Tom O'Bedlam

1

For Elszabet it was a quiet evening. She had a simple dinner about 1900 hours in the staff mess hall at the east end of the GHQ building: salad, grilled fish of some kind, small carafe of tangy white wine from one of the little wineries nearby. She shared her table with Lew Arcidiacono, who did most of the mechanical and electronic maintenance work at the Center, and his girlfriend Rhona, who was Dante Corelli’s assistant in the physical therapy department, and Mug Watson, the head groundskeeper. None of them seemed to have much in the way of dinner conversation that night, which was fine with Elszabet. Afterward she went over to the staff recreation center and listened to Bach harpsichord concertos with holovisual accompaniment for an hour or so, and by 2130 she was making her way down the path to her cabin far over on the other side of the Center. A quiet evening, yes.

In the evenings things were always quiet for Elszabet. Generally her last sessions with patients took place about 1700—end-of-day counselling, periodic progress reviews, crisis intervention if any crises had popped up, stuff like that. Then she liked to meet briefly with individual staff members to check out special problems, theirs or their patients’. By 1830, usually, the workday was over, and the social part of the day, such as it was, was beginning. For Elszabet that part was never anything much. First an early dinner—she had no regular dinner companions, just sat at any table that happened to have a free space—followed by an hour or two in the staff rec center for a movie or a cube or a nighttime splash in the pool, and then back to her cabin. Alone, of course. Always alone, by choice. She might read for a while, or listen to music, but her lights invariably were out well before midnight.

Sometimes she wondered what they all thought of her, an attractive woman keeping to herself like that so much. Did they think she was peculiar and aloof? Well, they were right. Did they think she was antisocial or snobbish or asexual? An uppity bitch? Well, they were wrong. She kept to herself because keeping to herself was what she wanted to do these days. Was what she needed to do. The ones who knew her best understood that. Dan Robinson, say. She wasn’t trying to snub anyone. Only to pull inward, to rest, to give her weary and eroded spirit time to heal. In a way she was as much of a patient here as Father Christie was, or Nick Double Rainbow, or April Cranshaw. Whether or not anyone else was aware of that, Elszabet was. She was living on the edge, had been for years, had taken the post at Nepenthe Center as much for the sake of healing herself as anything else. The difference was that instead of giving herself over to the mindpick every day so that the jarring dissonances could be scraped from her soul and a healthy new personality could form in the blank new places, she was trying to do it on her own, living cautiously, marshalling her weakened inner resources, letting her strength come gradually flowing back. This place was a sanctuary for her. Life outside the Center had worn her down the way it wore everyone down: the uncertainties, the tensions, the fears, the knowledge that the world that had been handed everyone was a badly broken one in danger of coming apart entirely. That, she had decided, was what Gelbard’s syndrome was all about, really, the awareness that life nowadays was lived at the brink of the abyss. The Dust War had done that to people. For a hundred years everyone worries about the horrors of atomic war, the flash of terrible light and the shattered cities and the melted flesh, and then the atomic war comes, not with bombs but very quietly, with its lethal radioactive dust, far less spectacular but a lot more insidious, great chunks of land made permanently unlivable overnight while life goes on in an ostensibly normal way outside the dusted places. Nations fall apart when bands of hot dust are spread through their midsections. There are migrations. There are upheavals of the body politic. There are ruptures of communication and of transportation and of ordinary civility. Societies fall apart. People fall apart. These were apocalyptic times. Something bad had happened, and everyone believed that something worse probably would happen, but no one knew what. These weird dreams, were they the harbingers? Who knew? Were they cause or effect? Was everybody going to go crazy? Was everybody already crazy? Elszabet thought she was in better shape than most, which was why she was here as one of the healers instead of as one of the patients. But she didn’t kid herself. She was at risk in this maimed and broken world. She could fall into the pit just as Father Christie had, or April, or Nick. There but for the grace of God went she, and she didn’t know how much longer God’s grace would hold out. So nowadays she moved through her life with care, like someone crossing a field mined with explosive eggshells. The last thing she needed now was emotional turbulence of any kind, or emotional adventure. Let other people have the stormy love affairs, she thought. Let them have the winning and the losing. Not that she didn’t miss it. Sometimes she missed it terribly. She missed that wonderful warm embrace, hands on her breasts, belly against her belly, eyes looking into her eyes, the sudden hard thrust, the warm flood of fulfillment, his, hers, theirs. She hadn’t forgotten what any of that felt like. Or just the presence of the other, leaving sex out of it, just the comforting knowledge that there was someone else there, that you weren’t minding the store all by yourself. She had had that once, or thought she had; maybe she would have it again someday. But not now, not here, not while the edge lay so close. The thing she feared more than anything else was having it again and losing it again. Better not to try for it. Not until she felt stronger inside. Sometimes she wondered: If not now, when? And had no answer.

She slipped out of her clothes and stood for a little while on her porch in the darkness.

The night was warm. Owls were talking in the treetops. The long golden Northern California summer still had a few weeks to run, maybe even many weeks. This was only September. Sometimes the rains didn’t begin until the middle of November. What a change that was, when the unending months-long procession of sunny days suddenly yielded to the implacable downpours of the Mendocino County winter! It could rain for weeks at a time, December, January, February. And then it would be spring again, the trees greening up, the drenched land beginning to dry out.

She heard distant laughter. Staff people, fooling around up front. For some of them this place was just a big summer camp for grown-ups all year round. Do your work by day, fool around by night, hanky-panky in this cabin or that one, maybe on the weekend drive over to Mendocino, take in a club or a restaurant or something like that. Mendocino was the closest thing to a city that there was around here. Fifty years back it had actually had a little flurry of a boom, trying to set itself up as a rival to San Francisco for preeminence in Northern California at a time when San Francisco was suffering from a lot of self-inflicted wounds; but in the end what became clear was what everyone had really known all along, which was that San Francisco had been designed by geography to be a major city and Mendocino hadn’t been. Even so, it still looked more or less citylike, and you could have a good time over there on the weekend, or so Elszabet had heard. Even in the present condition of the world you could have a good time, if you had the knack of shutting your eyes to what was really going on.

Again, laughter. Higher-pitched, this time. A squeal or two. Elszabet smiled and went inside and got into bed. A little music, she thought, while falling asleep. Bach? No, she’d had enough Bach for tonight. Schubert, the string quintet. Sure. Warm web of sound, deep, melodious, thoughtful. She flicked the stud to automatic so the system would shut down when the music was over, and turned on the cube. And lay there, half-listening, thinking more about tomorrow’s staff meeting than she was about the music. Space dreams from Vancouver, space dreams from San Diego, space dreams from Denver. Everywhere. Paolucci was coming up from San Francisco to deliver a report. There was even a possibility that Leo Kresh had been able to make it all the way from San Diego. Something very odd was going on in San Diego; that was the word. But what was going on everywhere was odd. She had laughed at Dan Robinson’s idea that afternoon when they were down at the beach, that the dreams were messages from an alien spaceship approaching Earth. Wild, weird, far-out notion, she had thought then. Now she wasn’t so sure that it was all that wild. She wondered if Robinson had done any further work on that, to check out whether such a thing was possible. Tomorrow at the meeting I’ll ask him if…

Still thinking about the meeting, she wandered off into sleep.

And somewhere during the night she had a space dream herself.

The greenness came first. Little wisps of thick furry fog, sidling into her mind. She was close enough to consciousness to know what was starting to happen. She was sleepy enough not to care. She had fought this thing off as long as she could. The invasion of the sanctuary, alien strangenesses creeping in from God knows where. Now she wasn’t able to hold it back any longer. It was almost a relief, giving in to it at last. Go on, she told the dream. Go ahead and happen. It’s about time, isn’t it? My turn? Okay, my turn, then.

Green.

Green sky, green air, green clouds. The landscape was shades of green. Hillside, river far down below, meadows unrolling to the horizon. Everything looked soft and friendly, a gentle tropical landscape. Elegant trees without leaves, slender green trunks, green scaly branches coiling outward, bending back toward the ground. The sun faintly visible behind the veil of fog. The sun was green too, maybe, though it was hard to tell for sure, the way the light came blurrily through all that thick swirling fleecy fog.

Something was beckoning her.

Crystalline creatures, supple, almost delicate. Their long-limbed bodies glistened. Their dark eyes were bright and glittering, a row of three on each of the four sides of their heads. They were moving toward a shimmering pavilion on the hill just beyond her, and they were inviting her to come with them, calling her by name, Elszabet, Elszabet. But the way they were saying it was unearthly and awesome, a hushed reverberating whisper that resonated against itself again and again, an echo-chamber whisper that had in it an eerie whistling quality and an undertone like the roaring of distant winds. Elszabet, Elszabet.

I’m coming, she told them. And put her hand in their cool crystalline hands and let them carry her along. She floated just above the ground. Occasionally a strand of thick fleshy grass brushed her toes: when it did, she felt a sharp but not unpleasant tingling and heard the sound of bells.

She was entering the pavilion now. It seemed to be made of glass, but glass of a peculiarly yielding sort, warm and rubbery to the touch, like congealed teardrops. All about her moved the delicate crystalline people, bowing, smiling, stroking her. Telling her their names. The prince of this, the countess of that. A crystalline cat sauntered among them. It rubbed its crystalline ears against her leg; and when she looked down she saw that her leg was crystal too, that in fact she had a body just like theirs, shining and wondrous. Someone put a drink in her hand. It tasted like flowers; it erupted in a thousand brilliant colors as it made its journey through her body. Do you like it, they asked? Will you have another? Elszabet, Elszabet. There is the duke of something. Beside him are the duchess and the duke-other of something and the marquis of something else. Look, look, there is the city, coming into view now below! Will you have it? We will give the city your name if you like. There, it is done: Elszabet. Elszabet. They all congratulated her. They clustered close and she heard the faint tinkling of their arms and legs as they moved, a little silvery whispering sound, like Christmas-tree ornaments swayed by a breeze. Do you like it here, Elszabet? Do you like us? We have a poem for you. Where is the poem? Where is the poet? Ah: here. Here. Make way for the poem. Make way for the poet.

A crystalline she had not seen before, taller than any of the others, came up to her, smiling shyly. Come, he said. I have a poem for you. They stepped outside the pavilion and greenness descended on them like emerald rain. He put something in her hands, an intricate little object that looked like a puzzle-box of glass, layer within layer, transparent to the core with a meshwork of dazzling glassy gears going round and round at the center. This is your poem, he said. I call it Elszabet. She touched it and a green flare of light sprang up from it and leaped across the sky, and from the pavilion came the tinkling sound of applause. Elszabet, they all said. Elszabet, Elszabet.

The green light deepened and thickened around her. She was swathed in it, now. The air seemed almost tangible. So warm, so woolly. So green, green, green.

Suddenly restless, she stirred, turned, sighed. Through the greenness she was able to glimpse a distant beacon of hard yellow light, and that bright beam aroused dismay in her and a kind of vague fear. A voice within her urged her to pull back, and after a moment she recognized the voice as her own. You must be careful, she told herself. Do you know where you are going? Do you know what will happen to you there? How tempting this is. How seductive. But be careful, Elszabet. If you get too far in, there may be no coming out again.

Or has that already happened? Perhaps you are already in too deep. Perhaps there will be no coming forth. She touched the poem again, and again green light leaped from it, and the poet smiled, and the crystallines applauded and whispered her name. How green everything is, Elszabet thought. How beautiful. How green, how green, how green.

2

So now they were going to kill again.

Tom stayed calm about that. You travel with killers, you have to expect them to do some killing. Still and all, he didn’t particularly like it. Thou shalt not kill, the Bible said, right out front. Thou shalt do no murder, said Jesus. You couldn’t argue with commandments like that. Of course in wartime those commandments were suspended. You could make out a pretty fair case, Tom told himself, that these days it’s a kind of wartime, every man’s hand lifted against all others. Maybe.

He sat hunched up in the front of the van, looking at Rupe’s body on the back seat. Rupe seemed to be asleep. His eyes were closed; his big meaty face was peaceful. His head lolled forward a little. You could practically hear him snoring. Mujer and Charley had propped him up in a sitting position back there, and Stidge had draped an old blanket across his lap to hide the laser burn that went through his shirt and his gut and out through his back. You looked at him, you thought he was asleep. Well, Rupe had never had much to say even when he was alive.

And now they were going off to kill again. A life for a life: two for one, in fact. No, it wasn’t that, Tom thought. Not just revenge. They were going to kill because that was the only way they could feel safe: with those two gone. In wartime you have to eliminate your enemies.

Maybe they won’t be able to find them, the two farm kids, Tom thought. The city has a million alleyways, a million basements. Those two kids could be hiding anywhere. They had a five-minute head start, didn’t they? Well, two or three minutes, anyway. So maybe they’ll get away. It was a shame to have more killing now, when the Last Days were so near, when the Crossing was almost about to begin. You die now, you miss out on the Crossing. What a pity that would be, to have to rot here in the soil of Earth with all the other dead ones from before, when everyone else was setting out on his way across the heavens. To miss out, right at the last minute. Those poor kids.

“Rupe?” Tom said. “Hey, you, Rupe?”

Very quiet back there. Tom took out his finger-piano, played a few random notes up and down the scale, hunting around for a tune.

“You mind if I sing, Rupe?”

Rupe didn’t seem to mind.

“Okay,” Tom said. And he sang:

“You ever hear that one, Rupe? I guess you never did. I guess you never will.”

He heard what sounded like someone rapping on the far side of the van. He didn’t bother to look. Back so soon, Charley? Tom shrugged and went on singing:

The rapping again, louder. A voice, angry. “Open the goddamned window, will you? You hear me, open up!”

Frowning, Tom leaned over and peered out. He saw a stranger out there, a short man with curling golden hair and a short frizzy golden beard and cold blue eyes. The stranger looked bothered about something. Tom wondered what to do. You stay here with the van, Charley had said. Don’t open it for nobody.

Tom smiled and nodded and moved away from the window. He started to feel a vision coming on. The usual roaring sound deep down in his mind, the whistling of the wind. The light of strange suns was kindled in his mind, blue, white, orange.

He still could hear the angry voice, though. “You move this van or I’ll blow it away,” the golden-haired man was saying. He pounded on the metal door, hard. “Who the hell said you could park here? Where’s your goddamn permit? Hey, you ain’t even got a license, this van. Will you open the fuck up?”

“Here is the Magister of the Imperium now,” Tom said sweetly. “That shining, that glow hovering there. You can’t see him, can you? Them, really. He’s a corporate entity, three souls in one. Can you feel the power? A Magister like that, he has the power to loose and bind. They tell the tale among the Sorgaz warriors that at the time of the Theluvara withdrawal, the Great Abdication, a Magister of the Imperium was all that stood between the Sorgaz and the Fount of Force, and they would have been engulfed except for—oh, look at the colors, will you? Look there!”

“I can’t hear what you’re saying, you fucking idiot. Open the goddamn window, you want to talk to me.”

Tom smiled. Tom said nothing. Tom was moving farther and farther away every moment. The angry voice went on and on.

“—under powers vested in me, City and County of San Francisco, Vigilante Street Authority, I declare this van in violation of Civic Code article 117 and I herewith—”

Then another voice, a familiar one.

“All right, fellow. We was just about to move along. My friend in here, he’s not permitted to drive, medical reasons. Neither of them.”

Charley.

Tom struggled back to awareness of the world about him. The pulsing blue sun faded, the white, the orange.

“It’s okay,” Charley said. “You can let us in, Tom.”

Tom saw Mujer and Stidge standing next to Charley. Across the street were Nicholas, Choke, Tamale, Buffalo. They had two other men with them, young-looking ones, pale, frightened-looking ones. The kids from the farm. Too bad, Tom thought. Too bad.

Uncertainly Tom said, “This man, he was banging on the van. I wasn’t sure—”

“It’s okay,” Charley said. “Just open up.”

Tom wondered why Charley didn’t open the door himself. He had the key, didn’t he? But Charley was starting to look impatient. Tom reached across and threw the latch, and when the door slid back Charley jumped out of the way and Mujer and Stidge grabbed the golden-haired man quickly under his arms and pushed him inside, throwing him face down on the floor. “What the hell,” the golden-haired man said, his voice muffled. “I’m an officer of the San Francisco Vig—”

Stidge hit him on the back of the head with something and he was quiet.

Then the others were piling into the van too, Charley and Nicholas and Choke, Tamale and Buffalo, and the two boys from the farm. “Okay, come on, move it, Mujer!” Charley snapped. “We can’t stay here.” Mujer jumped behind the wheel and the van went floating off quickly down the middle of the street.

“What did he want?” Charley asked Tom. “What was he trying to tell you?”

“I’m not sure,” Tom said. “Something about parking here. And not having a license. He was banging on the door, but you said not to let anyone in, and then you came back and—”

Charley muttered, “He really is a cop, then. A damned vigilante.” He reached into the policeman’s pocket, found a small shining computery-looking machine there, put it to his ear and listened a moment and nodded. Then he stepped on it and ground it to pieces. “Now he’s out of contact,” Charley said. “But now we got to get rid of him. Getting rid of a cop: sheesh!”

“You leave the looney in charge of the van, that’s what you get,” Stidge said.

“All right,” said Charley.

“Wasn’t such a good idea parking the van there neither,” Stidge said.

“All right. All right ”

“Where you want me to drive?” Mujer asked.

Charley said, “Turn left here. Then keep going straight. When you see signs to the Golden Gate Bridge, you get on it, head north, get out of the city. And take it easy driving. Last thing we need now, stopped by highway patrol.” He shook his head. “God damn, what a mess.”

“We leaving San Francisco so fast?” Tamale said.

Charley swung around. “You feel like staying? We got a dead man on board, we got a kidnapped cop, we got two guys we got to get rid of, you want to stay? Check into a hotel and give a tea party for the mayor? Jesus, Tamale. Jesus Christ.”

“That’s the bridge sign there, right?” Mujer said.

“What you think that says?” Charley asked. “Golden Gate Bridge, big as life.”

“I wasn’t sure that was what it said,” Mujer replied.

“Mujer, he got a little trouble reading,” said Stidge. “He didn’t learn how so good, huh? Huh?”

“ Chinga tu madre, ” Mujer said. ” Pija! Hijo de puta !”

“What’s he saying?” Stidge asked.

“Telling you how much he likes your nice red hair,” said Choke.

Buffalo said, “We not staying in San Francisco, then where we going to go, Charley?”

“I’ll tell you later, okay?” Charley said. “Mujer, when you get off the bridge, you take the first exit and follow on down until you hit a country road. Then go out toward the beach.” He shook his head again and slapped his hand against the side of it. “Dumb, dumb, dumb, this whole thing. We could’ve stayed in San Francisco all summer, and now look. Dumb. I don’t remember ever screwing anything up this bad.”

“This the right road?” Mujer asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. Stop here.”

Tom said, “The Last Days are almost upon us. It will be the Time of the Crossing soon. Spare them, Charley. Don’t deprive them of the Crossing.”

Looking at him sadly, Charley said, “I wish I could, Tom. But we don’t have no choice.” He gestured to the others. “All right, get them out of the van. By the side of the road.”

The San Francisco policeman was still lying face down, moaning a little. Stidge dragged him out. Nicholas and Buffalo hustled the two farm boys after him. They huddled together, trembling. One of them had wet his pants. They were eighteen, nineteen years old, Tom guessed.

Tom said, “And He had in His right hand seven stars, and out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was as the sun shineth in His strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last. I am He that liveth, and was dead; and beyond, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and death.”

“That’s enough for now, Tom,” Charley said. “Line them up by the edge of the ravine. That’s right. Okay, step back.” He cocked his laser bracelet and fired three quick bursts, the policeman first, the older farm boy, the other one. None of them made a sound as they died. “Son of a bitch,” Charley murmured. “What a lousy unnecessary mess. All right, throw them down the ravine. Far down.”

Choke and Buffalo threw the vigilante cop. Nicholas and Mujer and Tamale and Stidge took care of the other two.

“Now Rupe,” Charley said. “Take him a little way down the road; throw him over too.”

Choke looked up in surprise. “God’s sake, Charley—!”

“What do you want to do, carry him along with us for a keepsake? Or give him a Christian burial? Come on. Throw him over. And then let’s get the hell out of here.”

“You tell us where we’re going?” Buffalo said.

“Yeah. I can tell you, now that we don’t have to worry about them overhearing. We going north, up to Mendocino County. Lots of woods around there, lots of good places to hide. Because that’s what we need to do, now. We need to hide real good.” He paused, watching as Nicholas and Tamale and Stidge dragged Rupe’s heavy body from the van and hauled it to the edge of the ravine and sent it tumbling down into the dense underbrush far below. “Okay,” Charley said. “Let’s get moving.”

“We taking the looney?” Stidge asked. “Ain’t that a risk now that he’s seen what he just seen?”

“He goes with us,” Charley said. “Wherever we go. Right, Tom? You stay with us.”

“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord,” Tom said, shivering a little, though it was much warmer on this side of the bridge than it had been in San Francisco. “Which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”

“That’s right, Tom,” Charley said softly. “That’s right. Come on, now. Into the van. Everybody into the van.”

3

“Jesus, the heat!” Jaspin said, amazed, as the tumbondé caravan started to flow down out of the mountains into the broad flat expanse of the San Joaquin Valley. He found himself smothered in a great stagnant apocalyptic mass of sizzling air that was almost too hot to breathe. Jaspin’s battered old car was third in the long straggling procession, just behind the pair of creaky buses that housed the Senhor and the Senhora and the Inner Host. “I don’t believe it. It’s incredible, that heat. Where the hell are we going, into the Sahara?”

“Toward Bakersfield,” Jill said. “We’re just a little way south of Bakersfield.”

“I know. But it’s like the Sahara here. Like two Saharas piled one on top of the other. Christ, if we’re really heading for the North Pole I wish we were a little closer to it now.”

He thought the sky was about to break into flames. It was as though all the heat in the whole Valley had come rolling south like a white-hot bowling ball and had banged up against the wall of the Tehachapi Mountains and now was lying here waiting to engulf them.

“I think we’re stopping for the night,” Jill said. “You see? The flags are going up.”

“It’s only three o’clock,” Jaspin pointed out.

“Nevertheless. Look at the Senhor’s bus. The flags are up.”

She was right. He peered out the window and saw that a couple of tumbondé men were clambering around on the roof of the lead bus, putting up the gaudy banners that were the signal to halt and make camp for the night. The bus turned left off the edge of the freeway and into an open field. So did the second one. Jaspin, with a shrug, did the same. And behind him the whole strange caravan of buses and cars and wagons and trucks that had been coming down the pass like some weird motley giant caterpillar turned left too, one by one, following the bus of Senhor Papamacer out into the field.

Jaspin pulled his car up next to the second bus, the little orange-and-black one in which the eleven members of the Inner Host and most of the statues of the gods were traveling, and got out. He turned and shaded his eyes against the fierce mid-afternoon sun and looked back up the little ribbon of steeply rising roadway into the mountains out of which they had just descended. The line of vehicles stretched on and on as far as he could see back toward the summit. It probably went all the way back without a break to Gorman at the very least, and most likely a lot farther than that, on beyond Tejon Pass maybe, as far as Castaic, even. Incredible. Incredible. This whole thing is absolutely incredible, he thought. And for him one of the most incredible aspects was his own presence in it, right here in the front of the procession, just one notch behind the Inner Host. He was here as an observer, sure, as an anthropologist. But that was only half of it, maybe less than half. He knew that he was here as a follower of the Senhor also. He had made the surrender; he had accepted tumbondé; he was going north to await the opening of the way and the coming of Chungirá-He-Will-Come. Last night, lying in uneasy sleep on an air mattress next to the car on some desolate abandoned street in what once had been Glendale or Eagle Rock, he had had a vision of one of the new gods moving in serenity through a world where the sky and everything else were green; and the god, that shining fantastic creature, had greeted him by name and promised him great happiness after the transformation of the world. How strange all this is, Jaspin thought.

“Look at that, will you?” he said. “It’s the Mongol horde on the march!”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Barry.”

“I say something wrong?”

“The Mongol horde. This isn’t anything like that. They were invaders, evil marauders. This is a holy procession.”

Jaspin looked at her strangely. She was drenched with sweat, shining with it. Her T-shirt was soaked, almost transparent: her nipples were showing through. Her eyes were glowing in a frightening way. The glow of the True Believer, he thought. He wondered if his eyes ever took on a glow like that. He doubted it.

“Isn’t it?” she said. “Holy?”

“Yes. Of course it is.”

“You sound so irreverent sometimes.”

“Do I?” Jaspin said. “I can’t help it, I suppose. My anthropological training. I can’t ever stop being a detached observer.”

“Even though you believe?”

“Even though.”

“I feel sorry for you,” she said.

“Come on. Ease off.”

“I don’t like it when you make jokes about what’s happening. The Mongol horde, and all that.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m flippant. So shoot me. It’s in my genes, being flippant. I can’t help it. I’ve got five thousand years of flippancy in my blood.” He reached out for her, lightly touching her bare arm, gliding his fingertip through the perspiration on her skin and leaving a streak. She pulled away from him. She was doing that a lot lately. “Come on,” he said. “I’m sorry I was flippant.”

“If this is the Mongol horde,” Jill said, “you’re one of the Mongols too. Don’t forget that.”

Jaspin nodded. “You’re right. I won’t.”

She turned away, rummaging in the car, groping in the water-cooler. After a moment she came up with a bottle of water, took a deep pull, put it back without offering him any. Then she wandered away and stood staring toward Senhor Papamacer’s bus.

The new Jill, he thought.

There had been a subtle change, he noticed, in her attitude toward him since they had set out from San Diego with the tumbondé caravan. Or perhaps it wasn’t so subtle. She had cooled; she had become very distant. She was much less the timid waif now, much less tentative and subservient, much more self-assured. No more gratitude that the wonderful erudite Dr. Barry Jaspin of UCLA kindly permitted her to stick around. No more of that wide-eyed awe from her now; no more gaping at him as though he were the custodian of all human wisdom. And the sexual thing between them, which had been so free and easy the first couple of weeks, was fading fast, was hardly there any more. Well, some of that had been inevitable, Jaspin knew. He had been through it before with other women. He was human, after all, feet of clay right up to his eyebrows like everybody else, and she was bound to find that out sooner or later. She was starting to see that he was less wonderful than her fantasies had led her to think, and she was starting to look at him more realistically. Okay. He had warned her. I am not the noble, romantic, intellectual figure you think I am, he had told her, right up front. He might also have said he wasn’t the awesome lover she imagined him to be, but no need; she had had time by now to discover that herself. Okay. Okay. Being worshipped wasn’t all that great anyway, especially when it wasn’t based on anything real. But something else was going on, something a little scary. She was still basically a worshipper at heart, a dependent personality: what she had done was shift her dependence from him to the gods of tumbondé. The awe she had had for him was reserved now, it seemed, for Senhor Papamacer as Vicar-on-Earth of Chungirá-He-Will-Come. She would, he suspected, do anything the tumbondé men asked her to do. Anything.

He stared toward the south again, looking up the high mountain wall. The vehicles were still streaming down into the Valley, an unending flow of them. This was the fifth day of the journey, and day by day the size of the procession had grown. They had taken the inland route to avoid problems with traffic and with the authorities in the big coastal towns; they had gone up through places like Escondido and Vista and Corona, and then around the eastern edge of Los Angeles. It was a slow trip, with frequent stops for rituals and prayers and enormous communal meals. And it took forever to get things started up again when the order went out to head for the road. Probably the bulk of those who were here were people who had been part of the caravan since San Diego, Jaspin figured—tumbondé wasn’t widely known outside the southern half of San Diego County, where the big refugee populations were—but as the vast procession had rolled along, a good many other people had joined in, perhaps a great many others. There might be fifty thousand people by now. A hundred thousand, even. Truly the Mongol horde on the march.

“Jaspeen?”

Turning, he saw one of the high tumbondé men, the one named Bacalhau. It was getting easier to tell them apart, now. Despite the intense heat, Bacalhau was wearing full tumbondé rig, boots and leggings and jacket, even the sombrero, or whatever it was, that flat black wide-brimmed hat.

“The Senhor, he want you,” Bacalhau said. He glanced at Jill. “You, too.”

“Me?” she asked, surprised.

Jaspin was surprised too. Not that Senhor Papamacer would summon him to an audience—he had done that yesterday evening, and also two days before that, each time treating Jaspin to a long rambling repetitious monologue describing how the first visions of Maguali-ga and Chungirá-He-Will-Come had happened to enter his soul two or three years ago, and how he had immediately understood that he was the chosen prophet of the new gods. But why Jill? Up till now the Senhor had shown no indication that he even knew Jill existed.

“You come,” said Bacalhau. “You both.”

He led them to the Senhor’s bus. It was painted in the colors of Maguali-ga and bore the huge papier-mâché images of Prete Noir the Negus and Rei Ceupassear mounted on the hood on either side of the front window. Half a dozen other members of the Inner Host were lounging around its entrance when Jaspin and Jill approached it—Barbosa, Cotovela, Lagosta, Johnny Espingarda, Pereira, and one who was either Carvalho or Rodrigues, Jaspin was not sure which. Like Bacalhau they were all in formal tumbondé costumes, though some had loosened their collars.

“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” Lagosta said, sounding bored.

“Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” Jill replied before Jaspin could make the ritual response.

Lagosta stared at her with a flicker of interest in his chilly eyes, but only for a moment. He gave Jaspin a frosty look too, as if saying, Who are you, pitiful branch, sad honky noodle, to rate so much of Senhor Papamacer’s attention? Jaspin glowered back at him. Your name means lobster, he thought. And you, Bacalhau, that’s codfish. Some names. Lobster, codfish. The holy apostles of the prophet.

“Pardon me,” Jaspin said.

The Inner Host men sprawling on the steps of the bus moved aside, making room for them to go in. Inside the bus the air was thick and stale, and there was the sour smell of some strange incense on it. They had pulled out all the seats and had divided the bus with brocaded curtains into three small rooms, an antechamber, a chapel in the middle, and living quarters for Senhor Papamacer and Senhora Aglaibahi down at the back.

“You wait,” Bacalhau said.

He pushed aside the heavy curtain and went through into the chapel. The curtain closed behind him. Jaspin heard faint conversation in Portuguese.

“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Jill asked.

“No.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

Jaspin shook his head. “Don’t have the slightest,” he whispered.

After a moment Bacalhau reappeared with a couple of other members of the Inner Host who had been inside. There was never a time when seven or eight of them weren’t hovering close by the Senhor. Jaspin couldn’t tell whether the role the Host was meant to play was that of apostles or bodyguards, or some of each. The Inner Host was made up entirely of youngish dark-skinned Brazilians, eleven lean cool unsmiling men who could pass just as easily for bandidos as holy apostles. There were a few Africans in the high councils of tumbondé also, Jaspin knew, but they didn’t seem to rate the same access to the Senhor. Jaspin doubted that it was a racial thing, since the Brazilians were pretty much as black as the Africans; more likely Senhor Papamacer simply felt more comfortable with people from his own homeland.

“You come,” Bacalahau said, beckoning.

They followed him into the dark musty interior of the bus. Jaspin struggled for breath. Last night when he had been in here it had seemed disagreeably hot and stuffy, but now, down amidst the blazing afternoon heat of the Valley, it was downright stifling. Every window was shut, the smoke of a dozen sputtering candles was rising in the chapel, there seemed to be no ventilation at all. Jaspin came close to gagging. He looked helplessly at Jill, but she didn’t seem to be bothered at all by the foulness of the atmosphere. Her eyes had that glow again. It frightened him to see that look in her eyes.

Senhor Papamacer sat crosslegged at the far end of the bus, silent, waiting. To his left, along the side wall, was Senhora Aglaibahi, the divine mother and living goddess. The long narrow chamber was set up much like the room in which the Senhor had interviewed Jaspin back in Chula Vista: the darkness, the heavy draperies, the candles, the green-and-red rug, the little wooden images of Maguali-ga and Chungirá-He-Will-Come.

The Senhor made a tiny gesture of greeting with his left hand. His eyes came to rest on Jill. He studied her without speaking for what felt like forever.

“The woman,” he said at last to Jaspin. “She is your wife?”

He reddened. “Ah—no. A friend.”

“I thought a wife.” The Senhor sounded displeased. “But you travel together?”

“As friends,” Jaspin said uneasily, wondering where this was leading. He glanced toward Jill. She seemed off in some other world.

The Senhor said, “You know, I have the power of making you man and wife before all the gods. I will do this.”

Jaspin was caught off guard. His cheeks grew even hotter. What the hell was this? Marry? Jill?

Cautiously he said, “Uh—I think it’s best if she and I just remain friends, Senhor Papamacer.”

“Ah. Ah.” Jaspin felt a cold torrent of disapproval surging behind Senhor Papamacer’s timeless expressionless features. From a million miles away the Senhor said, “As you wish. But it is good, being man and wife.” Another barely perceptible gesture, this time toward the silent Senhora Aglaibahi. Jaspin’s gaze followed the Senhor’s hand. Senhora Aglaibahi sat without moving, scarcely seeming even to breathe. She seemed like some temple figurine, larger than life, something made of polished black stone: one of those Hindu goddesses, Jaspin thought, all breasts and eyes. She wore a vaguely sari-like white muslin garment that was so loosely wrapped around her that it plainly displayed the swaying globes of her bosom, the soft folds of her belly. Her dark skin was shining in the candlelight as though it had been oiled. Even after a week among these people the Senhora remained a mystery to Jaspin, a lovely voluptuous woman who might have been thirty or, just as easily, fifty. Tumbondé mythology had it that she was a virgin, but there was something else in the teachings about the ability of gods and goddesses to replenish their virginities as often as desired, and Jaspin doubted very much that the Senhor and the Senhora were living together in chastity. As he stared at her, the Senhora smiled. He imagined himself suddenly being drawn toward those dark-nippled breasts and given the milk of Senhora Aglaibahi to drink.

Jill said, unexpectedly, astonishingly, “I will be his wife if that is your will, Senhor Papamacer.”

“Hey, wait just a—”

“It is a good thing, yes, being man and wife. You do not want this, Jaspeen?”

He faltered and did not reply. He felt as though he had stepped in the path of a runaway steamroller. Marrying Jill was the last thing in the world that might have been on his mind when he walked into this bus five minutes ago.

“If you wish to attain the further knowledge, Jaspeen, you must go onward into the mysteries. And for this you must make the marriage.”

Oh, so that’s it, Jaspin said to himself.

Slowly he began to understand, then. Things had been starting to turn a little unreal, but now they were making sense again. This is mysticism country here, he thought. The Senhor is talking the sacred marriage, the hieros gamos, ye olde ancient primordial fertility thing. You want to learn the inner secrets, you have to go through the initiation. There are no two ways here. Jill must have grasped that intuitively. Or maybe she’s simply a better anthropologist than you are.

Plainly the Senhor was waiting for an answer, and only one answer was going to be acceptable. The steamroller had gone by, and he was flat as a tapeworm now.

He felt helpless. Okay, he thought. Okay. Go with it. Ham it up, Jaspin told himself. Rejoice, rejoice: you have no choice. In the most humble tone at his command he said, “I place myself in the Senhor’s hands.”

“You will take this woman in the marriage?”

Yes, yes, I will, certainly I will, he started to say. Whatever is pleasing to you, Senhor Papamacer. But he couldn’t get the words out.

Jaspin turned toward Jill. Her eyes were glowing again. But not for me, he thought. Not for me.

He shook his head. For God’s sake, he thought, am I really going to marry her, now? This scrawny goofed-up stringy-haired shiksa, this True Believer, this ragamuffin intellectual groupie? The idea was beyond belief. Everything in him balked at it. A voice within him cried out, What the fuck are you doing, man?I place myself in the Senhor’s hands. What? Married? On five seconds’ notice? To her? He imagined the scene, bringing her home to his parents. Mom, pop, this is my wife. Mrs. Barry Jaspin, yes, indeed. I was just waiting for the ideal mate to come along all this time, and now here she is. I know you’ll love her. Yes. Yes. And then he thought, Stop being an asshole. This isn’t anything legal. It won’t mean a thing outside this bus. You can walk away from it any time. Marry her and be done with it, and think of it as part of your anthropological research. A tribal ceremony you’re required to undertake so that the chief will go on allowing you to observe the other tribal rituals. And then he thought, Forget all that. Put from your mind all these thoughts of self and all this scheming for advantage. If you have any genuine hope of yielding yourself to Chungirá-He-Will-Come at the time of the opening of the gateway, you must obey Senhor Papamacer in all things. Jaspin felt his knees beginning to shake. He had come to the truth about this thing at last. He might not be doing this for love, but he also wasn’t doing it out of any cynical fingers-crossed-behind-the-back notion that he was acting purely for opportunism’s sake. No. That was just the rationalization that he was using to hide from himself what was really going on. But now he forced himself to admit the real story. He was doing it because beyond anything else he yearned to have his mind and soul flooded and possessed by Chungirá-He-Will-Come; and unless he obeyed Senhor Papamacer in all things that would not happen to him. So he would do it. For God’s sake.

“I will take her, yes,” Jaspin said.

A flicker of a smile passed across Senhor Papamacer’s thin lips. “Kneel beside the Senhora,” he said. “Both of you.”

4

The conference room was swaying, sliding, trying to turn green. Elszabet breathed deeply and struggled to keep everything in focus. She knew that she was nearing the edge of hysteria. Maybe I should just tell them, she thought, that I had a space dream last night and I am somehow unable to shake myself free of it, and to hell with trying to be professional up here.

No. No. Stay with it, she ordered herself. You can’t just crap out right in front of everybody.

She brought herself back into the meeting. It was an effort, but she brought herself back in.

Briskly she said by way of getting things started, “We all agree, I think, that we’re dealing with something that’s very hard to comprehend. But I think the first thing that we need to acknowledge is that it’s a phenomenon that can be measured and quantified and delineated in purely scientific terms.”

That sounded good.

Naresh Patel looked up from the sheaf of printouts he was studying. “Can it? Tabulations like these, do you mean? Frequencies and geographical distribution of hallucinatory events, variable-similarity scales, imagery analysis, cognitive-filtering vectors, correlation of hallucination with Gelbard-Louit stability-index rating of hallucinator? But what if this is a phenomenon totally inexplicable by scientific means?”

What if it is, Elszabet thought. What if it isn’t? Am I supposed to say something now?

Dan Robinson rescued her. She heard his voice, coming from what seemed like a very great distance.

“If it is,” he said, “then we won’t be able to explain it, will we? But why should we think it is, at this point? Pardon my hopeless western-materialistic bias, Naresh, but I happen to believe that everything in the universe has an underlying quantifiable rationale, which may not necessarily be accessible to human understanding because of limits in our current investigative techniques, but which is there nevertheless. Before the invention of the spectroscope, for example, it would have been the wildest sort of fantasy to claim that we could ever know which elements the stars were composed of. But for a modern astronomer there’s no problem at all in looking at a star fifty light-years away, or, for that matter, five billion light-years away, and saying quite authoritatively that it’s made up of hydrogen, helium, calcium, potassium—”

“Agreed,” Patel said. “Yet I think it is conceivable that a seventeenth-century astronomer could have accepted the idea that it would someday be possible to discover such information. All that was missing was the spectroscope: a matter of technological progress, refinement of technique, not a quantum leap of conceptualization. And I agree with you also that all events do have some underlying rationale. To say otherwise would be to argue that the universe allows pure randomness, and I do not think that is the case.”

The room was turning green again. Patel, Robinson, Bill Waldstein, and the rest were taking on a shining crystalline texture. Elszabet could hear what was being said, but she had no idea what it meant. She was not quite sure where she was, or why.

Patel went on, “. . . but I argue only that the event we consider here may not have a rationale that fits the dogmas of western scientific thought, and that therefore we will not approach any understanding of it by trying to measure and count.”

“What are you really saying, Naresh?” Bill Waldstein asked.

Patel smiled. “For example, what if these shared multiple hallucinations are not hallucinations at all, but rather the first signs of the advent upon our world of the actual numinous force, the divine spirit, the Godhead, if you will?”

“Are you going Hindu on us now?” Waldstein said. Crisply Patel replied, “There is nothing specifically Hindu, I believe, in what I have just suggested. Or eastern in any way, so far as I can see. I think that if we were to consult Father Christie on the subject of the Second Coming we might find that there are Christian elements to the concept, or Jewish messianic ones. I say simply that we are attempting to approach this matter in a scientific way when in fact it may be entirely outside the scope of scientific technique.”

Dante Corelli said, “Come on, Naresh. Are you telling us just to shrug and give up and wait to see what happens? Now that’s a Hindu notion if I ever heard one—”

“I do agree with Naresh on one point,” Dan Robinson cut in. “Where he says these shared multiple hallucinations are not hallucinations at all.”

Bill Waldstein leaned forward. “What do you think they are, then?”

Robinson looked toward the head of the conference table. “Elszabet, shall I respond to that?”

She blinked. “What, Dan?”

“Shall I respond? To Bill’s query? Is this the time for me to explain my idea of what the space dreams really are?”

“What the space dreams really are,” she said. She was lost. She realized that she must have been wandering in far-off realms. “Yes. Yes, of course, Dan,” she said indistinctly.

The Green World lay just beyond the window. Rolling meadows, graceful looping leafless trees.

“Elszabet? Elszabet?”

“Go ahead, Dan. What’s the matter? Go on.”

She looked around. Dan, Bill, Dante, Naresh. Dave Paolucci from the San Francisco center down at the far end of the table. Leo Kresh, all the way up from San Diego. An important meeting. You have to pay attention. She stared at the grain in the redwood-burl tabletop. God help me, she thought. What’s happening to me? What’s happening?

Robinson was saying, “. . . Project Starprobe, which was sent toward Proxima Centauri in the year 2057, I think, and which may now be producing a response in the form of a broadcast signal from the inhabitants of that world, a signal that is increasing in intensity as it approaches the Earth. I want to suggest that a vastly superior civilization in the Alpha Centauri system—Proxima Centauri is one of the three stars of that system, you know—has quite possibly sent a Starprobe of its own toward us, using a technology presently unknown to us but not in any serious way implausible, in order to make direct contact with human minds.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Waldstein muttered.

“Is it all right if I finish what I’m saying, Bill? This signal, let’s say, was received at first only by those here who were most sensitive to such things, which for some reason happened to be patients suffering from Tom O’Bedlam Gelbard’s syndrome in this sanitarium and elsewhere. But as the intensity of the signal has increased, incidence of receptivity has widened to take in a broad segment of the human population, including, as I understand it, a good many people right in this room. If I’m correct, then, what we’re confronting is not in any way an epidemic of some new mental illness, nor is it—forgive me, Naresh—any kind of metaphysical revelation, but in fact is a significant historical development, the inauguration of communication with intelligent extraterrestrial life, and as such an event neither to be feared nor to be—”

“There’s just one problem, Dr. Robinson.” A new voice cutting in from the far end of the table, quiet, assured. “May I have the floor a moment? Dr. Robinson? Dr. Lewis?”

Hearing her name, Elszabet looked up, startled, realizing she had been drifting again. They were all looking at her.

“May I address this point, Dr. Lewis?” The voice from the far end again. It belonged to the man from San Diego, Elszabet realized, her counterpart, Leo Kresh, the head of the Nepenthe Center down there. A smallish man, about forty, balding, precise in movement and in speech. She stared at him but she had wandered too far from the discussion to know what to say.

Into her silence Dan Robinson said quickly, “Of course, Dr. Kresh, go ahead, please.”

Kresh nodded. “That these images of other worlds might in some way be connected with Project Starprobe had also occurred to me, Dr. Robinson, and in fact I’ve done considerable investigation of that possibility. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to work out. As you correctly state, the unmanned Starprobe vehicle was launched in 2057, just a few years before the outbreak of the Dust War. However, I’ve been able to determine that even at the quite extraordinary velocities that Starprobe was capable of attaining at its peak of acceleration, it would not have reached the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from Earth, until the year 2099. So you can see that there has not yet been quite enough time even for Starprobe’s own signal, which of course is a narrow-band radio wave traveling at the speed of light, to have returned from Proxima, let alone for any hypothetical inhabitants of that system to have sent us any kind of signal of their own. And of course if the Proximans—if there are any—had shipped a Proximan equivalent of Starprobe in our direction, as you suggest, there’s no likelihood at all that it will be here for decades more. Therefore I think we have to rule out the hypothesis that the space dreams have an extraterrestrial origin, tempting though that notion may seem.”

“Suppose,” Robinson said, “that the Proximans have some way of sending a spaceship here at speeds faster than light?”

Gently Kresh said, “Pardon me, Dr. Robinson, but I’d have to call that an excessive multiplication of hypotheses. Not only are we required to postulate Proximans, but also you ask us to assume faster-than-light transit, which under the laws of physics as we currently understand them is simply not—”

“Hold on,” Bill Waldstein said. “What are we talking about here? Spaceships to and from other stars? Faster-than-light travel? Elszabet, for God’s sake, rule all this stuff out of order. It’s bad enough that the situation we’re coping with is fantastic in itself—can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people having identical bizarre dreams all over the West Coast, and maybe everywhere else too?—without dragging in all this imaginary speculation besides.”

“In addition,” said Naresh Patel, “it has been over two months since the first dreams were reported. Given what Dr. Kresh has told us about the time of Starprobe’s arrival at this other star and the necessary time that must elapse before its radio signal can return to us, I believe it’s clear that there is no connection between the dreams and whatever data the Starprobe satellite will eventually send back.”

“What’s more,” Dante Corelli offered, “we’re getting views of at least seven different solar systems in these dreams, right? Starprobe went to just one system, as I understand it. So even allowing for these problems of transmission time that Dr. Kresh’s been pointing out, how can it be sending back so many different sorts of scenes? I think—”

“Point of order,” Bill Waldstein shouted. “Elszabet, will you please let us move on to something more rational? We’ve got people here from San Francisco and San Diego who want to tell us what’s going on at their centers, and… Elszabet? Elszabet? Is there something the matter with you?”

She struggled to understand what he was telling her. Her mind was full of green fog. Crystalline figures moved gracefully to and fro, introducing themselves to her, inviting her to incomprehensible social events, a cataclysm symphony, a four-valley splendor, a sensory retuning. Everyone will be there, dear Elszabet. Your poet will present his latest, you know. And there is hope of another green aurora, the second one this year, and then no more again for at least fifteen tonal cycles, so they say—

“Elszabet? Elszabet?”

“I think I’d like to go to the four-valley splendor,” she said. “And maybe the cataclysm symphony. But not the sensory returning, I think. Will that be all right, to skip the sensory returning”

“What’s she talking about?”

She smiled. She looked from one to the other, Dan, Bill, Dante, Naresh, Dave Paolucci, Leo Kresh. Green light blazed upward from the center of the huge redwood table. It’s all right, she wanted to say. I’ve gone out of my mind, that’s all. But you don’t need to worry about me. It’s not unusual for people to go out of their minds these days.

“You aren’t well, Elszabet?”

Dan Robinson. Standing beside her, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.

“No,” she said. “I’m really not very well at all. I don’t think I have been all morning. Would you excuse me, everyone? I’m terribly sorry but I think I should lie down. Would you excuse me? Thank you. Thank you. I’m terribly sorry. Please don’t interrupt the meeting. But I think I should lie down.”

5

Ferguson said, “What did I tell you? There’s nothing to it. You just slip away through the forest and keep on going east, and you’ll hit civilization sooner or later.”

“You have any idea where we are?” Alleluia asked.

“On our way to Ukiah.”

“Ukiah. Where’s that?”

“East of Mendo, maybe thirty miles from the coast. You forget? They pick it out of you?”

“I don’t know much about this part of California,” she said. “We’re going to walk thirty miles, Ed?”

He looked at her. “You’re a superwoman, right? What’s the big deal about walking thirty miles? Little less than thirty, maybe. We do it in two days, tops. You can’t handle that?”

“Not me. You. Are you in shape for that kind of hike?”

Ferguson laughed and rubbed his hand against the flawless skin of her upper arm. “Don’t worry about me, baby. I’m in terrific shape for a man my age. I’m in terrific shape, period. Anyway, I get tired, we can always stop a couple hours. Nobody going to be coming after us here.”

“You sure of that?”

“Sure I’m sure,” he said. He grinned. “Imagine,” he said. “No pick tomorrow morning. No more head-scrambling. We’ll go through a whole goddamn day remembering everything that happened to us the day before.”

“And what we dreamed the night before too.”

“What we dreamed, yeah.” The grin, which had slowly been fading, turned into a frown. “You dream last night? A space dream?”

“I think so.”

“You get them just about every night.”

“Do I?” she asked.

“That’s what you’ve been telling me every morning before pick. I’ve got it all down, right here on my little ring. A different planet every night, the nine suns, the green world, the one where the whole sky’s full of stars. Last night it was the big blue star in the sky and the shining bubbles floating in the air.”

“I don’t remember,” Alleluia said.

“Well, sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.”

“And you? You never get the dreams, do you?”

“Never once,” he said, and felt the bitterness starting to rise. “Everybody gets them but me. I don’t know. I’d like to see those places just once. I’d like to know what the hell is going on in everybody’s mind. I’ve got it on my ring that first thing in the morning I have to ask myself, Did you dream a space dream? And I never have. Christ, I hate not feeling what other people feel.”

“You ought to try being artificial for a while, then. See what it’s like being really different.”

“Yeah. Sure. Just what I need.” Ferguson smiled. “Well, at least I won’t get picked tomorrow. They won’t stick their goddamn electronic scalpels into my head. Maybe two or three days away from those bastards and I’ll start to dream, you think? What do you think, Allie?”

“The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you want it too bad. You have to stop wanting it if you hope to get it. You see that, Ed?”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“A lot of hard things are simple.”

“Forget it,” he said. “I can live without the goddamn dreams. I’m just glad to be away from that place.”

“So am I,” she said, and gave his forearm a squeeze that he supposed was meant to be joyful and affectionate. It sent such a jolt of pain through him that he wondered for an instant if she had broken his arm.

They were about three hours out of the Center now. It was late afternoon, still a couple of hours to go before dark. The air was still warm, though there was the first hint in it of the oncoming evening chill. They were in dense redwood forest, moist and soft underfoot even after the long months of summer drought. There were ground squirrels running around everywhere, and now and then some shy skittish little deer peered at them from behind one of the giant trees.

Getting away had been easy, just as Ferguson had expected. After lunch, during free-time, they had simply wandered off into the woods on the inland side of the Center. Nothing unusual about that. Kept right on wandering, that was the unusual part. Stopping in his favorite little screwing-glade to pick up the canvas bag he had stashed there the day before. He had filled the bag with bread, apples, some squeeze-cans of juice, and he had put a detailed memo about it on his recorder-ring, telling his post-pick self of the next day exactly where to find it. And now they were on their way. Christ, it felt good to be free! Out of the pokey at last. Well, the Center wasn’t exactly like a prison—more like a strict boarding school, Ferguson thought—but he had never been much for boarding school either. Or anyplace else where people could tell him what he was supposed to do twelve, sixteen hours a day.

He had a sort of plan. Get to Ukiah, first: that was a fair-sized town, his recorder said, thirty, forty thousand people. A downright metropolis these days, post-Dust War days, when kids were few and far between and the population was way down, off as much as eighty-five percent from twentieth-century peaks. Sometimes Ferguson tried to imagine the world with all those people in it, five or six million in L.A. alone, more than that in New York. They said sixteen million in Mexico City. Could you believe it? Wasn’t anyone in Mexico City now, zero, nada, everybody scattering when the Nicas dusted the place. And maybe a million in L.A., if you counted in every town from Santa Barbara down to Newport Beach as being L.A. Well, so we get to Ukiah, he thought, find ourselves a motel, tidy up, regroup, and reorganize. Then phone Lacy and have her wire some money to me from San Fran. She’d be liquid enough to advance him something, he hoped. Christ knows she made a pile when she was working for me: must have hung on to enough to spare me a little. He wasn’t carrying any, of course. There was no need for it at the Center, and they didn’t encourage you to keep it on hand; when you had a weekend’s external leave they simply set up a credit line for you at the place where you’d be staying and at the place where you’d be eating. They didn’t want their inmates getting beyond reach.

He’d get beyond reach, all right. Couple days in Ukiah making arrangements, then off to Idaho—no visa needed to get into Idaho, right?—and from there, after maybe six weeks’ residence to make it official, apply for entry into Oregon. They had some sort of republic in Oregon now, Oregon and maybe half of what had been Washington State, and once he was across the line there’d be no way of getting him back to California. A matter of sovereign independence, and the way Oregon felt about the Californios, they’d never extradite anybody. So then with Oregon as his base he could start making some profitable use of the space dreams. He wasn’t exactly sure how just yet, probably some variation on the former Betelgeuse Five scam, guaranteed transmission to the newly developing other worlds, the seven planets so widely being exhibited in your nightly dreams. It would help some if he could see the dreams himself, but that wasn’t essential so long as he had Alleluia beside him. And Alleluia beside him at night, too, that tremendous panther body of hers every night—

“Hey, what’s the hurry?” he called to her. Suddenly she was striding along like a house on fire, leaving him far behind.

She turned and gave him a mischievous smile. “You having trouble keeping up, Ed?”

“Screw you,” Ferguson said amiably. “We all know you’re a superior life-form. You don’t have to prove the goddamn point. Now slow down a little and let’s hike it together, okay?”

“Right now I feel like moving fast,” she told him. “Getting my heart pumping some.”

“You get out of sight, you’ll get lost altogether. You may be perfect but you don’t know where you’re heading, do you? Go on. You just charge off through the woods. Maybe I’ll see you again, maybe not.”

Her laughter came floating back to him. Feeling anger rising, Ferguson began to walk faster, keeping his eyes fixed on her. Bitch, he thought. Challenging him like this. A real bitch. But you have to admit she’s a magnificent bitch.

He had never known a woman anything like her, and he had known a lot of women. So tall and supple, practically his own height. And beautiful: all that jet-black hair, those breasts, those legs. And strong: the long flat muscles rippling beneath her satiny skin, that aura she had of tremendous power just barely held in reserve. And strange: you could never predict what she would do. The way her mind worked, she seemed like a Martian sometimes. A woman from Betelgeuse Five. Ferguson wondered what sort of problems had landed her in mindpick. The first thing they told you at Nepenthe Center was that you weren’t supposed to discuss your past with your fellow patients; the past was where your wounds were, they said, and you were supposed to let it all slough off under the pick. When you reintegrated in the final phase of the treatment, they told you, the useful part of your past would come back, the wounds would be forever gone; so it wasn’t useful to cut the memory grooves any deeper by talking about where you were coming from. Ferguson had broken that rule, of course. He broke all the rules, just as a matter of habit. But Alleluia hadn’t told him a thing about the disturbances that had brought her to the Center. She had gone into fits of crazy depression, maybe, the Gelbard stuff, and maybe even killed people with her bare hands to cheer herself up, for all he knew. Whatever it was, she kept it to herself. Maybe she didn’t even know. Maybe she had already sloughed all her memories off under the pick, he thought. A strange woman. But gorgeous. Gorgeous.

He was damned if he’d let her get this far ahead of him. She was almost out of sight up there. He started into a half-trot, breathing hard, breaking into a light sweat, stumbling a little on the soft loose forest duff. Ferguson was surprised at how short a time it took for him to get out of breath. Then he began to feel the beginning of some pain behind his breastbone, nothing too agonizing, just a sharp little pressure. No big deal. But a little on the scary side all the same.

Hell, he thought, huffing and puffing, you ought to be able to outrun a girl, right?

Wrong, he told himself. Don’t be an asshole. That was no girl, that was a superhuman artificial being, and she had a hundred-meter head start on him. Besides, he was fifty years old. Not exactly a boy any more. It was nutty to go chasing after her like this through the woods.

But he kept on all the same. His shirt was soaked now and his heart was pounding and there were sharp little pressures all up and down his chest, but he couldn’t let himself be bested this way. “Goddamn you, Allie, wait up for me!” he yelled, running even harder. He couldn’t even see her now: a close-set stand of enormous redwoods rose like a wall before him. Screw her. I’ll just let her run away and get lost, he thought. I’ve got all the food, right? But still he didn’t slow down. And then he caught his foot in some sort of gopher hole and went toppling heavily to the ground, and felt the ankle twist beneath him as he landed.

Pain blazed in his whole leg. He sat up, touching himself here and there. The ankle was throbbing. He tried carefully to stand and discovered that he couldn’t: the leg wanted to buckle when he put the slightest weight on it. How was he going to get to Ukiah now? He cupped his hand to his mouth and called to her: “Allie? Allie? Come on back, I hurt myself!”

Five minutes, no sign of her. Ferguson massaged his ankle, hoping it would unsprain itself fast; but when he tried again to get to his feet it felt worse than before. His foot was beginning to swell up.

“Alleluia? God damn you, Alleluia, where are you?”

“Easy, easy. I’m right here.”

He looked up and saw her loping toward him like a gazelle, running in high splendid bounds. When she halted beside him she was not in the least winded: her breathing was as calm as if she had been sauntering.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Tripped. Sprained it. I can’t walk, Allie!”

“Sure you can. I’ll make a crutch for you.”

“Jesus, a crutch? I don’t know how to use a crutch. And what am I going to do, hobble for thirty miles? Why the hell did you have to go running off like that? I wouldn’t have tripped if I hadn’t been chasing after you. And—”

“Take it easy,” she said. He watched in astonishment as she bent a little tree to ground level, broke off the top third of its trunk, and began stripping away the branches. “You don’t have to go that far. There’s a road just up ahead. We’ll flag somebody down and ask for a ride into Ukiah. They don’t want to go to Ukiah, we’ll persuade them.”

“A road?”

“A little paved highway, just on the other side of those big trees, maybe five minutes up ahead. I was there when I heard you calling. A few cars going by, even. Don’t worry, okay?” She scooped him to a standing position as if he were a sack of feathers and propped the improvised crutch under his armpit. It was a little too long. Supporting him with one arm, she brought the crutch up across her shin and snapped off the tip. “There,” she said. “Ought to be the right length now.” If he hadn’t seen it done, he wouldn’t have believed that she had been able to snap a green sapling as thick as her wrist with one quick little gesture. How hard would it be for her to break someone’s arm or leg?

The crutch helped. It was a clumsy business, but he limped along, letting his injured foot dangle. She walked beside him, her arm around his shoulders, giving him an extra lift. The ground sloped upward until they reached the dense stand of redwoods, but then on the far side it angled down and leveled out and before long they emerged into a clear space and saw the highway. It was an old two-lane county road, potholed and worn, no vehicle-control devices visible at all in it, the sort of road they had had a hundred fifty years ago. He listened for cars but heard nothing: total silence. Behind them, the sun was getting low, starting to drop toward the Pacific.

“Something’s coming,” Alleluia said.

“I don’t hear a thing.”

“Neither do I. But I can see it, down the road. And now I can hear the engine, more or less. Probably a ground-effect car, since it’s so quiet.”

He saw no sign of anything, not even a speck in the distance. Her senses were awesome. A couple of minutes went by, and then he began to make it out, a dark van coming toward them from the south. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to creep a little way back into the woods. You stand out here and flag them down.”

“Will they stop?”

“People got to be out of their minds not stopping for a woman looks like you, out here by yourself with night coming on. They’ll stop. When they do, you tell them your husband’s back there with an injured leg, will they mind driving us to Ukiah. I’ll be coming out. Not much they can do about it then, when I come out. Meanwhile you get close to the driver. He show any sign of pulling out, you reach in the window, you put your hand on his throat, right? Not to hurt him, you understand, just to keep him cooperative.”

“Okay,” she said. “You better get out of sight.”

“Yeah,” Ferguson said, and went hobbling off into the underbrush. He settled in behind a tree to watch. A moment later the van appeared. It was a ground-effect job, all right, a real antique, maybe even a prewar model, with big garish bolts of lightning painted in red and yellow along its sides. Alleluia was standing in the middle of the road, wigwagging her arms; and, sure enough, the van slowed to a stop a short distance in front of her. He saw a couple of men in the front seat. They probably figured they were in for a night’s hot fun, terrific brunette, lonely country road. They tried anything with Allie, though, they’d find out different in a hurry.

He heard them talking with her. Ferguson started to emerge from his hiding place. We won’t even bother hitching a ride, he thought. I’ll just have Allie toss them out into the shrubbery and we’ll drive to Ukiah ourselves and take it on north tomorrow morning to Oregon.

Then he got a closer look at things and realized that beside the ones in the front seat there was a whole mob of men in the back of the van—three, four, maybe five of them. Scratchers, most likely. Or maybe even bandidos.

Damn, he thought. Even she can’t take on seven guys. I can’t even take on one, with my leg like this. Abruptly he saw how their escape from the Center was going to end: with him lying in the weeds with his throat slit, and Alleluia, kicking and screaming all the way, being dragged off somewhere for a night of gangbanging.

They were getting out of the van. Four, five, six, seven, yes. No, eight. Coming up to Alleluia, clustering around her, looking her over appreciatively. One of them, an evil-looking cat with a greasy face and a lot of untidy red hair, was staring at her breasts as if he hadn’t touched a woman in three years. Another, with washed-out blue eyes and a face full of acne scars, was actually licking his lips. Ferguson wanted to turn and get away, but it was too late, too late, they had seen him. At his hobbling pace they’d catch him in half a second.

“That your husband over there?” one of the scratchers asked, a stocky, tough-looking one with a short thick black beard. He pointed toward Ferguson. What a dumb way to die this is going to be, Ferguson said to himself. He prayed for Alleluia to go into action, grab three or four of them and snap their necks the way she had snapped that sapling, fast, before they knew what was happening. But she didn’t seem about to do that. She looked calm and cheerful and relaxed. Goddamn weird woman. He halted, leaning on his crutch by the side of the road, wondering what was going to happen next.

What happened next was that still another of the scratchers, a tall skinny one with long arms like a monkey’s and wild gleaming eyes, came over and peered at him in a peculiar intense way, staring into his face as if trying to read a map, and said earnestly, “Are you hurting a lot? I don’t mean your leg, I mean your soul. I think your soul’s hurting some. Just remember, this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

“What the hell,” Ferguson said, his voice thick with fear and bewilderment.

“Don’t pay him no mind,” said the red-haired scratcher. “He ain’t nothing but a looney, that one. That crazy bastard Tom.”

“Crazy, huh?” Ferguson said. He looked slowly around, beginning to think maybe they would come out of this in one piece after all. The thing was to stay cool, to start talking and talk a whole lot, to make himself seem useful to these men. “If he’s a real mental case,” he said, “you guys are in the right place, then. Take him over to the Center on the other side of that redwood forest there and he’ll feel completely at home. With all the other nuts they got there. Feed him, give him a bath, treat him nice and kindly, that’s what they’ll do for him over there, your crazy friend Tom.”

The dark-bearded man moved closer to Ferguson. “Center? What sort of center you mean?”