searching. And listen, get me Elszabet Lewis right away. She knows I applied, too.”

“Dr. Lewis is with a client, Mr. Ferguson.”

“Tell her I want to talk with her, then. Pronto, soon as she’s done.” He slapped the disconnect and put both his hands over his face and pressed hard. He managed to take two or three deep breaths. Then the phone bleeped: the computer was talking to him again.

“Do you still want that outside line, Mr. Ferguson?”

“No. Yes. Yeah, sure.” When he got the tone he keyed in Lacy’s number in San Francisco. Seven-fifteen in the morning; would she be up yet? Four rings. Slept somewhere else last night, kid? I wouldn’t be surprised. Then he wondered why he suspected that. For all he could remember, she lived like a nun. Maybe the pick isn’t as thorough as you think, he told himself.

On the fifth ring she answered, sounding furry and vague.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Ed, baby.”

“Ed? Ed! ” Awake in a flash. “Oh, sweet, how are you doing? I’ve been thinking about you so much—”

“Listen, there’s trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“About the weekend.”

“Yes?” Suddenly very cool, very remote.

“They won’t give me leave. They say I’ve had a setback, that I have to go in the tank for an extra rinsing.”

“I’ve got everything booked, honey! It’s all set up!”

“Next weekend?”

She was quiet a little while. “I’m not sure I can, next weekend.”

“Oh.”

“Even if you can’t get leave, couldn’t I come over there? You said there’s a house for conjugal visits, didn’t you? And—”

“You aren’t conjugal, Lacy.”

It was the wrong thing to say. He could feel the subzero chill coming up out of the telephone speaker.

He said, “Anyway, that isn’t the point. I’m going to be in the tank all weekend. By the time they get done with me, I won’t know my ass from my elbow. And I can’t have visitors.”

“I’m sorry, Ed.”

“So am I. You don’t know how sorry I am.”

Another silence. Then: “How are you doing, anyway?”

“I’m okay. I’m not letting these bastards get to me.”

“You still remember me?”

“You know I do, baby. I can see that red hair shining. I can see you sitting there high up above me going for a big one.”

“Oh, honey—”

“I love you, Lacy.”

“I love you too. You miss me, Ed? Really?”

“You know how much.”

“It’s really shitty, about this weekend. You and me walking along the beach in Mendo—”

“Don’t make it any harder,” he said. “You know I would if I could.”

“I had so much to tell you, too.”

“Like what?”

“There’s a funny thing. About our space project—you remember?”

“Sure I remember,” he said.

But there must have been a perceptible jiggle in his voice, because she said, “I mean, the one when we were trying to sell mind-trips to Betelgeuse Five, that one. I had a dream the other day that I took one. A mind-trip. That I really went to some other star, you know?”

He said, “You can’t start believing your own scams, baby.”

“It was the realest thing. There was a red sun in the sky and a blue one. And I saw a big golden thing with horns standing on a block of white stone, some kind of space monster, and it reached out to me, it seemed to be beckoning to me. It was like a giant. It was almost like a god. And in the sky—”

“Listen, baby, this call is costing me a fortune.”

“Just let me tell you. It wasn’t any ordinary dream. It was like real, Ed. I saw the trees of this planet, I saw the bugs, even, and they weren’t like our trees or bugs, and—but the funny thing was, it was just the sort of gig we were trying to sell people, the one they sent you up for, and—”

“Lacy, hey. They’re calling me to go down to the therapy session.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Will I see you next weekend? I can hear all the rest of it then.”

“I’m not sure, next weekend. I told you, it doesn’t look good.”

“Try for it, Lacy. I miss you so damn much.”

“Yeah, Ed. Me too.”

It didn’t sound convincing, how much she missed him. The bitch, he thought. Anger surged in him. If she had been within reach he would have slapped her around. And then he realized that none of this was her fault, that she had been primed to come tomorrow, that it was his wife who had scrambled things up. He couldn’t expect Lacy to keep herself on ice indefinitely, week after week. Quickly he went through one of the anger exercises Dr. Lewis had shown him.

He said as tenderly as he knew how, “I love you, Lacy. I wish I could see you tomorrow. You know that.”

He signed off. Then he touched his ring. “Request wife,” Ferguson said.

His recorded voice replied, “Wife: Mariela Johnston. Birthday August seventh. She’ll be thirty-three this summer. You married her in Honolulu on July fourth, 2098. She’s hot stuff but you can’t stand her any more. Your lawyer is checking to see if you’ve got grounds for an annulment.”

Fine, he thought. But obviously nothing’s happened about that yet. And here she comes for her conjugal, wiping out Lacy’s weekend. Shit. Shit. Hanging in there for the community property, I bet that’s what she’s doing. The good little wife, coming for the conjugal.

There was a tap at the door.

“Who?” Ferguson called.

“Alleluia,” said the most musical female voice he had ever heard.

Something stirred in his muddled and mutilated memory bank, but he was unable to get hold of it. He touched his ring and said, “Request Alleluia.”

“Fellow patient at Nepenthe Center. Synthetic woman, terrific body, very fucked-up personality. You’ve been screwing her on and off all summer.”

He stared at the ring in disbelief. Screwing a synthetic? You must have been awfully hard up, kiddo. But if the recorder says so, it must be so.

“Come on in,” he said.

When he saw her, he started believing what the ring had told him. Synthetic or not, he could easily imagine himself going to bed with her. She had presence. She could pass for real. She was beautiful beyond all plausibility, too, the way synthetics usually were. Laser-star looks, long legs, creamy skin, tumbling black hair, perfect face. She wore something thin and shimmering, with nipples showing through. With the light from the hallway behind her, he saw the black pubic triangle plainly too. He had never really understood why they bothered putting pubic hair on the imitation people, unless it was to keep them from getting recognized too easily for what they were; but you recognized them anyway because they were better looking than any natural person could ever hope to be.

She glided into the room and said, “Are you okay?”

“Why? Don’t I look okay?”

“Extremely tense. Jumpy, edgy, irritated. Maybe this is the way you always look, but you don’t look relaxed.”

“Irritated? Shit, yes, I’m irritated. There’ve been complications,” he said. “The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I don’t like it. It’s messed me up very bad.” He shook his head. “Hell, this is no way to start a conversation, is it? Try again. Hello there, you. Alleluia. Allie.”

She smiled. “I’m sorry. Hello. You’re Ed Ferguson, aren’t you?”

“You bet your pretty ass I am.”

“I had a note under my pillow that said I ought to go introduce myself to you first thing after pick. I think I do this every morning, don’t I?”

“Yes,” he said, although he had no more memory of it than she did. He rose and went to her, and pulled her to him and they kissed, and he ran his hands up over her breasts. They felt the way he imagined a fourteen-year-old’s breasts would feel, hard as plastic but warmer. “We do this every morning, yes. We get acquainted again. Alleluia, Ed. Ed, Alleluia. Very pleased to make your acquaintance. See? That’s the system.”

“It’s almost worth having to do pick,” she said. “To get acquainted again. Each time is like the first time, isn’t it?” She laughed and snuggled against his chest. “Let’s go take a walk in the woods this afternoon, okay? Your roommates will be getting back here soon.”

“I can’t go this afternoon, Allie.”

“Can’t?”

“The irritating complication I was speaking of. Got a visitor at ten-thirty. My wife. She’s coming on a conjugal.”

She moved back from him, looking pained. “I didn’t know you had a wife, Ed.”

“Neither did I, till the communications computer reminded me. She was supposed to come Tuesday, but somehow she’s arriving today instead. So the woods are out, sweetheart.”

“We still have three hours.”

“Conjugal is supposed to be conjugal,” Ferguson said. “You understand? If I could I would, you know that, but today I’m just not free. All right? She’ll be gone Sunday afternoon and then we can play. Is that all right?”

He saw the anger in her eyes, and it scared him. Women’s anger always did; but Alleluia’s anger was special even as women’s anger went, because she was special. If she wanted to, he knew, she could pull his arms and legs off the way you’d pull the wings off a fly. Synthetic people were amazingly strong. And this one was an emotionally disturbed synthetic person, and she was standing between him and the door. He flicked a glance at the phone, wondering if he could thumb the plate fast enough to call for help before she pounced.

But she didn’t pounce. She went through some internal exercise—he saw the muscles moving in her cheeks—and calmed herself. “All right,” she said. “After she goes. Your wife.”

“You know I’d rather be off playing with you.”

The artificial woman nodded abstractly. She seemed to be drifting off into some distant realm before his eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Quietly she said, “I’m not sure. There’s something been bothering me, and it happened again last night.”

“Tell me.”

“Don’t laugh. I’ve been having funny dreams, Ed.”

“Dreams?”

She hesitated. “I think I’m seeing other worlds. One’s all green, with a green sky and green clouds, and the people look like they’re made out of glass. Do you ever have dreams like that?”

“I don’t remember any of my dreams,” he said quietly. “They pick them out of me, first thing in the morning. You dreamed of another world, did you? How come you remember that, if you’ve been picked this morning?”

“A couple of them. The green world was one. My dreams seem to stay with me, you know? I suppose because I’m a synthetic. Maybe the pick doesn’t always work right on me. There’s another world I’ve seen once or twice, with two suns in the sky.”

Ferguson caught his breath sharply.

She said, “One’s red, and the other one—”

“—is blue?”

“Blue, yes!” she said. “You’ve seen it too?”

He felt the chills starting to run down his back. This is crazy, he thought. “And there was a big golden thing with horns, standing on a block of white stone?”

“You have seen it! You have!”

“Jesus suffering Christ,” Ferguson said.

5

It was the third day since Charley had managed to get the ground-effect van started up. They were down out of the foothills now, into the sweltering eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley. So far, so good, Tom thought. Maybe they’d let him travel with them all the way to San Francisco.

“Look at this godforsaken crappy place,” Charley said. “My grandfather came from around here. He was a goddamned rich man, my grandfather. Cotton, wheat, corn, I don’t know what. He had eighty men working for him, you know?”

It was hard to believe that this had been farming country only thirty or forty years back. For sure, nobody was farming much here any more. The land was starting to go back to desert, the way it had been four hundred years ago, before the irrigation canals. Under the summer heat everything was brown and twisted and dead.

“What’s that town off there?” Buffalo asked.

“I don’t think anybody remembers,” Charley said.

“It’s Fresno,” said the man named Tamale, who was full of information, all of it wrong.

“Shit,” Charley said. “Fresno’s way down in the south, don’t you know that? And don’t tell me Sacramento, neither. Sacto’s out this way. Anyhow, those are cities. This thing’s just a town, and nobody remembers its name, I bet.”

Buffalo said, “They got towns in Egypt ten thousand years old, everybody remembers their name. This place, you leave it alone thirty years, who the hell knows anything?”

“Let’s go over there,” Charley said. “Maybe there’s something useful still lying around. Let’s go scratch some.”

“Scratch scratch,” said the little Latino one they called Mujer, and all of them laughed.

Tom had traveled with scratchers before. He preferred that to traveling with bandidos. It was safer in a lot of ways. Sooner or later bandidos did something so dumb that they wound up getting wiped out. Scratchers were better at looking after their own skins. On the average they weren’t as wild as bandidos, and maybe a little smarter. What scratchers did was a mix of scavenging and banditry, whatever worked, whatever they had to do to stay alive as they moved around the outskirts of the cities. Sometimes they killed, but only when they had to, never just for the fun of it. Tom felt easy falling in with this bunch. He hoped he could stay with them at least as far as San Francisco. If not, well, that was okay too. Whatever happened was okay. There was no other way to live, was there, but to accept whatever happened? But he preferred to keep on traveling with Charley and his scratchers. They would look after him. This was rough country out here. It was rough country everywhere, but this was rougher than most.

And he figured he was safe with them. He had become a sort of mascot for them, a good-luck charm.

It wasn’t the first time he had played that role. Tom knew that to a certain kind of person, someone like him was desirable to have around. They regarded him as crazy but not particularly dangerous or unpleasant—crazy in a nice way—and somebody like that had some appeal for men of that sort. You needed all the luck you could get, and a crazy like Tom had to be lucky to have lived as long as he had, wandering around on the edge of the world. So now he was their pet. They all liked him, Buffalo and Tamale and Mujer, Rupe and Choke and Nicholas, and especially Charley, of course. All but Stidge. Stidge still hated him, probably always would, because he had gotten beaten up on Tom’s account. But Stidge didn’t dare lay a hand on him, out of fear of Charley, or maybe just because he thought it would bring bad luck. Whatever. Tom didn’t care what reason, so long as Stidge kept away from him.

“Look at that place,” Charley kept saying. ” Look at it!”

It was dismal, all right. Broken streets, slabs of asphalt rising at steep tilts everywhere, the shells of houses, dry grass poking up through shattered pavement. Sand creeping in from the fields. A couple of dead cars lying on their sides, everything stripped.

“They must have had one mean war here,” Mujer said.

“Not here,” said Choke, the skeleton-looking one with the crisscross scars on his forehead. “Weren’t no war here. The war was back east of here, dummy—Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, where they dropped the dust.”

“Anyhow,” said Buffalo, “dust don’t smash a town up like this. Dust just garbage it all with hard stuff, so you burn when you touch anything.”

“So what did this?” Mujer wanted to know.

“The people moving away, that’s what did it,” Charley said in a very quiet voice. “You think these towns repair themselves? The people left because there wasn’t any more farming here, maybe too much dust in the air bringing hard stuff from the dead states, or maybe it was because the canal broke somewhere up north and nobody knew how to fix it. I don’t know. But they move on, off to Frisco or down south, and then the pipes rust and you get an earthquake or two and nobody’s here to fix anything and it all gets worse and worse, and then the scratchers move in to grab what’s left. You don’t need no bombs to destroy a place. You don’t need anything. Let it be, and it just falls apart. They didn’t build these places to last, like they built Egypt, hey, Buffalo? They built them for thirty, forty years, and the thirty-forty years, they used up.”

“Shit,” Mujer said. “What a world we got!”

“We’ll go to San Francisco,” said Charley. “It’s not so bad there. Spend the summer. At least it’s cool there, the fog, the breeze.”

“What a screwed-up world,” said Mujer.

Tom, standing a little way apart from them, said, “For the indignation of the Lord is upon all the nations, and His fury upon all their armies: He hath utterly destroyed them, He hath delivered them to the slaughter.”

“What’s the looney saying now?” Stidge asked.

“It’s the Bible,” said Buffalo. “Don’t you know the Bible?”

“And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.”

Charley said, “You know it all by heart?”

“A lot of it,” said Tom. “I was a preacher for a time.”

“Whereabouts was that?”

“Up there,” Tom said, jerking his thumb over his right shoulder. “Idaho. Washington State, some.”

“You’ve been around.”

“Some.”

“You ever been really east?”

Tom looked at him. “You mean, New York, Chicago, like that?”

“Like that, yeah.”

“How?” Tom said. “Fly?”

“Yeah,” said Mujer, laughing. “Fly! On a broomstick!”

“They once did,” Tamale said. “Coast to coast. You get on a plane in San Francisco, it take you to New York, three hours. My father told me that.”

“Three hours,” said Stidge. “Shit. That’s just shit.”

“Three hours,” Tamale repeated. “Who you calling shit?” He had his knife out. “You calling my father shit? Go on, call it again. Call my mother something too, Stidge. Go on. Go on.”

“Quit it,” Charley said. “We came here to scratch. Let’s do some scratching. Stidge, you’re a pain in the ass.”

“You think I’m gonna believe that? Three hours and you’re in New York?”

“My father said it,” Tamale muttered.

“A different world then,” said Charley. “Before the Dust War it was all different. Maybe it was five hours, huh, Tamale?”

“Three.”

Tom felt all this talk pressing on his skull like a brain tumor. Three hours, five, what did it matter? That world was gone. He walked away from them.

He sensed that a vision was coming on.

Good. Good. Let it come. Let them bicker, let them cut themselves up if that was what they wanted. He dwelled in other, finer worlds. He walked up a little way, around the raw jagged upended block of pavement, past a mass of rusty iron gridwork, and sat down on the curb of a sand-choked street with his back against an enormous palm tree that looked as though it meant still to be here when California and everything man had built in California had been swept away by time.

The vision came rushing on, and it was a big one, it was the entire deal all at once.

Sometimes he got it all, not just one alien world but the great stupendous multitude of them coming one on top of another. At times like that he felt himself to be the focus of the cosmos. Whole galactic empires surged through his soul. He had the full vision of the myriad realms beyond realms that lay out there beyond mankind’s comprehension.

Come to me! Ah, yes, come, come!

Before his astounded bugging eyes came the grandest procession he had ever seen, a sequence of worlds upon worlds. It was like a torrent, a wild flood. The green world and the empire of the Nine Suns and the Double Kingdom first, and then the Poro worlds and the worlds of the Zygerone who were the masters of the Poro, and rising above them the figure of a Kusereen overlord from the race that ruled who knew how many galaxies, including those of the Zygerone and the Poro. He saw quivering transparent life-forms too strange to be nightmares. He saw whirling disks of light stretching to the core of the universe. Through him raced libraries of data, the lists of emperors and kings, gods and demons, the texts of bibles sacred to unknown religions, the music of an opera that took eleven galactic years to perform. He held on the palm of his hand a jewelled sphere no larger than a speck of dust in which were recorded the names and histories of the million monarchs of the nine thousand dynasties of Sapiil. He saw black towers taller than mountains rising in an unbroken row to the horizon. He had full perception in all directions in time as well as space. He saw the fifty demigods of the Theluvara Age that had been three billion years ago when even the Kusereen were young, and he saw the Eye People of the Great Starcloud yet to come, and the ones who called themselves the Last, though he knew they were not. My God, he thought, my God, my God, I am as nothing and You have brought all this wonder upon me. I Tom your servant. If I could only tell them the things You show me. If I could only. How can I serve You who created all this, and so much more besides? What need do You have of me? Is it to tell them? Then I will tell them. I will show them. I will make Thy wonders manifest in their eyes. My God, my God, my God! And still the vision went on, and on and on, worlds without end.

Then it was gone, winking out with a snap, and he lay sprawled in a ruined street in a deserted town, stupefied, gasping for breath. His clothing was drenched with sweat. Charley’s worried face hovered before him.

“Tom? Tom? Can you talk, Tom?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“We thought you had a stroke.”

“It was the big one,” he said. “I saw it all. I saw the power and the glory. Oh, poor Tom, poor poor Tom! It was the big one, and never will it come again!”

“Let me help you up,” Charley said. “We’re ready to move on. Can you stand? There. There. Easy. You had another vision, huh? You see the green world?”

Tom nodded. “I saw it, yeah. I saw everything,” he said. ” Everything .”