Tom O'Bedlam

1

Senhor Papamacer said, “The beginning, that is what is important, Jaspeen. I tell you this already? Well, you listen again: it is the most important. How the gods first visited themselves into me, the new gods.”

Jaspin waited patiently. The Senhor had told him this already, yes, more than once. More than twice, in fact. But there was never any percentage, Jaspin knew, in trying to direct these conversations. The Senhor said only what the Senhor wanted to say. That was his privilege: he was the Senhor. Jaspin was merely the scribe.

Besides, Jaspin had learned that if he was content to sit still while the Senhor was running through familiar stuff, sooner or later the Senhor would dredge up some new revelation. This afternoon, for instance, Jaspin noticed a large cardboard portfolio on the floor next to the Senhor. The Senhor was sitting with the stubby fingers of his left hand spread out wide over the portfolio, a sure sign that it was important. Jaspin wanted to know what was inside it, and he had a notion that if he simply sat still and waited, he would find out. He sat still. He waited.

“It was in the beginning with a dream.” Senhor Papamacer said. “I lay in the dark one night and Maguali-ga he show himself to me and say, I am the opener of the gate, I am the bringer of what is to come. And I know at once that this is the god speaking from across the ocean of stars, and that I am the chosen voice of the god. You know?”

Yes, Jaspin thought. He knew. He knew what came next, too. And I arose in the night and I went to the window, and the nine stars of Maguali-ga were shining in the heavens, and I reach my arms out and I feel the great light of the seven galaxies upon me. He knew it all word by word, by now. Senhor Papamacer was dictating a scripture to him and wanted to make sure he got it down right.There was no doubt. I felt the truth at once.

He studied the lean sculptured face, the obsidian eyes. This little man who meant to change the world and maybe would: this prophet, this holy monster, latest and perhaps last in a long line of prophets. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Senhor Papamacer. The Senhor liked to bracket himself with them: Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Senhor Papamacer. Maybe he was right.

“And I arose in the night,” said the Senhor, and I went to the window, and the nine stars of Maguali-ga were shining in the heavens—”

Ah, yes. And the great light of the seven galaxies.

“The thing that I know instantly,” the Senhor said, “is that these gods are real and they will come to Earth to rule us.” That was the interesting thing, Jaspin told himself, that great bounding leap of faith. Knowing instantly. Faith in the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Six months ago that would have been incomprehensible to Jaspin; but he had seen also: Chungirá-He-Will-Come on the scorching hillside back of San Diego, and then Maguali-ga so many times in his dreams, and Rei Ceupassear, Narbail of the thunders, O Minotauro. He too had seen; he too had believed instantly. To his own amazement. “How do I know this, you ask?” Senhor Papamacer went on. “I know it that I know it, is all. That is sufficient only. Verdademente a verdad, truly the truth. You know that you know.”

“Just as when Moses asked God to tell him His name,” Jaspin ventured eagerly, “and all that God would answer was, ‘I AM THAT I AM.’ And that was good enough for Moses.”

Senhor Papamacer gave him a frosty look. Jaspin was here to listen, not to supply commentary. Jaspin wanted to sink out of sight.

But after a moment the Senhor continued as though Jaspin had not spoken. “One must believe, you know, Jaspeen? In the face of the absolute truth one believes absolutely. So it was with me. I yielded myself to the truth and one by one the gods made themselves known to me, Rei Ceupassear and Prete Noir the Negus and O Minotauro and Narbail and the others, each gave me the vision in turn. I saw their worlds and their stars and I knew that they love us and watch over us and are making ready for their coming among us. I was the first to know this, but because I held the truth others came to me and I shared my knowledge with them. Now there are many thousands of us, and one day all the world will be joined with us: joined in blood, in the rite of tumbondé, to make ourselves worthy of the final god who will bring the blessings of the stars.”

Hesitantly, feeling he had to say something, Jaspin intoned, “Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come.”

For once it was the right thing. The Senhor nodded benevolently. “Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” he replied. Together they made the sacred signs.

Then the Senhor said suddenly, surprisingly, “You know what I was, before the gods came to me? You will not know. This you must put in your book, Jaspeen. I drive the taxi, in Chula Vista. Twenty years I drive there, and before that I drive in Tijuana, and when I am young I drive in Rio, before the big war. Take me here, take me there, can you drive any faster, keep the change.” He laughed. Jaspin had never heard the Senhor laugh before: a dry harsh shivering laugh, reeds rubbing together in a windswept arroyo. “All in one night I am made new by the gods, I never drive again. You put that in the book, Jaspeen. I give you photographs: my taxi, my chauffeur license. Mohammed, he drive camels, Moses he was a shepherd, Jesus a carpenter. And Papamacer a taxi-man.”

There they were again, the big four, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Papamacer. Jaspin tried to imagine this formidable deep-voiced coiled spring of a man, this charismatic prophet of the high gods of the stars, buzzing around San Diego in some old jalopy of a cab scrounging up fares and tips. The Senhor reached for the cardboard portfolio. The taxicab photos, Jaspin figured. But instead Senhor Papamacer said, “When you close your eyes, Jaspeen, you see the gods, yes?”

“Some nights, yes. I dream the visions two, three times a week.”

“You see all seven loving galaxies?”

“By now, yes,” said Jaspin. “All seven.”

“And you believe, these are the homes of the gods, verdademente a verdad? ”

“I believe it, yes,” Jaspin said. He wondered what the Senhor was getting at.

“You ever wonder, maybe it is only dream, maybe it is a foolishness of the night that you have, that I have, that all of us have?”

“I believe the gods are true gods,” Jaspin said.

“Because you have the faith. Because you know that you know.”

Jaspin shrugged. “Yes.”

“I have here the proof absolute,” said the Senhor. He opened the portfolio. Jaspin saw a thick stack of holographic repros inside. Senhor Papamacer passed the top one across to Jaspin. “You know this place?” he asked.

Jaspin stared. Even in the dim light of Senhor Papamacer’s bus the holo gleamed with an inner radiance. It showed a string of dazzling suns—he counted six, seven, eight, nine—strewn out across a dark purple sky, and an alien landscape, eerie and bewildering, all harsh angles and impossible perspectives. And in the foreground stood a massive sixlimbed figure with a single great glowing compound eye in the center of its broad forehead. Jaspin began to tremble inside.

“What is this, a photograph?” he asked.

“No, not a photograph. A painting only. But a very real painting, no? What is this place? Who is that standing there?”

“That’s Maguali-ga,” Jaspin murmured. “The nine suns. The Rock of the Covenant.”

“Ah, you know these things. You recognize.”

“It looks exactly the way I’ve seen them myself.”

“Yes. Yes. How interesting. You look at this one, now.” He passed Jaspin a second holo. It was a different view of the world of Maguali-ga now: the angle much steeper, and instead of Maguali-ga by himself there were five such beings. This repro too could have passed for a photograph; but now that Jaspin had been given the clue he was able to see that in fact it was only a painting, probably computer-generated and very realistic but nonetheless a work of the imagination. “And this,” said the Senhor, laying a third view of Maguali-ga’s planet down in front of Jaspin: somewhat different technique, considerably different subject matter—this time a strange stone building was in view, highvaulted and rugged, with Maguali-ga standing at its threshold—but there was no question that it depicted the same world as the other two. “Now these,” the Senhor said, and dealt three more pictures from his pack. Red sun, blue sun, fiery arch in the sky, golden figure in the foreground with curving ram’s-horns. Each of the three was clearly the work of a different artist; but all three showed the same thing, identical in all details. Jaspin shivered. “Chungirá-He-Will-Come.”

“Yes. Yes. And these?”

Three more. Green world, thick wisps of fog, shimmering crystalline figures moving about. Three of a world of blazing light, the entire sky one vast sun. Three of a fiery world whose sun was blue, and there was Rei Ceupassear, soaring high overhead in a shining radiant bubble. Three of a world whose suns were yellow and orange—

“What are these things?” Jaspin asked finally.

The Senhor beamed like an ebony Buddha. He had never looked so joyous. “It is truly the truth, and I know that I know it. But others are not so sure, and there are some who will oppose us. So I have had the truth made into pictures for them. You know, there are devices, they turn the pictures in a man’s mind into a picture on a screen, and then it can be made like this. I sent for three different people and I said, Make pictures of the worlds of the gods. Put them into this machine, so everyone can see the visions that you see. Well, Jaspeen, you can see. If you make the photograph, three people, you point the camera at the same street in Los Angeles, you will get the same picture. And here too we have the same picture, although it just comes out of people’s minds. So everyone is seeing the same thing. Look, this is Maguali-ga, this is Narbail, this is where O Minotauro dwells—who can doubt it now? These things are true and real. When they come into our minds, they are coming from true places. Because we all see the same. There can be no doubt now. You agree? There can be no doubt!”

“I never doubted,” said Jaspin, dazed. But he knew that he was lying. Some part of him had maintained its skepticism all along. Some part had insisted that what he was experiencing was only some sort of crazy hallucination. But if everyone was having the same hallucinations—exactly—down to the little details—these weird little plantlike things here that he had seen so often but which he had never mentioned to anyone else, here they were, in this holo and in that one and here too—

He was altogether stunned. He had not asked for these proofs; he had been willing to act on faith alone; but the holograms before him were overwhelming.

“Truly the truth,” Senhor Papamacer said.

“Truly the truth,” Jaspin murmured.

“You go now. Write down what you feel, how you think this minute. Now. You go, Jaspeen.”

He nodded and rose and went stumbling through the dim musty bus, groping in the darkness of the chapel, then out the front way. A few men of the Inner Host were sprawled on the steps of the bus: Carvalho, Lagosta, Barbosa. They smirked up at him. White eyes flashed mockingly in dark faces. He moved sideways through them, carefully, not giving a damn about their smartass smirks: the presence of the gods was still on him. Go write down what you feel, how you think. Yes. But first he had to tell Jill.

Dusk was coming on. The air was cool. They were somewhere up near Monterey now, inland a little way, camped in what had been somebody’s artichoke field before a hundred thousand pilgrims had driven their buses and vans and trailers into it. Jaspin heard the sound of chanting in the distance. Three enormous campfires were blazing, sending black columns of smoke into the darkening sky. He looked into his car for Jill. Not there.

From behind him he heard laughter. More Inner Host: Cotovela, Johnny Espingarda, leaning against their little orange-and-yellow bus. He glanced toward them.

“Something funny?”

“Funny? Funny?”

“Either of you see my wife?”

They laughed again, forcing it a little. They were deliberately trying to make him feel uncomfortable. He despised them, these chilly-faced inscrutable Brazilian bastards, these apostles of the Senhor. So smug in their assumption of superior holiness.

“Your wife,” Johnny Espingarda said. He made it sound dirty.

“My wife, yes. Do you know where she is?”

Johnny Espingarda balled his hand into a fist, put it to his mouth, coughed into it. Cotovela seemed to be choking back laughter. Jaspin felt the awe and astonishment that the Senhor’s holograms had aroused in him vanishing under the weight of his anger and irritation. He swung around, turned away from them, peered around for Jill in the gathering darkness. He walked to the far side of his car, thinking she might have spread a blanket over there. No Jill there either. When he came around to the front again, though, he saw her, walking toward the car from the general direction of the Inner Host bus. She looked flushed, sweaty, rumpled; she seemed to be fumbling with the belt of her jeans. Behind her, Bacalhau had emerged from the bus and was saying something to Cotovela and Johnny Espingarda: Jaspin heard their rough laughter. Oh, Christ, he thought. Christ, no, not Bacalhau.

“Jill?” he said.

Her eyes were a little out of focus. “You been visiting the Senhor?”

“Yes. And you?”

She seemed to be making an effort to see straight; and then suddenly she was, her eyes locking on his, her expression a chilly, defiant one. “I’ve been interviewing the Inner Host,” she said. “A little field anthropology.” She giggled.

“Jill,” he said. “Oh, Christ, Jill.”

2

Standing between these two strange new people, the beautiful dark-haired woman who was not real and the scowling-looking man with the injured leg, Tom was sure he felt a vision coming on. Right here, in front of everyone on this lonely back-country road as the sun was going down.

But somehow it didn’t arrive. There was the roaring in his brain, there was the first beginning of luminous flickering, but that was all. The vision stayed on hold. Something else was happening, maybe, some sort of omen unfolding within him.

He looked at Charley. He looked at the dark-haired woman and at the scowling-looking man who had hurt his leg. Charley was asking questions about the place that the scowling man had called a center. Where is it, who runs it, what do they do there? Tom listened with interest. He found himself thinking that he might like to go to that center, go there this evening, sit down and rest for a while in its gardens. He had been on the road too long, wandering this way and that, and he was tired.

“You mean this place, it’s a kind of funny farm?” Charley asked.

“Not exactly,” the scowling man said. “They got a lot of troubled people there. I think not quite as troubled as your friend here, most of them. But troubled, you know? Deeply upset inside. And they take care of them there. They got ways of soothing them and caring for them.”

Tom said, “Tom could use some soothing. Poor Tom.”

No one appeared to notice that he had spoken. He glanced toward the sky, still afternoon-blue but growing dark around the edges. The sun was hidden now by the tops of the tremendous redwood trees. The forest began just a little way off the road and went on and on and on. Overhead he saw stars appearing and drifting around the sky, colored pinpoints of light, red and green and orange and turquoise.

Tiny floating sparks. But each one at the heart of an empire spanning thousands of worlds, and each of those empires bound in a confederation encompassing whole galaxies. And on those worlds a billion billion wondrous cities. Compared to the smallest of those cities, Babylon was a village, Egypt was a puddle. And the light of all those stars was focused now on this unimportant little world, this sad Earth.

Charley said, “Who are you two, anyway?”

“I’m Ed. That’s Allie, here.”

“Ed. Allie. Okay. Out for a stroll in the woods.”

“Uh-huh. A little hike. I put my foot in a gopher hole and twisted my ankle.”

“Yeah. You got to be careful.” Charley was measuring them. “And what’s the name of this place, this center?”

“The Nepenthe Center,” the man named Ed said. “Some foundation runs it. They take people in from all over California. It’s almost like a country hotel, hiking and recreation and everything, except they also give you treatment there for your troubles. He’d like it there. It’s just around on the far side of that forest, between the woods and the coast. There’s a big gate out front, and signs. You can’t miss it. If you wouldn’t mind driving Allie and me over to Ukiah first, and then there’s a road that goes straight out from Ukiah to Mendocino, and you can pick up a road off that takes you to the Center.”

“How come you know so much about it?” Charley asked.

“My wife’s been treated there,” Ed said.

“Allie? What was wrong with her?”

“No, not Allie.” Ed looked uncomfortable. “Allie’s a friend. My wife—” he shrugged. “Well, it’s a long story.”

“Yeah. I bet.”

Tom realized that Charley was going to kill these people when he was finished talking to them. He had to. They could identify him now. If the local police came around and said, “We’re looking for some scratchers who killed a vigilante officer in San Francisco, did you see anybody unusual driving around up here,” these two could say, “Well, we saw eight men in a van drive through this way, and this is what they looked like.” Charley couldn’t risk that. Charley said he didn’t like to kill, and very likely he meant it. But he didn’t mind killing, either, when he felt that he had to.

The woman said, “Tell me something. Do you people have space dreams?”

The man turned to her, his face getting red, and said, “Allie, for Christ’s sake—”

Yes. He’d kill them sure as anything, Tom knew. The idea that he had to do it was starting to show in Charley’s face: that the man was dangerous to him, the man might somehow tip off the police. The only reason Charley had stopped in the first place was that he thought the woman was by herself on the road. The scratchers had wanted to use her. But then when the man appeared, limping out of the underbrush—that changed everything. The man had to die because he was too dangerous to Charley. And that meant the dark-haired woman had to die too. Once there’s killing, there’s got to be more killing. That was what Charley had said a long time ago.

The woman was saying, sounding stubborn, “No, I want to know. It’s important. These are the first people we’ve seen since—since. I just wonder. Whether they have space dreams too.”

“Space dreams?” Tom said, as if hearing for the first time what she was saying.

She nodded. “Like visions. Other worlds. Different suns in the sky. Strange beings moving around. I’ve been having dreams like that, and I’m not the only one. A lot of people I know. Not Ed, though. But a lot of others.”

“Harbingers,” Tom said to her. “The Time of the Crossing is coming near.” He saw Stidge turn to Tamale and tap his forehead and make a circle in the air with his fingers. Well, that was Stidge. Tom said, “I get the visions all the time. Do you ever see the green world? And the world of the nine suns?”

“And there’s one with a red sun and a blue one too,” she said, sounding excited. “It’s all coming back to me now. I thought I had lost them, but no, I can find them in my mind now. Why is that? That stuff was gone. But I remember a big blue sun sizzling in the sky-shining cities that looked like floating bubbles—”

“Yeah,” Charley said. “I know that one. I heard about it from Tom.

That’s the Loollymoolly planet, right, Tom?”

“Luiiliimeli,” Tom said. He felt excited too, now. Maybe Charley wouldn’t kill them after all, now that he had found out that the woman had the dreams too. Charley could get interested in people, and that made a difference sometimes. Tom said to the woman, “What other places have you seen? Was there one where the whole sky was filled with light just radiating down from all over?”

“Yes,” she said. “There’s one of those too. And—”

“It’s getting late,” Charley said. Charley’s eyes looked dark and hooded suddenly, and his voice was flat. Tom knew that look and that voice. Chilly look, scary voice. “We been having a nice talk here, haven’t we? But it’s getting late.”

He’s going to kill them anyway, Tom thought. No matter what.

It was no good, this killing. All this killing had to stop. He had already explained that to Charley. The Time of the Crossing was too close at hand now. It wasn’t fair to deprive anybody of their chance to go to the stars, now that the Time of the Crossing was almost here.

Charley turned and said, “Stidge—Mujer—”

“Wait,” Tom said. He had to do something, he knew, right now, right this minute. “Here. Here. It’s starting to come on. I feel the rush beginning.”

He had never faked a vision before. He hoped he’d be able to bring it off.

Charley said, “Save it, Tom. We got things to do.”

“But this one’s special, what I’m seeing,” he said, begging for time. That was all he could do now, beg for time and hope for something to happen. “The whole sky is moving! You see the stars? They’re drifting around like goldfish up there.” He threw his head back and waved his arms around and tried to look ecstatic, hoping he might somehow bring a real vision on. But nothing was coming. Desperately he said, forcing it, “Can you see the Kusereen princes? They move freely through the Imperium. They don’t need spaceships or anything. It would take too long, getting from world to world by spaceships, but they understand how to make the Crossing, you know? All of them do. They can leave their bodies behind and enter into whatever kind of body the host world has.”

“Tom—”

“This woman here, this Allie. She’s really Zygerone, Charlie. She’s a Blade of the Imperium. And the man, he’s a Kusereen Surveyor. They’re visiting us, preparing us for the Crossing. I can feel their inner presences” Tom felt himself beginning to tremble. He was at the edge of believing his own story. The man and the woman were staring at him, astounded, bewildered. He wanted to wink at them and tell them to go along with everything, but he didn’t dare. Words poured from his lips. “I’ve felt the consciousnesses of these two many times, Charley. She’s a true Fifth Zygerone herself, even though consciously right now she doesn’t really have access to her own identity. They lock it away, so they don’t get into trouble. And him, I can’t even begin to tell you what he is, he’s so powerful in the Kusereen hierarchy. I tell you, we’re in the presence of great beings here. And it could even be that the whole destiny of the human race is going to be settled right out here on this road tonight and—”

“Shit, just listen to him,” Mujer said.

Charley said, “Take him back into the van. Nicholas, Buffalo. Don’t hurt him any, just take him in there, keep him occupied. Go on. Go on, now.”

“Wait,” Tom said. “Please. Wait.”

Suddenly there was a droning noise in the sky.

“Christ,” Mujer said, “what’s that? Helicopter?”

Tom blinked and stared. A dark gleaming shape hovered above them, descending gently.

“Son of a bitch,” Charley muttered.

“Cops?” Buffalo asked.

Charley glared at him. “You going to stay around to ask them? We got to scatter. Scatter. Into the woods, every which way. Go on, run! Run, you idiots!”

The scratchers disappeared into the dusk as the helicopter floated down to land by the side of the road. Tom stood still, watching it in fascination. He heard Charley yelling to him from somewhere in the woods but he paid no attention. The helicopter was small and sleek. It bore the words Nepenthe Center Mendocino County along its glossy pearl-colored sides in bright blue lettering.

A hatch opened and two men jumped out, then a woman, then a third man. “All right, Ed,” one of them said. “Alleluia. It’s time to go home now.”

“For the love of suffering Jesus,” the man named Ed said. “You been flying all over the county after us?”

The woman said, “It’s not all that hard tracing you. You’ve both got homing-vector chip implants, you know. I guess you forgot that, right?”

“Jesus,” Ed muttered. “They pick you, how can you win?” He swung about and started toward the woods in a hopeless hobbling clumsy way. When he had gone eight or nine steps he tripped over his own crutch and went sprawling and lay there cursing and pounding his fist against the ground. The woman and one of the men went to him, helped him up, began leading him toward the helicopter.

The woman named Allie did not move at all at first. Tom had expected her to try to escape into the forest too, but she stood as though she had been turned into a statue. And when she did move it was not away from the people who had come to get her but straight toward them, with amazing speed. She was on them in an instant. She knocked one of the men almost to the far side of the road with one swipe of her arm and seized the other one around the neck.

“Okay,” she said. “You leave us the hell alone,” she said, “or I’ll pull his head off, you hear? Now take your hands off Ferguson. You hear me, Lansford? Let go of him.”

“Sure, Alleluia,” said the man who was holding the man with the injured foot. He stepped away from Ed, and so did the woman on the other side of him. “No problem,” the man said. “You see? Nobody’s holding Mr. Ferguson.”

“All right,” Allie said. “Now I want you to get into that helicopter of yours and take yourselves right back to—”

“Alleluia?” said the woman.

“Don’t talk to me, Dante. Just do what I say.”

“Absolutely,” the woman named Dante said. She brought her hand up and something bright flashed in it, and the woman named Allie made a soft little sound and fell to the ground.

Tom said, “Did you kill her?”

“Anesthetic pellet. She’ll be asleep about an hour, time enough to get her back and cooled off. Who are you?”

“Tom’s my name. Poor Tom. Hungry Tom. You’re from the center? Where people go to rest and be soothed?”

“That’s right,” the woman said.

“I want to go there. That’s where I need to go. You’ll take Tom with you, won’t you? Poor Tom? Hungry Tom? Tom won’t hurt anyone. Tom’s been with the scratchers long enough.” They were staring at him. He smiled. “That’s their van, the scratchers. Charley and his boys. They all ran off into the forest, but they aren’t far away. They thought you were the police. When you go they’ll come back for me if you leave me. I’ve been with them long enough. They hurt people sometimes, and I don’t like that. Tom’s hungry. Tom’s going to be cold, out here by himself. Please? Please?”

3

For a little while that morning, while she was trying to get ready for the meeting with Kresh and Paolucci, Elszabet had seriously considered asking to undergo mindpick herself. That was how scary it had been, coming up out of the Green World dream and discovering that vestiges of the strangeness were still clinging to her, a dream that would not go away.

Of course, pick really wasn’t an available option, and she knew that. Nobody on the staff had ever been picked: it was strictly for patients only. You didn’t just reach for pick the way you might for a martini or a tranquilizer whenever you felt the need to mellow yourself out. Setting someone up for pick was a big deal involving weeks of testing, fitting the electroneural curves just right so no damage would be done. Pick was supposed to be a therapeutic process, not a destructive one. When chopping away at somebody’s memory-banks, you had to be sure you chopped only at the pathological stuff, and that required elaborate prepick measuring and scanning.

All the same, the moment of awakening had been so terrifying for her that she had simply wanted to unhappen the dream as fast as she could, by any means available. Get it out of her mind, obliterate it, forget it forever.

What was frightening about the dream was how beautiful it had been.

Seductive, that cool green fog-wrapped world. Irresistible, those elegant shimmering many-eyed people. Delicious, the intricate baroque dance of their daily existence. Those magnificently civilized beings, moving gracefully through lives untouched by conflict, ugliness, decay, despair: a civilization millions of years beyond all the nasty grubby sweaty little flaws of human existence, all those disagreeable things like aging and disease and jealousy and covetousness and war. Having once plunged into that world, Elszabet did not want to leave. Awakening had been like the expulsion from Eden.

Of course there were no such places, she knew, except in the land of dreams. It was pure fantasy, a phantom of the night. Nevertheless she wanted to go back there. It seemed unfair, a brutal imposition, to have to wake up: as cruel as a snowstorm on a summer afternoon.

The powerful pull of the Green World had drained her vitality all morning. Going through her rounds, calling on Father Christie and Philippa and April and Nick Double Rainbow and all the rest, she had been barely able to pay attention to their problems and needs and complaints; her mind kept drifting back to the other place and its dukes and countesses, its parties, its symphonies of form and color and psychological interplay. She had already forgotten the names of those among whom she had moved in her dream, and the details themselves were blurring: they had more than two sexes, she knew, and there was something about a new summer palace, and a poet and his poem. Knowing that she was starting to forget filled her with despair. She grasped at the fading memories. She yearned to go back to that blessed world.

No one had told her that the space dreams were this wondrous. Was it that she had dreamed more intensely than anyone else? Or that they forgot within an hour or two of awakening? Or that they kept the richness and complexity of what they had seen to themselves, a sweet hoarded interior treasure?

Elszabet had feared the dreams before she had ever had one. Now she feared them even more, now that she knew what risk to her sanity they presented. How could she let dreams be the answer? A dream so lovely as that one could beckon her straight into madness, she realized. The edge was always near, perilously near. Dreams were unreal. Dreams were the negation of reality. That land of dreams, the poet had said, so various, so beautiful so new: it really offered neither joy nor love nor light, nor help for pain.

By mid-morning, though, she was beginning to think that she had shaken the dream-world off. She had the distraction of the two visitors, Paolucci from San Francisco and Leo Kresh from San Diego, to draw her back to reality.

Dave Paolucci had arrived with a bunch of charts and graphs showing his latest information on the geographical range of the space dreams, and a packet of cubes containing spoken accounts of them that patients at his center in San Francisco had recorded. Elszabet felt comfortable and assured in Paolucci’s presence. He was a comfortable sort of man, round-faced and sturdy, with dark olive skin and deep-set amiable eyes. She had trained with him in mindpick technique at the San Francisco headquarters before coming up here to Mendocino; in a way Paolucci had been her mentor. Later in the day she intended to tell him about her own dream experience of last night and ask him to counsel her.

Kresh, the San Diego man, was not at all a man to feel comfortable with. Tidy, fastidious, a little on the pedantic side, he seemed in full command of himself and of his emotions and probably did not have a great deal of sympathy for those who were not. It was a considerable concession for him to have traveled this far, seven or eight hundred kilometers, for this meeting. Perhaps he had simply wanted to get out of Southern California, teeming with its multitudes of second-generation Dust War refugees, to spend a few days in the cool clean air of the redwood country. When Elszabet met with him shortly before the general staff meeting was due to begin he showed relatively little interest in what had been going on at Nepenthe; he wanted to tell her instead about some religious phenomenon that was centered in the refugee-inhabited towns surrounding San Diego proper. “You know about tumbondé?” Kresh asked.

“I’m not sure that I do,” she said.

“I’m not surprised. It’s been a purely local San Diego thing. But it isn’t going to be much longer.”

“Tumbondé,” Elszabet said.

“It’s a hybrid Brazilian-African spiritist cult, with some Caribbean and Mexican overtones. A former San Diego taxi driver who calls himself Senhor Papamacer runs it, and there are thousands of followers. They hold ritual ceremonies, apparently pretty wild stuff, in the hills east of San Diego. The essential thing of it is apocalyptic: our present civilization is near its end and we are about to be led to the next phase of our development by deities who will break through to our world from remote galaxies.”

Elszabet managed a smile. She felt a tendril of the Green World brush across her consciousness, and shivered. “These are very strange times. . . ”

“Indeed. There are two notable aspects of tumbondé that are relevant to us, Dr. Lewis. One is that there seems to be a remarkable correlation between the space gods that Senhor Papamacer and his followers invoke and worship and the unusual dreams and visions that have been reported lately by a great many people, both at mindpick centers and in the general population. I mean the imagery appears to be the same: evidently the tumbondé people have been receiving the space dreams too, and have used them as the basis for their—ah, theology. In particular their god Maguali-ga, who is said to be the opener of the gate who will make possible the breakthrough of the space deities on the Earth, seems identical with the massive extraterrestrial being who is invariably seen in the so-called Nine Suns dream. And their supreme redemptive figure, the high god known as Chungirá-He-Will-Come, appears to be the horned being experienced by those who have the dream termed Double Star One, with the red sun and the blue one.”

Elszabet frowned. Those names were familiar somehow: Maguali-ga, Chungira-He-Will-Come. But where had she heard them? She was so weary this morning—so preoccupied with the vision that had come to her in the night—

Kresh went on, “As I’ll explain more fully at the meeting, it’s possible that these tumbondé manifestations, which have been widely publicized in San Diego County and elsewhere in Southern California, may actually be encouraging a wider locus for the space dreams through mass suggestion: that is, people may think they are having the dreams when in fact all that is happening is an influence from media coverage. Of course, that couldn’t be a factor here, where tumbondé has not yet been publicized. But that brings me to my second point, which is a rather urgent one. A significant aspect of tumbondé theology is the revelation that the point of entry for Chungirá-He-Will-Come is the North Pole, identified in tumbondé terminology as the Seventh Place. Senhor Papamacer has vowed to lead his people toward the Seventh Place in time for the advent of Chungirá-He-Will-Come. And, though evidently you haven’t heard the news yet, the migration has now begun. Anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand tumbondé followers are traveling slowly northward in a caravan of cars and buses, gathering new supporters as they go. I understand that they’re somewhere in the vicinity of Monterey or Santa Cruz by now—Dr. Paolucci probably has more accurate word on that—”

Maguali-ga, Elszabet thought. Chungirá-He-Will-Come. She remembered now: Tomás Menendez, the cube he had been playing on his bonephone, the strange barbaric African-sounding chanting she had heard. Those names had been repeated again and again: Maguali-ga, Chungirá-He-Will-Come. Menendez had friends in the Latino community in San Diego who sent things to him here. So tumbondé evidently had at least one adherent already in Northern California, she thought. One right here at the Center, in fact.

“—But it’s quite possible,” Kresh continued, “that the tumbondé marchers will pass right this way, along the coast at Mendocino, and there are so many of them that they could very well spill over onto the property of your Center. I think it might be a good idea to give some thought to setting up special security precautions.”

Elszabet nodded. “We certainly should, if a hundred thousand people are heading our way,” she said. “I’ll bring it up at the staff meeting today. I’d like to talk about all these things at the meeting. Which is just about due to begin, by the way.”

As it turned out, Elszabet wasn’t able to talk about much of anything at the meeting. The thing that she most dreaded plagued her all during it: the Green World, seeking once more to rise up through her conscious mind and carry her away. She fought it as long as she could. But when eventually it overcame her she had had to leave the room. After that she wasn’t sure what had happened for a time; they had given her a sedative and had her lie down, and when she returned to consciousness there was a new mess to deal with. Dan Robinson brought her the news: Ed Ferguson and the synthetic woman Alleluia had run away. Homing-vector tracers were in use, though, and the fugitives had been located east of the Center in the redwood forest. An hour or so from now, when they emerged into some open place, Dan would send out the helicopter to pick them up.

“Who’s going to go?” Elszabet wanted to know.

“Teddy Lansford, Dante Corelli, and one of the security men. And I suppose I will also.”

“Count me in too.”

Robinson shook his head. “The copter only holds six, Elszabet. We need to leave room for Ferguson and Alleluia.”

“Let Dante stay behind, then. I ought to supervise the pickup operation.”

“Dante’s a strong and resourceful woman. They could be dangerous, especially Alleluia. I’d like Dante to go.”

“Then Lansford—”

“No, Elszabet.”

“You don’t want me to go.”

Robinson nodded. As though speaking to a child, he said, “Right. At last you see it. I don’t want you to go. You practically became delirious at the staff meeting, you’ve been under sedation for the past two hours, you’re wobbly as hell. It makes no sense for you to go chasing off in a helicopter after a couple of unruly runaways who happen to be the two least predictable and most amoral individuals we have here. Okay? Do you agree that you’re going to skip the pickup mission?”

She couldn’t argue with that. But the rest of the afternoon was a fidgety time for her. Runaways were serious business: she was responsible not only for the mental condition of the patients but for their physical well-being as well. It was very much against the rules for any of them to leave the Center grounds without permission, and permission was granted only with stringent precautions. There were legal aspects: Ferguson was here in lieu of a jail term, after all. And the synthetic woman, though she was not actually regarded as a criminal, was uncontrollably violent at times, extremely dangerous to others because of her superhuman strength. In her pre-Center days she’d done more than a little damage to people during wild moments of blackout. Elszabet didn’t want either one of them wandering around loose. They would need extensive double-picking when they got back, and maybe some preventive reconditioning as well—and what if they somehow gave the pickup squad the slip, or harmed a staff member while they were being apprehended?

So there was that to worry about. And the aftermath of her dream still to wrestle with. And she supposed she also had to give some thought to that horde of tumbondé people heading this way, although that was far from being an urgent problem right now if they were still somewhere south of San Francisco. Sufficient unto the moment were the headaches thereof.

It was a long couple of hours.

The helicopter returned toward sunset. Elszabet, feeling tired but much more calm than she had been during the day, went out to greet it. Alleluia was out cold: they had had to hit her with an anesthetic dart, Dante said. Ferguson, looking rumpled and sullen and abashed, came limping out: he had hurt his ankle pretty badly romping around in the forest, though otherwise he was okay. “Put him under pax and let him sleep it off,” Elszabet said. “We’ll double-pick him in the morning after we find out where he thought he was going. Ask Bill Waldstein to look at that ankle, too. Set up an immediate pick for Alleluia when she wakes up, and make sure she’s secured against any kind of violent outbreak. We’ll pick her again tomorrow, too.” Elszabet paused. Someone unexpected was coming from the copter: a tall, thin, shabby-looking man with intense, burning eyes. She glanced toward Dan Robinson. “Who’s that?”

“His name’s Tom,” Robinson said. “If he’s got any other name we don’t know it. He was with a band of scratchers when we found Ferguson and Alleluia. The scratchers ran for it, but Tom stuck around and asked us to take him in. Pretty far gone, you ask me: paranoid schizophrenic’s the quick two-dollar diagnosis. But very gentle, harmless, hungry.”

“I suppose we can give him a bath and a few meals,” Elszabet said. “The poor scruffy bastard. Look at those eyes, will you! They’ve seen the glory, all right!” She started to walk toward the newcomer, who was prowling around in a vague, perplexed way. Then she paused and looked back at Robinson. “Hey, I thought you told me the copter only held six!”

He grinned at her. “So sue me. I lied.”

“Tom’s hungry,” the scratcher said. “Tom’s cold. Will you take care of me here?”

“We’ll take care of you, yes,” Elszabet said. She went over to him. How strange he is, she thought. The strangeness seemed to radiate from him like an aura. Schizophrenic, maybe: it was, as Dan Robinson said, a pretty good two-buck diagnosis. Certainly he was a little off center. Those eyes, those fiery biblical eyes—the eyes of a madman, sure, or the eyes of a prophet, or both. “You’re Tom?” she asked. “Tom what?”

“Tom o’ Bedlam,” he said. “Poor Tom. Crazy Tom.”

He smiled. Even his smile had a fierce strange intensity. She put out her hand to him. “Come on, then, Tom o’ Bedlam. Let’s go inside and get you cleaned up, okay?”

“Tom’s dirty. Tom’s cold.”

“Not for long,” she said. She took him by the wrist. As she touched him she felt a curious sensation, as though something were twisting and churning in the depths of her mind; and for an instant she thought the Green World hallucination was going to repossess her right then and there. But that faded as quickly as it had come. Again Tom smiled. His eyes met hers, and something—she had no idea what—passed between them in that moment, some silent transfer of force, of power. I think we may have something special here, Elszabet told herself. But what? What?

4

In the morning Tom woke a little before sunrise, as he usually did. But for a moment he was bewildered at not being able to see the dawn sky, black shading into blue overhead and the last stars still glowing faintly. Above him all he could make out now was darkness, and beneath him he felt the unaccustomed softness of a bed, and he wondered where he was and what had happened to him.

Then he remembered. This place called the Center. The woman named Elszabet, taking him to the little wooden cabin at the edge of the woods last night and saying, “This will be where you stay, Tom.” Showing him how to work the sink and the shower and the other attachments. He remembered her telling him, “You get yourself cleaned up and I’ll be back in half an hour or so to take you down to the mess hall, okay?” Giving him fresh clothing, even. Pair of jeans, soft flannel shirt, pretty good fit. And coming back for him and taking him over to the big building where they were serving food. Dinner served on dishes, not something cooked on a stake over a fire by the side of the road. He remembered all that now.

So he hadn’t dreamed it. He was really here. This beautiful quiet place. He got up and walked out on the cabin porch and stared at the thick mists coiling like lazy snakes through the trees.

It had felt great sleeping in a bed again, an actual honest bed with pillows and clean sheets and a sleep-wire to hold in your hand if you didn’t feel sleepy, and all the rest. Tom couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bed, not really. When he was with the scratchers he had slept on one of the blow-up mattresses that they kept in the back of the van. Before that, coming down from Idaho, he had slept outdoors, mostly. Here and there, under trees or in little caves or right out in open fields, and sometimes, but not often, in some old burned-out house in one of the dead towns. And before that? He wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. He was here now.

It was a good place, this Center. He felt different here, more peaceful, more in command of himself, closer to the center of his being. That was interesting, the way he felt so different here.

In the dimness he could see the indistinct forms of buildings, some cabins like his own close by and then a big open lawn and some more small cabins and then bigger buildings farther away on the hill over there.

He looked up through the mists into the sky.

The stars seemed very close to the Earth here. He couldn’t see them, not with sunrise just a short time away. But he could feel them, the shining presence of them, like a series of invisible glittering spheres lined up one after another up there. This must be a very holy place, he thought, to have the stars so close. All the worlds he had visited so often in his visions seemed practically within his grasp: just reach out, just touch!

Tom tingled with awe. Those wondrous galaxies, those millions upon millions of worlds bustling with life! “Hello,” he called. “Hello, you Poro and you Zygerone. You Thikkumuuru people. And you fabulous Kusereen, hello, hello!” The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament showeth His handiwork. What a privilege it had been to behold all this, the multitude of worlds, the fullness of the universe. For how many billions of years had those great races been masters of the stars, building their civilizations and their empires, linking world to world, soaring across those black incredible spaces, becoming almost as gods themselves? And he had seen it all, image upon image pouring into his astounded brain. At first it had seemed like mere craziness, sure. But then he began to recognize the patterns; yet even so there was too much to comprehend or even to begin to comprehend. It was as if he had picked up an envelope and taken out a letter and the letter contained every word in every book that had ever been published; and all those words had come roaring into his mind at once. That could have driven anyone crazy. But he had lived with these things so long that he had come to make a little sense out of them. He knew which races ruled the star-kingdoms now, and which had ruled in the eons gone by. He knew which were obedient subjects waiting their own time of greatness yet to come. It was all there, in the Book of Suns and the Book of Moons, which he had been allowed to read. He alone was the chosen one through whom the peoples of the universe were permitting themselves to be made known to Earth. Now the news was spreading, though; and soon everyone would know it; and then the moment for which Tom lived would come, when the peoples of Earth went forth into those shining worlds themselves, soaring across the gulfs of space to become citizens of the vast galactic realm.

The first light of dawn came into the sky and the mists started to burn away. Tom felt the phalanx of the galaxies recede and disappear. For a moment, standing there on the porch, he felt a terrible pang of separation and loss. Then the feeling eased and he grew calm again. He went back inside, washed, put on his new jeans, his new shirt. Knelt for a long time beside his bed in prayer, giving thanks for blessings received. And decided to go out, finally, and see if he could get himself some breakfast.

He wasn’t sure which building it was. Everything looked different by daylight. While he was wandering around he ran into the man with the bad leg, the one called Ed, who had tried to escape. Ed appeared to be wandering around too, walking without any real purpose. He didn’t look very good this morning. His face was puffy and his eyes were red and bleary and his mouth was clamped in a tight scowl, and he was moving in a wobbly, blithery way, as though he might be drunk. At this hour of the morning.

They stood facing each other on the path.

“Hey,” Tom said, “you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”

Ed stared at him in silence for a long moment. He didn’t seem drunk close up. Sick, maybe, but not drunk. “Who the hell are you?” he asked finally.

“I’m Tom. I was in the helicopter with you yesterday when they brought us in from outside. Don’t you remember that?”

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “I don’t know any goddamn thing right now. I’m just coming up from pick. You know what that is, don’t you, fella?”

“Pick?”

“You new here?”

“I came in last night with you on the helicopter.”

“You got a lot to learn, then.” Ed shifted his weight, favoring his sore leg. He was leaning on a white plastic crutch. “Pick is when they put electrodes on your head,” he said, “and flash a flickering light in your eyes and send some kind of juice down into your brain. Wipes out your short-term memory. You forget most of what happened to you yesterday. You even forget what you dreamed last night. That’s what they do here.”

Tom blinked. “Why would they do that? It ought to be against the law, doing that to somebody’s brain.”

“They do it to heal you. To cure you when they think your mind is mixed up. That’s how they cure you, by mixing it up even more. You wait. They’ll pick you too, fella. Tom, whatever your name is. Soon as they measure your brain-waves they’ll go to work on you.”

“Me? No,” Tom said, a little nervously. This man was making him very uncomfortable. This man, this Ed, there was something wrong with him inside. Tom had seen that right away, when Ed had first come straggling out of the woods back there on that little highway. His soul was injured; his spirit was all closed in on itself, full of pain and hatred. Like Stidge, that was how he was, a mean and bitter man who thought that everybody was out to get him. Tom smiled and said, “Not me. They won’t do that to me.”

“You wait.”

“Not me,” Tom said again. He laughed. “Poor Tom, nobody wants to hurt Tom. Tom doesn’t do any harm.”

“You really are a nut, aren’t you?”

“Poor Tom. Tom’s a nut, yes. Poor Tom, silly Tom.”

“Christ, where’d they find you?” Ed’s scowl deepened. “You say you came in here with me last night, on the helicopter? From where? What was I doing outside the Center in the first place?”

“You tried to run away,” Tom said. “You and the woman named Allie. They caught you.”

“Ah,” Ed said, nodding. “So that’s what.”

“Brought you back in the helicopter. Just last night. You don’t remember?”

“Not a goddamn thing,” Ed said. “That’s what they do to you here. They take your memory away.”

“No,” Tom said. “I don’t believe that. This place is a good place. They wouldn’t hurt anybody’s mind here.”

“You wait, fella. You’ll find out.”

Tom shrugged. There was no sense arguing with him. He was sick in the head, everything all twisted up in him. You just had to look at him to know it. Tom felt sorry for people like that. Once we make the Crossing, he thought, everyone will be truly healed of pain. In the embrace of the star-folk all sufferers will be given ease at last.

“You know where I can find some breakfast?” Tom asked.

“Up there. Gray building on the hill, you go around to the right side.”

“Much obliged. You going that way?”

Ed made a sour face. “They filled me full of dope last night. The idea of food makes me sick to my stomach.”

“I’ll see you, then,” Tom said. He headed up the hill at a good clip. The morning air was fresh and bracing, though he suspected the day was going to get hot later on. As he neared the complex of buildings midway up the hill the woman, Elszabet, stepped out of one of them and waved to him.

“Tom?”

“Morning, ma’am.”

She walked toward him. A nice-looking woman, he thought. Not sensationally beautiful, the way that Allie woman was, but of course Allie was artificial, they could make them as beautiful as they wanted. And Elszabet was pretty. Tall and slender with very long legs and wonderful warm rich gray eyes. And a very good person, too, kind and gentle. That was obvious right away, how tender and loving she was, and full of life. He hadn’t known many people like that, with the kindness and goodness right out front where you could feel it. Although there was something tight inside her, like a clenched fist. Tom wanted to reach into her and pry that fist open. She’d look even prettier then.

“Going up for breakfast?” she asked.

Tom nodded. “It’s in there, right?”

“That’s right. I’ll walk over with you. Sleep well?”

“Best I’ve had in months. Years. Real sound sleep.”

“I bet it was so sound you didn’t even dream.”

“Oh, I dreamed, all right,” Tom told her. “I always dream.”

She gave him that pleasant smile of hers. “I’ll bet you have interesting dreams, don’t you?”

Tom walked along beside her, not saying anything. She had said something about dreams last night too, he remembered. When she had taken him to his cabin after dinner, just some offhand remark, something about how she was going to go to sleep herself right away because she was tired, she had had a strange dream the night before and it had upset her. He thought then that she was hoping he would ask her about that dream of hers, but he hadn’t felt like it. Now she was talking about dreams again. And both times she had seemed sort of tense when the subject came up, her nostrils quivering a little, color coming into her cheeks. Why were they so interested in dreams here? He recalled that man Ed saying, telling him about the pick thing.You even forget what you dreamed last night. Tom began to feel a little uneasy.

She said after a moment, “When you get a chance, Tom, would you like to come over to my office for a talk? It’s in that building just down here—you ask anyone inside, they’ll tell you where to find me. I’d like to know a bit more about what was happening yesterday with Ed and Alleluia out beyond the forest, okay? And a few other things I’d like to talk about with you.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll stop by.” Why not? These people were feeding him and sheltering him. She was entitled to ask him a few things.

They paused outside the big gray building. She stood close beside him, looking straight into his eyes. She was almost as tall as he was, and she was very close to him. He found himself hoping she would take him in her arms and hold him tight; but all she did was rest her hand on his forearm for an instant, giving him a little squeeze. And he saw her nostrils quiver again, and the two little red dots appear in her cheeks. As though she was a little afraid of him. As though she knew somehow that he could reach in and open that tight fist within her soul. And she was afraid of that, afraid of him.

Well, that makes two of us, he thought. Because I’m a little afraid of you, Miz Elszabet.

She let go of him and walked away, turning to wave. He waved back and entered the mess hall. There were just a few people in it, most of them sitting far apart from one another. Tom took a seat by himself, off to one side. A machine on the table lit up and asked him what he wanted. Coffee and rolls, he decided. It told him which buttons to push. He had learned how to do that last night at dinner. He had expected that a machine would come down the aisle bringing him his dinner, too, but that wasn’t how it worked: a boy came by with a cart. This morning it was a girl. The rolls were so good that he ordered a second breakfast, more of the same and a grapefruit, too. It seemed you could have whatever you wanted here, and as much as you wanted, and not pay. Poor Charley, he thought—getting scared and running away like that. If he hadn’t run away, he might be eating free grapefruit and coffee and rolls this morning too. Tom wondered what had become of them, Charley and Buffalo and Stidge and the rest. Probably in Ukiah by now, or maybe on their way to Oregon, wandering on and on and on in their aimless way. He hoped they stayed out of trouble, wherever they went. Just took it easy, Tom hoped, and not get themselves killed this close to the Time of the Crossing, because all their worries would be over when they went out to the stars. If they lived long enough to get to go.

When he was finished eating Tom sat by himself for a while, just savoring the pleasure of sitting still and not having to jump back in the van and ride off somewhere with the scratchers. He wondered how long they would let him stay here. A week, maybe? That would be nice, staying here a week. And then maybe he’d be able to catch a ride down to San Francisco. He had liked that city. So clean, so pretty. Too bad they’d only stayed there a couple of hours. But he would go back. It was getting to be October, now. Winter coming on in those parts of the country that had real winter. If he had to spend another winter on the Earth, he thought, at least let it be a California winter. He didn’t know when the Crossing would begin—maybe next week, maybe by Christmas, maybe not until spring. You could freeze to death wandering around east of the mountains, but out here on the coast you were pretty safe from the weather.

“Hey, you, Tom!”

He looked up. The man named Ed was standing by the door of the mess hall. He had another man with him, a short pudgy curly-haired one wearing a Catholic priest’s outfit. They seemed to be looking for company. Tom beckoned them over.

“I thought the idea of food made you sick right now,” Tom said.

“Well, I got to feeling a little better after a time. The fresh air. Tom, this is Father Christie. Father, Tom.”

“You the chaplain here?” Tom asked.

The priest smiled. He seemed like a sad little man. “Chaplain? Oh, no, no, I’m just a patient, same as you.”

Tom shook his head. “I’m not a patient.”

“You aren’t? But you can’t be staff, surely.”

“Just a visitor,” Tom said. “Just passing through. But very pleased to make your acquaintance, Father. I’ve done some preaching myself, up Idaho way, Washington State. Different sort of thing from yours, of course. But I was pretty good. The congregation, they didn’t much mind how crazy I got. They thought the crazier the better, the crazier the holier.”

“We aren’t supposed to use the word crazy here,” said Father Christie.

“Perfectly good word,” Tom said. “What’s wrong with saying crazy? What’s wrong with being crazy?”

“You telling us you’re crazy?” Ed asked.

“You know it. I see visions. Isn’t that crazy? Other worlds swimming before my eyes. Always have, since I was a kid, visions pouring in like—like crazy.”

Ed and Father Christie exchanged glances. Ed said, “Other worlds? Like space dreams?”

“Space dreams, yes. But not just when I’m asleep.”

“Father Christie here has space dreams too. Everyone in this whole fucking place has them. Excuse me, Father. Everyone has them but me, that is. I don’t get them. But I know all the dreams. The green world, the nine suns, the red star and the blue one—”

“Wait a second,” said Father Christie mildly. “You say there are several kinds of space dreams?”

“Seven of them,” Ed said. “You don’t know that, because you get picked every morning, you don’t remember anything about your dreams. But there are seven. I have ways of keeping little records. You had one this morning, Father, the green world again. But they picked it. The bastards. Excuse me again, Father.”

Tom listened in wonder.

The priest shook his head and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Say, what about breakfast?”

“Got a better idea,” Ed said. He reached into his breast pocket and drew forth some little squeeze-flasks. “Too early in the day, maybe? A quick drink? I got Canadian here, bourbon, Scotch. Here, here’s one special for you, Father: a flask of Irish. Tom? You a drinking man?”

Father Christie said morosely, “I can’t use this, Ed. You know that.”

“You can’t?”

“I guess you forgot, on account of being picked. But I’m an alcoholic. I’ve got a conscience chip in my gullet. Any booze hits my throat, the chip’s going to make me throw up. You don’t remember that, huh? Here, maybe your friend Tom wants it.”

“Conscience chip,” Ed muttered. “Right, I forgot. All these scientific things they stitch into us. Conscience chips to keep you from drinking. Homing-vector implants in case we run away. The bastards, they stick a sliver of this and a sliver of that in us and they operate us like machines. You be a smart guy, Tom, you get yourself out of here fast, you hear?”

“They’ve been nice to me so far.”

“You be a smart guy anyway. You want one of these?”

“Thanks,” Tom said. “No.”

“Well, I do. Down the hatch!” Ed pressed the squeeze-tab and put the flask to his mouth. “Ah, that’s what I needed!” He looked a little more cheerful. “So you get visions of other worlds too, huh? God, I’d like to see one of those! Just one. Just to find out what all the fuss is about.”

“You never have?”

“Not once,” Ed said. His red-rimmed eyes seemed to blaze suddenly with rage and anguish. “Not even once. You know how much I envy all of you, with your green worlds and your blue ones and your nine suns and all the rest of it? Why don’t I see too? Some goddamn tremendous thing is going on all around me, some weird colossal thing that nobody can understand but that’s plainly of gigantic tremendous importance, and I’m shut clean out of it. And that stinks. You know? It stinks .”

So that’s it, Tom thought.

Now he understood where the pain lay inside this man, and what he might be able to do about it, maybe. He wanted to do something about it.

Tom said, “Give me one of those drinks.”

“Which one you want?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Bourbon,” Ed said. “Here, have the bourbon.”

Tom took the squeeze-flask from him, studied it a moment, pressed the tab. The top popped open and he put it to his lips and let the dark liquor roll down his throat. It hit all at once, hard and hot and good. It was a long time since Tom had had a drink, and he sat there relishing it, feeling it go to work in the crevices of his soul. Good, he thought. I can handle this. This is going to work out just fine.

He turned to Ed. “You got to stop worrying about those space dreams, okay?”

“Stop worrying, the man says. I’m not worrying. I’m just a little pissed off. Am I a freak or something? Why don’t I see what the others all see?”

“Easy up,” Tom said. He took a deep breath and put his hand over Ed’s hand and leaned close and said, “You will see. I promise you that. You’ll have the dreams too, Ed, just like everybody else. I know you will. I’m going to show you how, all right? All right?”

5

“Monday, the eighth of October, 2103,” Jaspin said. He was sitting in the back seat of his car, speaking into the golden gridwork of a hand-held mnemone capsule. “We are well up into Northern California now, camped in open country about fifty miles east of San Francisco Bay. The march is about to take on a new aspect, because Senhor Papamacer has decided to swing due west here and go through Oakland before we resume our northward journey. We have avoided passing through cities up till now, ever since setting out from San Diego. I think the Senhor would actually like to cross the bay and enter San Francisco, which he says is a profound focus of galactic forces. But even he sees that that’s logistically unwise, maybe even impossible, because San Francisco is so small and is accessible only by bridge, except from the south. Trying to bring a mob this size into San Francisco would cause major disruptions both for the city and for us. There would be no place to camp, and the main routes out might become blocked, possibly causing a breakup of the entire march. So we will go no further than Oakland, which is readily accessible by land and has adequate camping space in the hills just east of the city. While we are there, of course, thousands of its citizens will certainly join the march, and perhaps an even larger number will come over from San Francisco to enroll. It’s just as well that there are no more major population centers along the coast between here and Mendocino, because we’re quickly reaching the point where our numbers are becoming unmanageably unwieldy. This is already the greatest mass migration since the end of the Dust War, certainly, and since Senhor Papamacer intends to get at least as far north as Portland before the onset of winter, and maybe even to Seattle, the possibility exists that serious disorders will—”

“Barry?”

Jaspin looked up, annoyed at the interruption. Jill stood by the window, thumping on the roof of the car to get his attention.

“What is it?” It was two or three days now since he had had a chance to bring his journal up to date, and there was plenty of important material he wanted to enter. Whatever she wanted, he thought, couldn’t it have waited another half an hour?

“Someone to see you.”

“Tell him five minutes.”

“Her,” Jill said.

“What?”

“A woman. Red frizzy hair, looks sort of trampy in a high-class way. Says she’s from San Francisco.”

“I’m trying to dictate my notes,” Jaspin said. “I don’t know any redheads from San Francisco. What does she want with me?”

“Nothing. She wants an audience with the Senhor. Got as far as Bacalhau, Bacalhau says she should talk to you. I think you’re now the high muckamuck in charge of excitable Anglo broads around here.”

“Christ,” Jaspin said. “Okay, five minutes, tell her. Just let me finish this. Where is she now?”

“At the Maguali-ga altar,” Jill said.

“Five minutes,” he said again.

But his concentration was broken. In his journal entry he had wanted to discuss the way the racial makeup of the tumbondé procession was changing as the march went along—the original San Diego County group of followers of Senhor Papamacer, heavily South American and African in ethnic origin, having been diluted now by hordes of Chicanos from the Salinas Valley farming communities out back of Monterey; and now up here in the north there had been an Anglo influx too, rural whites, causing some alterations in the general tone of the whole event. The newcomers had no real idea of the underlying Dionysiac flavor of tumbondé, the pagan frenzy and fervor; all they seemed to hear was the promise of wealth and immortal life when Chungirá-He-Will-Come finally came waltzing through that gateway at the North Pole, and they wanted to be in on that number, oh, yes, Lord. Already that was creating disorder in the march, and it was going to get worse, especially if Senhor Papamacer continued to reign in absentia, as he had been doing for days, from the seclusion of the lead bus. But getting his observations on all these matters down on the mnemone capsule would have to be postponed now. Jaspin realized he should have gone off by himself for an hour or two to do his dictation, but too late for that now. He turned off the capsule and got out of his car.

It was a hot muggy afternoon. Heat had plagued them all the way up the center of the state, and there was still no sign of the rainy season. They said that up here it sometimes began raining in October, but apparently not this October. The low rounded hills of this unspectacular countryside were tawny with the dry summer grass. Everything here was shriveled and parched and golden-brown while it waited for winter.

From hill to hill, all across the saddle of this valley, all you could see was tumbondé: pilgrims everywhere, a surging sea of them. In the center of the whole circus were the buses in which the Senhor, the Senhora, the Inner Host, and the holy images were traveling. Nearby was the big patch of consecrated ground with the altars and the blood-hut and the Well of Sacrifice and everything all set up, just as though this were the original communion hill back of San Diego. Wherever they went, they set up all that stuff. And then beyond the central holy zone there was a horde of patchwork tents, thousands upon thousands of pilgrims, innumerable smoky campfires, children yelling, cats and dogs running around, every imaginable sort of ramshackle vehicle parked in random chaotic clusters. Jaspin had never seen so many people together in one place. And the numbers grew from day to day. How big would the army of tumbondé be, he wondered, a month from now? Two months from now? He wondered also, sometimes, what was going to happen when they reached the Canadian border—the Republic of British Columbia’s border, actually. And what was going to happen if they kept on going north and north and north for month after month, and winter closed in on them, and Chungirá-He-Will-Come did not make an appearance? There will be no more winter, Senhor Papamacer had promised, once Maguali-ga opens the gateway. But Senhor Papamacer had spent all his life in Rio, in Tijuana, in San Diego. What the hell did he know about winter, anyway?

Screw it, Jaspin thought. The gods would provide. And if not, not. Mine not to reason why. I lived by reason all those years and what good was it ever to me? Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come. Yes. Yes.

The woman was easy to find. She was standing by the Maguali-ga altar, just as Jill had said: staring at the nine globes of colored glass as if she expected the bulgy-eyed god to materialize before her eyes at any second. She was shorter than Jaspin was expecting—somehow he had thought she would be tall, he didn’t know why—and not quite as flashy, either. But she was very attractive. Jill had said she was trampy in a high-class way. Jaspin knew tramps and he knew high class, and this one wasn’t really either. She looked shrewd, she looked energetic, she looked like she’d been around some. An enterprising woman, he figured.

“You wanted to see me?” he asked. “I’m Barry Jaspin. The Senhor’s liaison aide.”

“Lacy Meyers,” she said. “I’ve just come over from San Francisco. I need to see Senhor Papamacer.”

“Need?”

“Want,” she said. “Want very much.”

“That’s going to be very difficult,” Jaspin told her. He realized that somehow he was standing closer to her than was really necessary, but he didn’t move back. Quite an attractive woman, in fact. About thirty, maybe a little more, the red hair close to her head in a caplike coif of tight ringlets, her eyes a deep lustrous green. Delicate tapering nose, fine cheekbones, the mouth maybe a little coarse. “Is this for a media interview?” he asked.

“No, an audience. I want to be received into his presence.” She was wound up tight: one poke and she’d explode. “He may be the most important human being who has ever lived, do you know? Certainly he is to me. I just want to kneel before him and tell him what he means to me.”

“So do all these people you see here, Ms. Meyers. You understand that the Senhor’s burdens are very great, and that although he would make himself available to all his people if that were possible, it isn’t—”

The green eyes flashed. “Just for a minute! Half a minute!”

He wanted to help her. It was completely impossible, he knew. But even so, he found himself wondering whether he might be able to find a way. Because you find her attractive, is that it? If she were plain, or old, or a man, would you even consider it?

He said, “Why is it so urgent?”

“Because he’s opened my eyes. Because I’ve gone through my whole life not believing in any goddamned thing except how to make life softer for Lacy Meyers, and all of a sudden he’s made me see that there’s something really holy in this universe, that there are true gods who guide our destinies, that it isn’t all just a dumb joke, that—that—I don’t really need to tell you, do I, what a religious conversion is like? You must have been through it too, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Jaspin nodded. “I think we actually have a lot in common.”

“I know we do. I saw it right away.”

“And you’ve been following the path of tumbondé even up here in the Bay Area? I didn’t think it had—”

“I didn’t know anything about tumbondé until a couple of weeks ago, when you people started getting up into this part of the state. But I’ve known about the gods all summer. I had a vision in July, a dream, a red sun and a blue one, and a block of white stone, and a creature with golden horns reaching out toward me—”

“Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” Jaspin said.

“Yes. Only I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know what the hell it was. But the dream kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back, and each time I saw it more clearly, the creature moved around and seemed to say things to me, and sometimes there were others like him in the dream, and then there were other dreams—I saw the nine suns of Maguali-ga, I saw the blue light of—what’s the name, Rei Ceupassear?—I saw all sorts of things. I tell you, I thought I was going nuts. That the whole world was going nuts, because I know everybody else was having these visions too. But I didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody did. Until I read about Senhor Papamacer. And I saw the pictures he had—the pictures of the gods—”

“The computer-generated ones, the holographic repros.”

“Yes. And then it all fell into place for me. The truth of it, that the gods were coming to Earth, that they were going to bring the jubilee, that the millennium was coming. And I saw that Senhor Papamacer must truly be their prophet. And I knew that I was going to come over here and join the pilgrimage to the Seventh Place and be part of what was going to come. But I want to thank the Senhor personally. I want to go down on my knees to him. I’ve been looking for some sort of god all my life, you know? And absolutely sure I could never find one. And now—now—”

Jaspin saw Jill coming toward them. Worried, maybe, that he might be getting something on with this woman? Flattering that she even gave a damn, she who came in every night reeking of Bacalhau’s sweet greasy hair-oils, with Bacalhau’s sweat mingling with her own. Screwing her way right through the Inner Host and back again, and he could hardly remember the last time she’d been willing to make love with him, his wife Jill. Jealous, now? Jill? Not very likely.

What the hell, even if she was, Jill had no right to complain. He’d been damned miserable all month long on Jill’s account. If he happened to find some woman attractive now, and she happened to feel the same way about him—

Lacy was saying, “The ironic thing, all this space stuff, is that a couple years ago I was actually involved in a fraud, a scam that involved promising to send people off to other stars. It was like we were selling them real estate that didn’t exist, the old underwater development bit: give us your money, we’ll put you on the express to Betelgeuse Five. A man named Ed Ferguson, a real shifty operator, he was running it, and I was working the marks for him. Well, they caught him, they were going to send him in for Rehab Two, but he had a good lawyer—”

Jill walked up next to Jaspin. “He being of any help to you?” she said to Lacy.

“I was just telling Mr. Jaspin, the irony of it, that I used to work with a man who was running a crooked thing involving journeys to other stars. Before any of these visions from the stars began reaching Earth. He would have gone to jail, but he got himself sent to one of those mindpick places instead, up near Mendocino, where they’re supposed to be turning him into a decent human being. Some chance.”

“My sister April’s in the same place,” Jill said. “Nepenthe, it’s called. Near Mendocino.”

“Your sister?” Jaspin said. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

Lacy laughed. “It’s a really small world, isn’t it? I bet your sister and Ed are having a terrific wild affair up there right this minute. Ed always had an eye for the women.”

“He won’t have an eye for April,” said Jill. “She’s fat as a pig. Always has been. And very weird in the head, too. I’m sure your friend Ed can do a lot better than April.” To Jaspin she said, “When you’re finished here, Barry, go over to the Host bus, huh? They’re setting up for the Seven Galaxies rite tonight and Lagosta wants you to help out plugging in the polyphase generator.”

“Okay,” Jaspin said. “Five minutes.”

“Nice meeting you, Ms.—uh—” Jill said, and drifted away.

“Not very friendly, is she?” Lacy said.

“Downright rude and nasty,” said Jaspin. “Getting religion has made her go sour somehow. She’s my wife.”

“Your wife?”

“So to speak. More or less. One day the Senhor decided we ought to be married. Spur of the moment, married us on the spot, month or so ago. It’s for the rituals, the initiations, some of it: you have to be part of a couple. It isn’t what you’d call a happy marriage.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

Jaspin shrugged. “It won’t matter, once the gate is open, will it? But until then—until then—”

“It can be rough, yeah.”

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got to go help set up for tonight. But I want to tell you, I’ll try to arrange an audience with the Senhor for you. Won’t be easy, because he’s been pretty scarce the last few weeks. But maybe I can get you in. That isn’t just bull. If I can do it I will. Because I know what it feels like, being a standard shabby twenty-second-century human being just faking your way through life and suddenly being lifted up and shown that there’s something worth living for besides your own crappy comfort. Like I say, we have a lot in common. I’ll try to get you what you’ve asked me for.”

“I appreciate that,” she said.

She offered him her hand. He took it and held it perhaps a moment too long. He debated pulling her toward him, just on an impulse, and kissing her. He didn’t do that. But there was no mistaking the warmth in her eyes and the gratitude. And the possibilities. Especially the possibilities.