Tom O'Bedlam

1

The red-and-yellow ground-effect van was floating westward, floating westward, floating westward, on and on and on. The scratchers hadn’t wanted to stay in the San Joaquin Valley after the killings in the farmhouse by the river fork. So westward they went, on a chariot of air, drifting a little way above the dusty August roadbed. Tom felt like a king, riding like that: like Solomon going forth in majesty.

They let him sit up front next to the driver. Charley drove some of the time, and Buffalo, and sometimes the one named Nicholas, who had a smooth boyish face and hair that was entirely white, and who almost never said a thing. Occasionally Mujer drove, or Stidge. Tamale never did, nor Tom himself. Mostly the one who drove, though, was Rupe, beefy and broad-shouldered and red-faced. He just sat there, hour after hour after hour, holding the stick. When Rupe drove, the van never seemed to drift more than a whisker’s width from the straight path. But Rupe didn’t like Tom to sing when he drove. Charley did; Charley was always calling for songs during his shifts. “Get out the old finger-piano, man,” Charley would say, and Tom would rummage in his pack. He had picked up the finger-piano down San Diego way three years ago from one of the African refugees they had down there. It was just a little hollow wooden board with metal tabs fastened to it, but Tom had learned to make it sound as good as a guitar, picking out the melodies with his thumbs against the tabs. He knew the words of a lot of songs. He didn’t know tunes for all of them, but by now he had had enough practice so that he could make tunes up that fitted the words. His voice was a high clear tenor. People liked to hear it, everyone but Rupe. But that was only fair, not bothering Rupe while he was driving.

“Where do you get those songs?” Mujer asked. “I never heard no songs like that.”

“I found a book once,” Tom said. “I learned a lot of poems out of it. Then I made up the music myself.”

“No wonder I never heard none of those songs,” said Mujer. “No wonder.”

“Sing the one about the beach,” Charley said. He was sitting just to the right of Tom. Mujer was driving, and Tom between them in the front seat. “I liked that one. The sad one, the beach at moonlight.” They were getting close to San Francisco now, maybe just another four or five hours, Charley had said. There were a lot of little towns out here, and most of them still were inhabited, though about every third one had been abandoned long ago. The land was still dry and hot, the heavy hand of summer pressing down. The last time they had gotten out of the van to scratch for food, that morning around eleven, Tom had hoped to feel the first cool breeze blowing from the west, and to see wisps of fog drifting their way: San Francisco air, clean and cool. No, Charley had said, you don’t feel San Francisco air until you’re right there, and then it changes all of a sudden, you can be roasting and you come through the tunnel in the hills and it’s cool, it’s like a different kind of air altogether.

Tom was ready for that. He was getting tired of the heat of the Valley. His visions came sharper and better when the air was cool, somehow.

He played a riff on the finger-piano and sang:

“Beautiful,” Charley said.

“I don’t like this goddamn song neither,” said Mujer.

“Then don’t listen,” Charley said. “Just shut up.”

“It don’t make no sense,” said Mujer. “It ain’t about anything.”

“What about the end part?” Charley said. “That’s where it’s really beautiful. If you got any soul in you. Skip to the end, Tom. Hey, what’s that town? Modesto, you think? Modesto, coming up. Skip to the end of the song, will you, Tom?”

Skipping to the end was all right with Tom. He could sing the songs in any order at all.

He sang:

“Beautiful,” Charley said. “You just listen to that. That’s real poetry. It says it all. Take the bypass, Mujer. We don’t want to get ourselves into Modesto, I don’t think.”

“Do the rest of it,” Charley said, as Tom became silent.

“That’s it,” said Tom. “That’s where it ends. Where ignorant armies clash by night. ” He closed his eyes. He saw Eternity come rising up, that ring of blazing light stretching from one end of the universe to the other, and he wondered if a vision was coming on, but no, no, it died away as fast as it had risen. Too bad, he thought. But he knew it would return before long; he could still feel it hovering at the edge of his consciousness, getting ready to break through. Someday, he told himself, a vision of brightness will come and completely take me and carry me off to the heavens, like Elijah who was swept up by the whirlwind, like Enoch, who walked with God and God took him.

“Look there,” said Charley. “The road to San Francisco turns off there.”

The van swung toward the north. Floating, floating, floating toward the sea on a cushion of air. My chariot, Tom thought. I am led in splendor into the white city beside the bay. A chariot of air, not like that which came for Elijah, which was a chariot of fire, and horses of fire. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. “There is a kind of chariot on the Fifth Zygerone World,” Tom said, “that is made of water, I mean the water of that world, which isn’t like the water we have here. The Fifth Zygerone people travel in those chariots like gods.”

“Listen to him,” Stidge said from the back of the van. “The fucking looney. What do you keep him for, Charley?”

“Shut it, Stidge,” said Charley.

Tom stared at the sky and it became the white sky of the Fifth Zygerone World, a gleaming shield of brilliant radiance, almost like the sky of the Eye People’s world except not so total, not so solid a brightness. The two huge suns stood high in the vault of the heavens, the yellow one and the white, with a rippling mantle streaming red between them and around them. And the Fifth Zygerone people were floating back and forth between their palaces and their temples, because it was the holiday known as the Day of the Unknowing when all the past year’s pain was thrown into the sea.

“Can you see them?” Tom whispered. “Like teardrops, those chariots are, big enough to hold a whole family, the blood-parents and the water-parents both. And all the Fifth Zygerone people float through the sky like princes and masters.”

His mind teemed with worlds. He saw everything, down to the words on the pages in their books; and he could understand those words even when the books were not books, the words were not words. It had always been like this for him; but the visions became sharper and sharper every year, the detail richer, more profound.

Charley said, “You just keep driving, Mujer. Don’t stop nohow for anything. And don’t say nothing.”

“The Fifth Zygerone are the great ones, the masters. You can see them now, can’t you, getting out of their chariots? They have heads like suns and arms sprouting all around their waists, a dozen and a half of them, like whips—those are the ones. They came to this star eleven hundred million years ago in the time of the Veltish Overlordry, when their old sun started to puff up and turn red and huge. Their old sun ate its worlds, one by one, but the Zygerone were gone by then to their new planets. The Fifth World is the great one, but there are nineteen altogether. The Zygerone are the masters of the Poro, you know, which is astonishing when you think about it, because the Poro are so great that if one of their least servants came to Earth, one of their merest bondsmen, he would be a king over us all. But to the Zygerone the Poro are nothing. And yet there is a race that is master over the Zygerone too. I’ve told you that, haven’t I? The Kusereen, they are, and they rule over whole galaxies, dozens of them, hundreds, the true Imperium.” Tom laughed. His head was thrown back, his eyes were closed. “Do you think, Charley, that the Kusereen yield to a master too? And so on up and up and up? Sometimes I think there is a far galaxy where the Theluvara kings still reign, and every half billion years the Kusereen Overlord goes before them and bows his knee at their throne. Except the Kusereen don’t have knees, really. They’re like rivers, each one, a shining river that holds itself together like a ribbon of ice. But then who are the kings the Theluvara kings give allegiance to? And there is also God in majesty at the summit of creation, triumphant over all things living and dead and yet to come. Don’t forget Him.”

“You ever hear crazy?” Stidge said. “That’s crazy for you. That’s the real thing.”

“I like it better than his songs,” said Mujer. “The songs give me a pain. This stuff, it’s like watching a laser show, except it’s in words. But he tells it real good, don’t he?”

“He sees it like it’s real to him, yeah,” said Buffalo.

Charley said, “He sees it that way because it is real.”

“I hear you right, man?” Mujer said.

“You hear me right, yeah. He sees worlds. He looks out across stars. He reads the Book of Suns and the Book of Moons.”

“Oh, hey,” Stidge said. “Hey, listen to Charley, now!”

“Shut your hole,” said Charley. “I know what I’m saying, Stidge. You shut it or you’ll walk the rest of the way to Frisco, man.”

“Frisco,” Buffalo said. “It ain’t far now. Man, am I going to have some fun in Frisco!”

Charley said, speaking softly to Tom alone, “You don’t pay any mind, Tom. You just go on telling us.”

But it was over. All Tom saw now was the road to San Francisco, hardly any traffic, heat shimmering on the pavement and big tumbleweed balls rolling across the highway, fetching up against the old barbed-wire fencing. The Fifth Zygerone World was gone. That was all right. It would be back, or one of the others. He had no fear of that. That was the one thing he did not fear, that the visions might suddenly desert him. What he did fear was that when it came time for the people of the Earth to embrace the worlds of the Imperium he would be left behind, he would not be able to make the Crossing. There was a prophecy to that effect. It was an old story, wasn’t it? Moses dying at the entrance to the Promised Land? I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither, said the Lord. Tears began to stream down Tom’s cheeks. He sat there quietly weeping, watching the road unroll. The van moved silently toward San Francisco, floating, floating, on and on and on.

“San Francisco, forty-five minutes,” said Buffalo. “My oh my oh my!”

2

The tumbondé man said, “You wait here, we call you when Senhor Papamacer he ready to talk to you. You don’t go out of this room, you understand that?”

Jaspin nodded.

“You understand that?” the tumbondé man said again.

“Yes,” said Jaspin hoarsely. “I understand. I’ll wait here until Senhor Papamacer is ready for me.”

He couldn’t believe this place. It was like a shack, four, five rooms falling apart, falling down; it was like the sort of stuff you would expect to find in Tijuana, except Tijuana hadn’t been this run-down in fifty years. This, the headquarters of a cult that had the allegiance of thousands, that was winning new converts by the hundreds every day? This shack?

The house was in the southeast corner of National City somewhere right down next to Chula Vista, on a low flat sandy hilltop behind the old freeway. It looked about two hundred years old and probably it was: early twentieth century at the latest, patched and mended a thousand times, not the slightest thing modern about it. No protection screen, no glow-windows, no utilities disk on the roof, not even the usual ionization rods that everybody had, the totem poles that were thought to keep away whatever gusts of hard radiation might blow from the east. For all Jaspin could tell, the place had no electricity either, no telephone, maybe not even any indoor plumbing. He hadn’t expected anything remotely as primitive as this. “Man, you be ready today, you come hear the word Senhor Papamacer has for you,” they had told him. “We come get you, man, we take you to the house of the god.” This? House of the god? Not even any sign of that, really, none of the tumbondé imagery visible from the front. It was only when you walked up the cracked and weedy wooden steps and around to the side entrance that you got a peek into the carport, where the papier-mâché statues of the divinities were stored, leaning casually against the beaver-board wall like discarded props from some laser-show horror program, old tossed-aside monsters. At a quick glance Jaspin had spotted the familiar forms of Narbail, O Minotauro, Rei Ceupassear. Maybe they kept the big Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga ones in some safer place. But in this neighborhood, where Senhor Papamacer was like a king, who would dare to mess around with the statues of the gods?

Jaspin waited, He fidgeted. At least in a doctor’s office they gave you an old magazine to read, a cube to play with, something. Here, nothing. He was very frightened and trying hard not to admit that to himself.

This is a field trip, he thought. This is like you’re going for your doctorate and you have to have an interview with the high priest, the mumbo man. That’s all it is. You are doing anthropological research today.

Which was true, sort of. He knew why he wanted to see Senhor Papamacer. But why, for God’s sake, did Senhor Papamacer want to see him?

One of the tumbondé men came back into the room. Jaspin couldn’t tell which one: they all looked alike to him, very bad technique for someone who purported to be an anthropologist. In his narrow black-and-red leggings, his silver jacket, his high-heeled boots, the tumbondé man could have been a bullfighter. His face was the face of an Aztec god, cold, inscrutable, cheekbones like knives. Jaspin wondered if he was one of the top eleven apostles, the Inner Host. “Senhor Papamacer, he almost ready for you,” he told Jaspin. “You stand up, come over here.”

The tumbondé man patted him down for weapons, missing no part of him. Jaspin smelled the fragrance of some sweet oil in the tumbondé man’s thick dark high-piled hair, oil of wintergreen, essence of citrus, something like that. He tried not to tremble as the tumbondé man explored his clothing.

They had stopped him after the rites when he and Jill were leaving two weeks ago. Five of them, surrounding him smoothly, while his head was still full of visions of Maguali-ga. This is it, he thought then, half dazed: they are on to human sacrifice, now, and they have noticed the scholarly-looking Jewboy with the skinny shiksa girlfriend, the wrong kind of ethnics in this very ethnic crowd, and in five minutes we are going to be up in the blood-hut next to the white bull and the three of us, Jill and the bull and me, will have our throats cut. Blood running together in a single chalice. But that wasn’t it. “The Senhor, he has words for you,” they said “When the time is here, man, he wishes speak to you.” For two weeks Jaspin had worried himself crazy with what this thing was all about. Now the time was here.

“You go in now,” the tumbondé man said. “You very lucky, face on face with the Senhor.”

Two more toreros in full costume came into the room. One stationed himself in front of Jaspin, one behind, and they led him down a dark hallway that smelled of dry rot or mildew. It didn’t seem likely that they meant to kill him, but he couldn’t shake off his fear. He had told Jill to call the police if he wasn’t back by four that afternoon. Fat lot of good that would do him, most likely; but he could at least threaten the tumbondé men with it if things turned scary.

“This is the room. Very holy it is here. You go in.”

“Thank you,” Jaspin said.

The room was absolutely square, lit only by candles, heavy brocaded draperies covering the windows. When Jaspin’s eyes adjusted he saw a rug on the floor, jagged patterns of red and green, and a man sitting crosslegged, utterly motionless, on the rug. To the right of him was a small figure of the horned god Chungirá-He-Will-Come carved from some exotic wood. Maguali-ga, squat and nightmarish with one great bulging eye, stood on the man’s left. There was no furniture at all. The man looked up very slowly and speared Jaspin with a look. His skin was very dark but his features were not exactly Negroid, and his unblinking gaze was the most ferocious thing Jaspin had ever seen. It was the ebony face of Senhor Papamacer, no doubt of it. But Senhor Papamacer was a giant, at least when he was looming on the top of the tumbondé hill at the place of communion, and this man, so far as Jaspin could tell, considering that he was sitting down, seemed very compact. Well, they can do illusions extremely well, he thought. They probably put stilt-shoes on him and dress him big. Jaspin began to feel a little calmer.

“Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come,” said Senhor Papamacer in the familiar subterranean voice, three registers below basso. When he spoke, nothing moved except his lips, and those not very much.

“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” Jaspin responded.

A glacial smile. “You are Jaspeen? You sit. Por favor. ”

Jaspin felt a cold wind sweeping through the room. Sure, he thought, a cold wind in a closed room without windows, in San Diego, in August. The wind wasn’t real, he knew; the chill that he felt was. He maneuvered himself down to the red-and-green rug, creakily managing a lotus position to match Senhor Papamacer’s. It seemed to him that something might be about to pop loose in one of his hips, but he forced himself to hold the position. He was frightened again in a very calm way.

Senhor Papamacer said, “Why you come to us in tumbondé?”

Jaspin hesitated. “Because this has been a dark and troubled time in my soul,” he said. “And it seemed to me that through Maguali-ga I might be able to find the right path.”

That sounds pretty good, he told himself.

Senhor Papamacer regarded him in silence. His obsidian eyes, dark and glossy, searched him remorselessly.

“Is shit, what you say,” he told Jaspin after a bit, laying the words out quietly, without malice or rancor, almost gently. “What you say, it is what you think I want to hear. No. Now you tell me why white professor comes to tumbondé.”

“Forgive me,” Jaspin said.

“Is not to forgive anything,” said Senhor Papamacer. “You pray to Rei Ceupassear, he give forgive. Me you just give truth. Why do you come to us?”

“Because I’m not a professor any more.”

“Ah. Good. Truth!”

“I was. UCLA. That’s in Los Angeles.”

“I know UCLA, yes.” It was like speaking to a stone idol. The man was utterly unyielding, the most formidable presence Jaspin had ever encountered. Out of some stinking brawling hillside favela near Rio de Janeiro, they said, came to California when the Argentinians dusted Brazil, now worshipped by multitudes. Sitting on the opposite side of this little green-and-red rug, almost within reach. “You leave UCLA when?”

“Early last year.”

“They fire you?”

“Yes.”

“We know. We know about you. Why they do that, hey?”

“I wasn’t coming to my classes. I was doing a lot of funny things. I don’t know. A dark and troubled time in my soul. Truly.”

“Truly, yes. And tumbondé, why?”

“Curiosity,” Jaspin blurted, and when the word came out of him it was like the breaking of a rope around his chest. “I’m an anthropologist. Was. You know what that is, anthropology?”

The chilly stare told him he had made a bad mistake.

Jaspin said, “Sometimes I don’t know whether you understand my words. I’m sorry. An anthropologist. Years of training. Even if I wasn’t a professor, I still thought of myself like one.” Color was flooding to his cheeks. Go on, just tell him the real stuff, he thought. He’s got your number anyway. “So I wanted to study you. Your movement. To understand what this tumbondé thing really was.”

“Ah. The truth. It feels good, the truth?”

Jaspin smiled, nodded. The relief was enormous.

Senhor Papamacer said, “You write books?”

“I was planning to do one.”

“You no write one yet?”

“Shorter pieces. Essays, reviews. For anthropological journals. I haven’t written my book yet.”

“You write a book on tumbondé?”

“No,” he said. “Not now. I thought perhaps I might, but I wouldn’t do it now.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve seen Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” Jaspin said.

“Ah. Ah. That is truth too.” A long silence again, but not a cold one. Jaspin felt totally at this strange little man’s mercy. He was wholly terrifying, this Senhor Papamacer. At length he said, as though from a great distance, “Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come.”

Jaspin made the ritual response. “Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga.”

Anger flashed in the obsidian eyes. “No, now I mean something other! He will come, I am saying. Soon. We will march north. It will be almost any day, we leave. Ten, fifty thousand of us, I don’t know, a hundred thousand. I will give the word. It is the time of the Seventh Place, Jaspeen. We will go north, California, Oregon, Washington, Canada. To the North Pole. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Truth.”

“Truth, yes.” Senhor Papamacer leaned forward. His eyes were ablaze. “I tell you what you do. You march with me, with Senhora Aglaibahi, with the Inner Host. You write the book of the march. You have the words; you have the learning. Someone must tell the story for those who come after, how it was Papamacer who opened the way for Maguali-ga, who opened the way for Chungirá-He-Will-Come. That is what I want, that you should march beside me and tell what we have achieved. You, Jaspeen. You! We saw you on the hill. We saw the god coming into you. And you have the words, you have the head. You are a professor and also you are of tumbondé. It is the truth. You are our man.”

Jaspin stared.

“Say what you will do,” said Senhor Papamacer. “You refuse?”

“No. No. No. No. I’ll do it. I’ve been committed to the march since July. Truly. You know I’ll be there. You know I’ll write what you want.”

Quietly Senhor Papamacer said, in a voice rich with dark mysteries beyond Jaspin’s comprehension, “I have walked with the true gods, Jaspeen. I know the seven galaxies. These gods are true gods. I close my eyes and they come to me, and now not even when they are closed. You will tell that, the truth.”

“Yes.”

“You have seen the gods yourself?”

“I have seen Chungirá-He-Will-Come. The horns, the block of white stone.”

“In the sky, is what?”

“A red sun from here to here. And over here, a blue sun.”

“It is the truth. You have seen. Not the others?”

“Not the others, no.”

“You will. You will see them all, Jaspeen. As we march, you will see everything, the seven galaxies. And you will write the story.” Senhor Papamacer smiled. “You will tell only the truth. It will be very bad for you if you do not, you understand that? The truth, only the truth. Or else when the gate is open, Jaspeen, I will give you to the gods who serve Chungirá-He-Will-Come, and I will tell them what you have done. You know, not all the gods are kind. You write not truth, I will give you to gods who are not kind. You know that, Jaspeen? You know that? I say it to you: Not all the gods are kind.”

3

Morning rounds, one of the regular chores. Routine was important, a key structural thing, for them and sometimes even for her. Right now especially for her. Go through the dorms, room by room, check all the patients out, see how well they were doing as their minds returned from their morning pick. Cheer them up if she could. Get them to smile a little. It would help their recovery if they’d smile more. Smiling was a known cure for a lot of things: it triggered the outflow of soothing hormones, that little twitch of the facial muscles did, sending all sorts of beneficial stuff shooting into the weary bloodstream.

You ought to smile more often yourself, Elszabet thought.

Room Seven: Ferguson, Menendez, Double Rainbow. She knocked. “May I come in? It’s Dr. Lewis.”

She hovered, waiting. Quiet inside. This time of morning they often didn’t have a lot to say. Well, no one had said she couldn’t come in, right? She put her hand to the plate. Every doorplate in the building was set to accept her print, Bill Waldstein’s, Dan Robinson’s. The door slid back.

Menendez was sitting on the edge of his bed with his eyes closed. There were bonephones glued to his cheeks, and he was moving his head sharply from side to side as if he were listening to some strongly rhythmic music. Across the room, Nick Double Rainbow lay stretched out belly-down on his vivid red Indian blanket, staring at nothing, chin propped up on fists and elbows. Elszabet went over to him, pausing by his bed to activate the privacy screen around it. A crackle of blurry pink light leaped up and turned Double Rainbow’s corner of the room into a private cubicle.

In that moment, just as the screen went shooting up around them, Elszabet felt her mind invaded by a green tendril of fog. Almost as if the energy of the screen had allowed the greenness to get in. Surprise, fear, shock, anger. Something rising out of the floor to skewer her. She caught her breath. Her spine tightened.

No, she thought fiercely. Get the hell out of there. Get. Get. The vagrant greenness went away. Once it was gone Elszabet found it hard to believe that it had been in her just a moment ago, even for an instant. She let her breath out, commanded her back and shoulders to ease up. The Indian didn’t seem to have noticed a thing. Still belly-down, still staring.

“Nick?” she said.

He went on ignoring her.

“Nick, it’s Dr. Lewis.” She touched his shoulder lightly. He jerked as if a hornet had stung him. “Elszabet Lewis. You know me.”

“Yeah,” he said, not looking at her.

“Rough morning?”

Tonelessly he said, “It’s all gone. The whole thing.”

“What is, Nick?”

“The people. The thing that we had. Goddamn, you know we had a thing and it was taken away. Why should that have happened? What the hell reason was there for that?”

So he was on his Vanishing Redman kick again. He was lost in contemplation of the supreme unfairness of it all. You could pick and pick and pick, and somehow you could never pick down far enough to get that stuff out of him. Which was what had dumped him into the Center in the first place: he had come here suffering from deep and abiding despair, the thing that Kierkegaard had termed the sickness unto death, which Kierkegaard said was worse than death itself, and which nowadays was called Gelbard’s syndrome. Gelbard’s syndrome sounded more scientific. Double Rainbow had lost faith in the universe. He thought the whole damn thing was useless and pointless if not actually malevolent. And he wasn’t getting better. There were holes in his memory all over the place now, sure, but the sickness unto death remained, and Elszabet suspected it didn’t have a thing to do with his alleged American Indian heritage but only with the fact that he had been unlucky enough to have been born in the second half of the twenty-first century, when the whole world, exhausted by a hundred fifty years of dumb self-destructive ugliness, was beginning to be overwhelmed by this epidemic of all-purpose despair. Bill Waldstein might actually be right that Double Rainbow wasn’t an Indian at all. It didn’t matter. When you had the sickness unto death, any pretext was enough to drag you down into the pit.

“Nick, do you know who I am?”

“Dr. Lewis.”

“My first name?”

“Elsa—Ezla—”

“Elszabet.”

“That’s it. Yeah.”

“And who am I?”

A shrug.

“You don’t remember?”

He looked at her, an off-center look, dark eyes focusing on her cheek. He was a big heavy-set man, thick through the shoulders, with a blunt broad nose and a grayish tinge to his skin, not exactly the coppery hue his alleged race was supposed to have, but close enough. Since he had taken that swing at her a couple of weeks back he had never quite been able to look her in the eye. So far as anyone could tell, he had no recollection of having gone on a rampage, of having hit her and hurt her. But some vestige of it must remain, she suspected. When he was around her he looked rueful and embarrassed and also sullen, as though he felt guilty about something but wasn’t sure what and was a little angry with the person who made him feel that way.

“Professor,” he said. “Doctor. Something like that.”

She said, “Close enough. I’m here to help you feel better.”

“Yeah?” Flicker of interest, swiftly subsiding.

“You know what I want you to do, Nick? Get yourself up and off that bed and over to the gym. Dante Corelli’s got the rhythm-and-movement workshop going down there right now. You know who she is, Dante?”

“Dante. Yeah.” A little doubtfully.

“You know the gymnasium building?”

“Red roof, yeah.”

“Okay. You get down there and start dancing, and dance your ass off, you hear me, Nick? You dance until you hear your father’s voice telling you to stop. Or until lunch bell, whichever one comes first.”

He brightened a little at that. His father’s voice. Sense of tribal structure: did him good, thinking about his father’s voice.

“Yeah,” he said. In his heavy way he started to push himself up from the bed.

“Did you have any dreams last night?” she asked offhandedly.

“Dreams? What dreams, how? I got no way of knowing.”

He had dreamed Blue Giant, the harsh and piercing light: that was this morning’s pick-room report. He seemed sincere in not remembering that, though.

“All right,” Elszabet said. “You go dance now.” She grinned at him. “Make it a rain dance, maybe. This time of year, we could use a little rain.”

“Too soon,” he said. “Waste of time, dancing for rain now. Rains don’t come till October. Anyway, what makes you think dancing’ll bring rain? What brings rain, it’s the low-pressure systems out of the Gulf of Alaska, October.”

Elszabet laughed. So he’s not completely out of things yet, she thought. Good. Good. “You go dance anyway,” she told him. “It’ll make you feel better, guaranteed.” She kicked the switch to knock the privacy screen down and went over to Tomás Menendez’ side of the room. He was sitting just as he had been before, listening to his bonephones. When she activated his privacy screen she braced herself for another touch of the green fog, but this time it didn’t come. Just about every other day now she had a whiff of it, an eerie sensation, that hallucination circling her like a vulture waiting to land. It was getting so that she was afraid to go to sleep, wondering whether this would be the night when the Green World finally broke through to her consciousness. That continued to terrify her, the fear of crossing the line from healer to hallucinator.

“Tomás?” she said softly.

Menendez was one of the most interesting cases: forty years old, second-generation Mexican-American, strong hulking man with arms like a gorilla’s, but gentle, gentle, the gentlest man she had ever known, soft-spoken, sweet, warm. In his fashion he was a scholar and a poet, as profoundly involved in his own ethnic heritage as Nick Double Rainbow claimed to be with his, but Menendez seemed really to mean it. He had turned the area around his bed into a little museum of Mexican culture, holoprints of paintings by Orozco and Rivera and Guerrero Vasquez, a couple of grinning Day of the Dead skeletons, a bunch of lively brightly painted clay animals, dogs and lizards and birds.

The year before last, Menendez had strangled his wife in their pretty little living room down in San José. No one knew why, least of all Menendez, who had no memory of doing it, didn’t even know his wife was dead, kept expecting her to visit him next weekend or the one after that. That was one of the strangest manifestations of Gelbard’s syndrome, the motiveless murder of close relatives by people who didn’t seem likely to be capable of swatting flies. Tell Menendez that he had killed his wife and he would look at you as though you were speaking in Turkish or Babylonian: the words simply had no meaning for him.

“Tomás, it’s me, Elszabet. You can hear me through those phones, can’t you? I just want to know how you’re getting along.”

“I am quite well, gracias. ” Eyes still closed, shoulders jerking rhythmically.

“That’s good news. What are you playing?”

“It is the prayer to Maguali-ga.”

“I don’t know that. What is it, an ancient Aztec chant?”

He shook his head. He seemed to disappear for a moment, knees bobbing, fists banging lightly together. “Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” he sang. “Chungirá-He-Will-Come!” Elszabet leaned close, trying to hear what he was hearing, but the bonephones transmitted sounds only to their wearer. The jacket of the cube he was playing with lay beside him on the bed. She picked it up. It bore a crudely printed label that looked homemade, half a dozen lines of type in a language that she thought at first was Spanish; but she could read a little Spanish and she couldn’t read this. Portuguese? The label had a San Diego address on it. Tomás was always getting shipments of things from his friends in the Chicano community: music, poetry, prints. He was a much loved man. Sometimes she wondered if they ought to be screening all these cubes and cassettes that he received. They might deal with things that could impede his recovery, she thought. But of course whatever he played was picked from him the next day, anyway; and it obviously made him happy to be keeping up with his people’s cultural developments. “Maguali-ga is the opener of the gate,” he said in a firm lucid voice, as though the phrase would explain everything to her. Then he opened his eyes, just for a moment, and frowned. He seemed surprised to have company.

“You are Elszabet?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“You have a message from my wife? She is coming this weekend, Carmencita?”

“No, not this weekend, Tomás.” There was no use in explaining. “What was that, what you were playing?”

“It is from Paco Real, San Diego.” He looked a little evasive. “Paco sends me many interesting things.”

“Music?”

“Singing, chanting,” Menendez said. “Very beautiful, very strong. Tell me, did I dream last night of the other worlds?”

“No, not last night.”

“The night before, though?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

He smiled sadly. “The dreams are so beautiful. That is what I write down: the dreams are so beautiful. Even though I must lose them, the beauty is what stays. When will I be allowed to keep my dreams, Elszabet?”

“When you’re better. You’re improving all the time, but you aren’t there yet, Tomás.”

“No. I suppose not. So I must not know, when I dream of the worlds. Is it all right that I write down that the dreams are so beautiful? I know we are not supposed to write things to ourselves, either. But that is a small thing, to tell myself about my dream, though I do not tell myself the dream itself.” He looked at her eagerly. “Or could I write down the dreams too?”

“No, not the dreams. Not yet,” she said. “Do you mind if I hear the new cube?”

“No, no, of course, here. Here.” He put the bonephones to her cheeks, pressing them on lightly, with a tender, almost loving touch. He tapped the knob and she heard a deep male voice, so deep it sounded like the booming of a great bullfrog, or perhaps a crocodile, chanting something steady and repetitive and vaguely African-sounding, a little barbaric, very powerful and disturbing. She heard the words that Menendez had been murmuring: Maguali-ga, Chungirá. Then there was a lot of what might have been Portuguese, and the sound of drums and some high-pitched instrument, and the noises of a crowd repeating the chant.

“But what is it?” she asked.

“It is like a meeting, a holy prayer. There are gods. It is very beautiful.” He took the bonephones from her as tenderly as he had put them on. “My wife, she will not this weekend, eh?”

“No, Tomás.”

“Ah. Ah, it is too bad.”

“Yes.” Elszabet switched off the screen. “You might want to go down to the gymnasium. There’s a dance group there now. You’d enjoy it.”

“Perhaps a little while.”

“All right. Do you happen to know where Ed Ferguson is?”

“Ferguson, no. I think he goes off walking in the woods.”

“Alone?”

“Sometimes the big woman. Sometimes the artificial one. I forget the names.”

“April. Alleluia.”

“One of them, yes.” Menendez took Elszabet’s hand carefully between his own. “You are a very kind woman,” he said. “You will visit me tomorrow?”

“Of course,” she said.

The strange discordant chanting still rang in her ears as she walked up the hallway to finish her rounds. Philippa, Alleluia, April. Alleluia wasn’t there. All right, off in the woods with Ferguson: that was an old story. They deserved each other, she told herself, the cold-blooded swindler and the cold-blooded artificial being. Then she chided herself for lack of charity. Some hell of a healer you are, thinking of your patients that way. But as quickly as she had assailed herself Elszabet let herself off the hook. You’re entitled to be human, she thought. You aren’t required to love everybody in the Center. Or even to like them. Just to see that they get the treatment they need.

She broke into a slow trot and then into a jog, heading back up the hill toward her office. The morning was lovely, clear and warm. It was that time of the year when one golden day followed another without variance or interruption; the summertime fog season was over, and as Nick Double Rainbow had so thoughtfully reminded her, the rainy season was still more than a month away.

I’ll go to the beach this afternoon, Elszabet thought. Lie in the sun, try to make some sense out of things.

It bothered her enormously that these strangenesses were creeping into the Center: the shared dreams, puzzling not only because they were shared but also because of their bewildering content, all these to the staff: Teddy Lansford and Naresh Patel and just yesterday Dante Corelli, too, bewilderedly confessing a Nine Suns dream. Elszabet suspected that other staff members might be concealing space dreams of their own, too, just as she had not yet been able to admit to anyone that she was now and then being invaded—while actually awake, no less—by strands of imagery that seemed to come out of the Green World dream. Everything was turning strange. Why? Why?

For Elszabet the Center was the one place in the world where she felt at peace, where the crazy turmoil outside was held at bay. That was why she had come here, to do her work and be of service and at the same time to escape the harshness and sorrows of that burned-out world beyond the Center’s gates. There were times here when she almost managed to forget about what was going on out there, although the steady influx of Gelbard’s syndrome victims, twitchy and hollow-eyed, constantly reminded her of that. Still, the Center was a peaceful place. And yet, and yet, she knew that was foolishness, hoping she could ever escape the real world here. The real world was everywhere. And now the real world was getting unreal and the unreality was sliding through the gates like a fog.

As she approached her office Bill Waldstein came down the path from the GHQ building and said, “Where is everybody?”

“Who? Staff? Patients?”

“Anyone. Place seems awfully quiet.”

Elszabet shrugged. “Dante’s got a big dance group going. I guess just about everyone must be over at the gym. Who are you looking for? Tomás and the Indian are in their room, Phillipa and April are in theirs, Ferguson’s fooling around in the forest with Alleluia—”

Waldstein looked drawn and weary. “Is it true that Dante had a space dream night before last?”

“You’d better ask her that,” Elszabet said.

“She did, then. She did.” He scuffed at the ground with his sandal. “Can we go into your office, Elszabet?”

“Of course. What’s happening, Bill?”

He didn’t speak until they were in the little room. Then, scrunching down against the data wall, he gave her a haggard look and said, “Confidential?”

“Absolutely.”

“You remember when I was saying the space dreams had to be frauds, that the patients were making them up just to bedevil us? I haven’t really believed that for a while, I guess. But I certainly don’t now.”

“Oh?” she said.

“Now that I’ve had one too.”

“You?”

“I had Double Star Three last night. The whole thing, all the bells and whistles, the orange sun high and the yellow one down by the horizon, the double shadows. Then the yellow one set and everything turned to flame.”

Elszabet watched him closely. She thought he was going to burst into tears.

“Wait,” he said. “There’s more. I improved on it. When April had it last week there were no life-forms, right? I got life-forms. Blue sphere-shaped creatures with little squid tentacles at the top end. Isn’t that cute? Strolling around in a sort of amphitheater like Aristotle and his disciples. Cute. Very cute.”

“How do you feel?” Elszabet asked.

Waldstein shuddered. “Dirty inside the head. Like I have gritty sand all over the lining of my skull.”

“Bill—”

Compassion flooded her. This was the moment to tell him that he wasn’t alone, that she had been feeling the Green World dream tickling at the edge of her mind, that she feared the same things he feared. She couldn’t do it. It was a lousy thing, holding back on him when he was plainly in so much pain. But she couldn’t do it. Letting him, anyone, know that her mind too was vulnerable to this stuff: no. No, she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She felt like a hypocrite. So be it. So be it. She remained outwardly cool, calm, the sensitive administrator hearing the confession of the troubled staff member.

Give him something, Elszabet thought.

“I can tell you that you aren’t alone in this,” she said after a moment.

“I know. Teddy Lansford. Dante. Also I think Naresh Patel, from something he let slip a few weeks ago. And probably more of us.”

“Probably,” she said.

“So it isn’t just a psychotic phenomenon limited to the patients.”

“It never was limited to the patients. Almost from the beginning it’s been reaching staff members.”

“Who are psychotic also, then? Early stages of Gelbard’s, do you think?”

She shook her head. “A, stop throwing around loaded words like psychotic, okay? B, sharing a manifestation like this with victims of Gelbard’s doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re coming down with Gelbard’s yourself, only that something very peculiar is going on that tends to affect the patients more readily than the staff, but affects staff too. C—”

“I’m scared, Elszabet.”

“So am I. C, what we have here is a phenomenon not confined to Nepenthe Center, as I intend to make clear at the staff meeting tomorrow.”

Waldstein looked startled. “What do you mean?”

“Move back and watch the data wall,” she said.

He ambled to his feet and turned around. She activated the wall. A map of the Pacific states appeared.

“These dreams,” she said, “have also been reported at the mindpick centers in San Francisco, Monterey, and Eureka.” She touched a key and the screen lit up at those three places. “I’ve been in touch with the directors there. Same seven visualizations, not necessarily all seven in each center. Primarily experienced by patients, lesser frequency among staff.”

“But what—”

“Hold on,” she said. More lights appeared on the screen. “Dave Paolucci in San Francisco has been gathering reports of incidence of the space dreams outside Northern California, and it looks like his new data are coming on line right this minute.” Patterns of color blossomed at the lower end of the state. “Look at that,” Elszabet said. “I’ve got to call him. I’ve got to get the details. Look there: a heavy concentration of dream reports in the San Diego area, you see? And some from Los Angeles. And up there too: what’s that, Seattle, Vancouver? Oh, Christ, Bill, look at that! It’s everywhere. It’s a plague.”

“Denver, too,” Waldstein said, pointing.

“Yeah. Denver. Which is about as far east as we have reliable communication, but who knows what’s going on beyond the Rockies? So it isn’t just you, Bill. It’s damn near everybody that’s dreaming these dreams.”

“Somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better,” Waldstein said.

4

Ferguson said, “What I’d like to do, I’d like to get myself the hell out of this place as fast as I can and start making some money out of all this nonsense.”

“How would you do that?” Alleluia asked.

“Hell, wouldn’t be much of a trick. The main side of the Center there’s a gate, but on this side it’s just the forest. You could slip off in the afternoon and find your way right through, just keep the sun at your back afternoons and in front of you mornings, maybe two or three days tops if you had your wits about you. Out to the old freeway and across to Ukiah, say—”

“No. I mean how would you make money out of it.”

Ferguson smiled. They were lying in a quiet, mossy glade a twenty-minute stroll east of the Center, redwoods and sword ferns and a little brook. The ground was folded and tilted there in a way that would make it hard for anyone to blunder onto them. It was his favorite place. He had made sure to enter its location on his ring-recorder so he’d have no trouble finding it again, even though they might happen to pick the data from his mind every time after he had gone there. Some things you forgot, some you didn’t: you never could be sure.

He said, “It’s a cinch. The space dreams, they aren’t just happening to the patients here. I know that for a fact.”

“You do?”

“I listen very carefully. You know the technician, Lansford? He’s had them two or three times. I heard them talking, Waldstein, Robinson, Elszabet Lewis. I think maybe that little Hindu doctor has had them. And even Waldstein, is what I think. But the dreams are also happening outside the Center.”

“You know that?” Alleluia asked.

“I’ve got good reason to think so,” Ferguson said. He ran his hand lightly up her thigh, stopping just short of the crotch. Her skin was smooth as silk. Smoother, maybe. It was half an hour since they had done it and he still felt sweaty, but not Alleluia. That was the thing about these artificial women—they were perfect, they never even worked up much of a sweat. “I have a friend in San Francisco, she told me about a dream weeks ago, same one you had once. You remember having that dream? With the horns, the block of white stone, the two suns?”

“I thought that you had that dream.”

“Me? No. It was you. I never had any of the dreams, not one. The time I told you, it was that my friend had it, the one in San Francisco. If they’re having them there, having them here, you can bet they’re everywhere.”

“So?”

He slipped his hand up to her breast. She stirred and wriggled against him. He liked that. He felt almost ready to go again. Just like a kid, he thought: always ready for an encore, even these days.

“You know what I was sent here for?” he asked.

“You told me, but they picked it.”

“I had a scam going, offering to send people to other planets where they could make a new start, escape this mess on Earth, you know? Just give me a few thousand bucks and as soon as the process is perfected you’ll be able to—”

Alleluia said, “You can still remember doing that?”

“It doesn’t seem to go when they pick me.”

“And you’ll start your scam up again, is that it?”

“How can it miss? Everybody’s presold. The dreams, they’re like advertisements for the planets that I can supply, you see? There’s the red-and-blue-sun world, there’s the green-sky planet, there’s the nine-suns planet—you see, I know them all, I have my ways, Allie. Seven of them, there are, seven dream-planets. You make your choice, you give me the money, I take care of things, I see to it that you’re shipped to the right place. The dreams, I say, that’s just the other planets sending out like travel posters to tell people how terrific they are. It can’t miss, kid. I tell you: it can’t miss.”

“They’ll catch you again,” she said. “They caught you once, they’ll catch you again. And this time they won’t just toss you in Nepenthe Center.”

“It won’t happen, they catch me.”

“No?”

“Never. First thing is, I get out of the jurisdiction. I go up north, Oregon, Washington. Then I use a dummy corporation—you know what that is?—and another dummy behind the dummy, a series of shells, everything through nominees. With a mail drop in Portland, say, or maybe Spokane, and—”

“Ed?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t give a crap, Ed. You know that?”

“Well, why should you? You don’t give a crap about anything, do you?”

“One thing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “One thing. Thank God for that. But I don’t understand. What good’s a sex-drive in a synthetic? Sex was put in us originally so we’d reproduce, right? And you don’t reproduce, not by sex. Right? Right?”

“It’s there for a reason,” she said.

“It is?”

“It’s to make us think we’re human,” Alleluia said. “So we don’t get maladjusted and unhappy and try to take over the world. We could, you know. We’re highly superior beings. Anything you can do, we can do fifty times better. If we didn’t have sexual feelings, we might think of ourselves as even more different than we are, some sort of master race, you know? But they give us sex, it keeps us pacified, it keeps us in our place.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I can understand that.” Ferguson leaned across, kissed the tip of each nipple, lightly kissed her lips. “It makes a lot of sense,” he said. He had never spent this much time around a synthetic before, and he was learning a lot from doing it. Like most people, he had tended to keep his distance, regarding the synthetics as creepy, weird. There weren’t that many of them anyway, maybe half a million, something like that. Less. He remembered when they were being made, thirty years ago or thereabouts, just before the Dust War. Intended for military use was what he remembered, perfect beings to fight a perfect war. A discontinued experiment of the good old days. But they weren’t quite perfect, it seemed. They had a lot of genuine human quirks. Human enough to make them wind up in a therapy center the way this one had, apparently. Well, they were human enough to love to fuck, too. You take the pluses with the minuses, hope for the best. He cupped her breasts. Softly he said, “When I leave here, you leave here with me, okay? I’ll show you all my little tricks.”

“I’ll show you some of mine,” she said.

5

The roadway looped like a great gray snake across the water, rising high above the water here, leveling off there, passing through a tunnel at one point, jumping up and becoming two huge suspension bridges later on. At the far end of it, white and glistening in the afternoon light, was San Francisco, tightly huddled on its little piece of the planet. Cool, cool air came flowing through the van’s open windows.

“This bridge,” Charley said, “it goes way back. They built it in the middle ages, and look at it still holding together. Through all the earthquakes and who knows what sort of other stuff, and it’s still holding together.”

“The Golden Gate Bridge,” Buffalo said. “Incredible!”

“Nah, not the Golden Gate,” Charley said. “That’s the Golden Gate, over there on the side, going up north. This one’s the Bay Bridge. That right, Tom?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’ve never been in San Francisco before.”

Stidge laughed. “You been in the Eleventh Zorch Galaxy, but you never been in Frisco. That’s pretty good.”

“I never been here neither,” Buffalo said. “What of it?”

“Well, we’re here now,” said Charley. “Pretty city. Prettiest damn city there is. I was a kid, I lived here six years. I bet it hasn’t changed a whole lot. Somehow this place, it never changes.”

“Even when there’s earthquakes?” Buffalo asked.

“The earthquakes, they don’t matter none,” Charley told him. “They mess things up, the town gets put right back the way it used to be. I was ten years old they got clobbered. Six months you couldn’t tell the difference.”

“You were here for the Big One?” Mujer asked.

“Nah,” Charley said. “Big One, that was a hundred years ago. They had that one, 2006. Big One Two, they called it. Big One One, they had that in 1906, the fire and everything, burned down the whole goddamn place. Then a hundred years after that they were getting ready for the anniversary celebration, you know, parades and speeches? Son of a bitch, Big One Two, two days before the anniversary, knocked everything down again. That’s the kind of city this is.”

“You weren’t here for that,” Mujer said.

“That was ninety-seven years ago,” said Charley. “I guess I missed that one. Then they had the Little Big One, thirty years later, forty, I don’t know. That was before my time, too. The earthquake I was here for, that one didn’t get a name. Wasn’t that big, but big enough. Knocked everything off the shelves, broke windows, scared the shit out of me. I was ten years old. House across the street came right off its foundations, sitting there with one wall down looking like a doll’s house, all the rooms showing. That was more than an ordinary earthquake, they said, but not as big as a Big One. The Big One, it don’t come more than once every hundred years or so.”

“They about due, then,” Tamale said from the back of the van.

“Yeah,” said Choke. “Tomorrow afternoon, I hear. Half past three in the afternoon.”

“Hot shit,” Buffalo said. “That’s just what I want, my first day in San Francisco. Start off with a real bang.”

“What we do,” said Mujer, “we get in the van just before it starts. We turn the engine on. Then we sit there floating on the air cushion until the ground stops moving, huh? We’ll be okay. And then when it all stops, we get out and go looking around in the broken houses and fill up the van with whatever we like and we drive away north somewhere.”

“Sure,” Charley said. “You know what they do with looters, they get an earthquake? They string ’em up by their balls. That’s the rule here, always was, always will be.”

“And if they don’t got no balls?” Choke asked. “Not everybody got balls, Charley.”

“They put some on you in the sex-change ward of the hospital,” said Charley. ” Then they string you up by them. This town, they don’t fool around with looters none. Hey, Tom, you ever seen a prettier city than that?”

Tom shrugged. He was far away.

“Hey, Tom? Where are you now, Tom?”

“Eleventh Zorch Galaxy,” said Stidge.

“Hush it,” Charley snapped. To Tom he said, “Tell us what you see, man.”

Things were stirring and surging in Tom’s mind. He was seeing the city called Meliluiilii on the world called Luiiliimeli, under the giant torrid blue star known as Ellullimiilu. That was one of the Thikkumuuru worlds of the Twelfth Polyarchy, Luuiiliimelli. High kings had reigned there for seven hundred thousand grand cycles of the Potentastium. “They have earthquakes there all day long,” Tom said. “It doesn’t trouble them at all. The ground is like molten, it boils and heaves like a cauldron, but the city just drifts above it.”

“Where’s that?” Charley asked. “Which planet?”

“Meliluiilii, on Luiiliimeli,” Tom said. “It’s one of the Pivot Worlds, the great ones that shape the Design. The sunlight on Luiiliimeli’s so strong it hits you like a hammer. Blue sunlight, a hammer that burns. We’d melt in a flash. But the Luiiliimeli people, they’re not even slightly like us. So they don’t mind it any. It’s not a planet for humans, it’s a planet for them. This is the only planet for humans, the one we’re on right now. The people on Luiiliimeli are like shining ghosts and the city, it’s only a floating bubble. That’s all, only a bubble.”

“Listen to him,” Charley said. “You think San Francisco is pretty? Loollymoolly, it’s like a gigantic gorgeous bubble. I can almost see it floating there and shining when I listen to him talk about it. Fan tas tic.”

Tom said, “All the cities are beautiful everywhere in the galaxy. There is no such thing as an ugly city, not anywhere. That one, now, that’s Shaxtharx, the Irikiqui capital. That’s on the big world in the Sapiil system, the empire of the Nine Suns. Everything is built out of a spiderweb material there, ten times strong as steel. It shimmers and bounces, and when there’s an earthquake—they have earthquakes there often, very often, the gravity of the Nine Suns is always pulling the planet in all sorts of different directions—when there’s an earthquake, you know, the city becomes even more beautiful, the way it moves. Almost like a tapestry, showing all the different colors of the suns. At earthquake time the Sapiil people come from all around to watch Shaxtharx shaking.”

“You been there, huh?” Buffalo asked.

“No, not me. But I see it, you understand me? The visions come. I see all the worlds, and someday maybe I’ll make the Crossing.” Tom’s eyes were shining. “You can’t go across in the flesh. You’d die like a gnat in a furnace, any of those worlds. The only world for humans, it’s this world, you follow what I’m saying? But when the Time of the Crossing comes we will be able to drop our bodies and go over into their bodies.”

“That was something, those cities he was telling us about,” Buffalo said. “But he can’t keep from running off at the mouth, can he? We drop our bodies, we go over into their bodies. Just like that. You know what he’s talking about, Charley? You, Mujer? Drop our bodies, go over into their bodies.”

“Just as is said in the Bible,” Tom went on. “In Corinthians, it’s said. That we shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. That’s the Crossing they’re talking about, when we go over to the other worlds. Not to heaven: that’s not what they mean. They mean we will go over to Luiiliimeli, some of us, and take on their very forms, and some of us will go to the Sapiil worlds and some to the Zygerone, or to the Poro, or will become Kusereen, even—we’ll be scattered through the universe, which is the divine plan, the dispersion of the Spirit—”

“All right, Tom,” Charley said gently. “That’s enough for now, okay, Tom? We’re coming off the bridge. We’re in San Francisco. Right in the middle of town.”

“Hey, look at it!” Buffalo cried. “You ever see beautiful? All those white buildings. All those green trees. Just breathe the air. That air, it’s like wine, huh? Like wine. ”

Tamale said, “Were you serious, Choke? About an earthquake tomorrow afternoon, half past three?”

“Well, they can predict them, can’t they?” Choke said. “They can measure the earthquake gas coming out of the ground days and days before.”

“So you know for sure? There’s one tomorrow? What we doing here, then?”

“I don’t know shit about tomorrow,” Choke said. “I was only running my mouth, man. If there was an earthquake tomorrow, don’t you think everybody would be packed and out of town by now? Jesus Christ, Tamale, how can you be so dumb? I was only running my mouth.”

“Yeah,” Tamale said, with a little laugh. “Yeah. I knew that. I knew it, man.”

Tom sat quietly among them. The wonder of the visions still lay on his soul. Those marvelous unhuman cities, those noble beings moving about from place to place upon the faces of their amazing worlds. He thought of what he had said, that there was no such thing as an ugly city, not anywhere. He had never considered that point before, but it was true, and not just in the far galaxies. There was beauty everywhere in all places, in all things. Everything radiated the miracle of creation. San Francisco was beautiful, sure, but so were the desolate towns of the abandoned Valley behind them, the rusted crumbling wasteland towns, and so was everything else in the world, because everything had God’s hand in its design. Mujer was beautiful. Stidge was beautiful. Once you begin looking at things with eyes that have been opened, Tom told himself, you see only beauty wherever you turn.

“Pull up here,” Charley said. “We can park across the street, look around, ask some questions, find ourselves a place to stay. Rupe, you watch the van, you and Nicholas. We’ll be back ten, fifteen minutes, maybe. Tom, you stay close to me. Are you with us, Tom? You back on Earth, man?”

“I’m here,” Tom said.

“Good. You make sure you stay here a while, okay?” Charley grinned. “What do you think of San Francisco? Pretty city?”

“Very pretty,” Tom said. “The air. The trees.”

They headed up the street, scattering out, Buffalo going first with Choke right behind him, then Stidge and Tamale close together, Mujer near them, and Charley and Tom a little way back. It was important, Charley said, not to look like an invading gang. Sometimes the bandidos came in from the back country in gangs of ten or twenty to clean out the city, and they got into wars with the city vigilante commissions. Charley didn’t want that. “We’re just going to spend the summer here, keeping low, easy and cool, not attract any attention, okay? This is a good place to be, in the summer. And maybe when the rains begin we’ll go somewhere else, up north, maybe, or maybe down to San Diego. It’s nice and warm there, San Diego, in the winter.”

Tom stared. It was a long time since he had been in a city, a real city. Things looked old here, even ancient, all the small wooden buildings that seemed to come out of a vanished era when life had had certainty and stability. There was something very peaceful about San Francisco, very comforting. Perhaps it was the scale, everything so small and close together. Or perhaps it was the way everything looked old. The cities he had seen before were not anything like this, the ones in Washington, in Idaho, in the other places up north where he had been. Even the cities that had come to him in his visions were not like this.

One thing that particularly struck him were the hills. The hills here were astounding. Tom looked up and saw the tiny white buildings climbing the hills, and it was hard to believe that they would build on hills like that. Of course he had seen worlds where they built their houses on glass-sided mountains that went straight up to the sky, houses jutting out from the side like eagles’ nests, but that was on other worlds where everything was different, the air, the gravity. Some had no air at all. Maybe some had no gravity at all. There were all sorts of worlds. But this was the Earth and for a long time Tom had been living in places that were flat, and now he was in a city that seemed to be all peaks and valleys.

They moved warily to the end of the street and across. There wasn’t much traffic, a few old combustion cars and some ground-effect ones. The sky was a bright hard blue and the air was amazingly clear, sunlight bouncing almost visibly off the dazzling white facades. A cool dry wind, very sharp, was blowing from the west, where the ocean lay hidden from view by the hills.

Charley said, walking close by Tom’s side, “That was beautiful, you know, what you were telling us on the bridge. About those cities. Sometimes you can get a little crazy, but all the same you got a wonderful mind, Tom. The things you see. The things you tell us.”

“I know how lucky I am,” Tom said. “The bounty of God has been conferred on me.”

“I wish I saw a tenth the things you see. I do see them, you know. Some of them, anyway.” Charley’s voice was low, as it was sometimes when he didn’t want the other scratchers to overhear him. But they were all up ahead, halfway up the block. “I been dreaming, almost every night, fantastic dreams. Fantastic. You know I saw that blazing bright world, the one you told me about, where the Eye People live? I didn’t care to say while we were traveling. But I saw it just like you told it, that flood of light filling everything. And I saw another where there were two suns in the sky, a white one and a yellow, the damnedest shadows over everything and the sky all red.”

“The Fifth Zygerone World,” Tom said, nodding. “I thought you would. It comes through very strong.”

“You know their names and everything.”

“I’ve been seeing them practically all my life. Since I was small, when at first I thought everybody saw such things. It scared me, later, when I knew nobody else did. But I’m used to it now. And now others are seeing, too. And what I see, it gets clearer and clearer all the time.”

“You think I’m starting to see them because I’m traveling close to you? Can that be it?”

“That could be,” Tom said. “I don’t know. Am I the source? Or are we all having the visions all at once? Maybe the other worlds are breaking through to the whole human race now, and no longer just me. I don’t know.”

Charley said, “I think some of the others are having the dreams too but they don’t want to own it up. Choke, I think, and maybe Nicholas. Maybe everybody is. But they’re all afraid to talk about it. They look a little strange some mornings, but nobody says anything. They think they’ll be called crazy if they say they’re seeing the things you see. They think they’ll be made fun of. That’s the thing they hate most, these guys, being made fun of. Worse than being called crazy.”

“I don’t mind it. I’m used to it. Either one, being made fun of, being called crazy. Poor Tom. Poor crazy Tom. Sometimes it can be pretty safe, being crazy. Nobody wants to hurt a crazy man. But the things that poor crazy Tom sees are real. I know that, Charley. And one day the whole world will know too. When we’re called to the Crossing, I mean. When the skies open and we go forth unto the worlds of the Sacred Imperium.”

Charley smiled and shook his head. “Now that’s when I begin to feel funny about you, man, when you start talking like that. When you start to go on and on about—” He stopped in midstride. “You hear anything back there, Tom?”

“Hear what?”

“No, you wouldn’t, would you.” Charley turned, looking halfway back toward the place where they had left the van. Mujer, who had been up the street ahead of them, came galloping back and halted, panting, at Charley’s side.

“That was Nicholas,” Mujer said. “Calling for help.”

“Yeah. God damn.”

Charley swung around, and Mujer, and then the others, too, running past Tom, heading back in the direction of the van. Stidge went sprinting by, his eyes wild, his spike in his hand. Tom felt his skin prickling. Trouble coming, no doubt of it. He trotted behind them back toward the parking place. Nicholas was shouting now, again and again. Tom looked ahead and saw two strange men in worn jeans and loose white shirts on the far side of the van, running away, firing bolts of red heat as they ran. Rupe’s blocky body lay sprawled in the street, face down. Nicholas was crouched behind the van, firing. By the time Tom reached the van it was all over, the strange men out of sight, the weapons put away. Charley was scowling and pounding his fists together in fury.

“You get a good look at them?” he said to Nicholas.

“No doubt of it. The two farm kids, the ones who got away from us when Stidge killed the father and the mother.”

“Shit,” Charley said. “Our quiet visit to San Francisco. Shit. Shit. Rupe’s dead?”

“Dead, yeah,” Mujer said. “Burn clear through the belly.”

“Shit,” Charley said. “All right. We got to go after them. Stidge, you got us into this, you track them down, wherever. We don’t find them, they’ll haunt us, pick us off easy. Move your ass, man. You got to go get them.” Charley shook his head. “Go. Go.” He looked to-ward Tom. “You see what I mean about killing? Once you begin you got to finish.” He touched the laser bracelet on his right wrist. “You stay here with the van,” he said. ” Inside the van, don’t open it for nobody. Try to keep your wits about you, you hear me, Tom? We’ll be right back. God damn,” Charley said. “And everything moving along so nice, too.”