Tom O'Bedlam Part 17

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 encompa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce dreams too."

"s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ceships or anything. It would take too long, getting from world to world by s.p.a.ceships, 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 ident.i.ty. 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 -"

"s.h.i.t, 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 b.i.t.c.h," 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 wordsNepenthe 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 h.e.l.l 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? n.o.body'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.

FORa 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. n.o.body 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 s.e.xes, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 h.o.a.rded 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sured in Paolucci's presence. He was a comfortable sort of man, round-faced and st.u.r.dy, 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 mult.i.tudes 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 tumbonde?" 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."

"Tumbonde," 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 tumbonde that are relevant to us, Dr. Lewis.

One is that there seems to be a remarkable correlation between the s.p.a.ce G.o.ds 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 tumbonde people have been receiving the s.p.a.ce dreams too, and have used them as the basis for their - ah, theology. In particular their G.o.d Maguali-ga, who is said to be the opener of the gate who will make possible the breakthrough of the s.p.a.ce deities on the Earth, seems identical with the ma.s.sive extraterrestrial being who is invariably seen in the so-called Nine Suns dream. And their supreme redemptive figure, the high G.o.d known as Chungira-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 tumbonde manifestations, which have been widely publicized in San Diego County and elsewhere in Southern California, may actually be encouraging a wider locus for the s.p.a.ce dreams through ma.s.s suggestion: that is, people maythink 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 tumbonde has not yet been publicized. But that brings me to my second point, which is a rather urgent one. A significant aspect of tumbonde theology is the revelation that the point of entry for Chungira-He-Will-Come is the North Pole, identified in tumbonde terminology as the Seventh Place. Senhor Papamacer has vowed to lead his people toward the Seventh Place in time for the advent of Chungira-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 tumbonde 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. Chungira-He-Will-Come. She remembered now: Tomas 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, Chungira-He-Will-Come. Menendez had friends in the Latino community in San Diego who sent things to him here. So tumbonde 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 tumbonde marchers will pa.s.s 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.