The two Heechee were having none of either. They chirped and hissed worriedly to each other, and then to Ella, who frowned thoughtfully and then went away for a moment, returning with a huge bag of old rags. That seemed to satisfy the Heechee, sort of, but the space she offered them to sleep in did not. They twittered to each other again, gazing at the walls and roof of the old building, then politely excused themselves. They carried their rags out of doors and patted them into a pair of heaps in the alley, away from the building.
When Judy made an inquiring noise, Cara le Brun was quick with an explanation. “I did a show on it once. That’s how they sleep, dug into a mass of stuff.”
“Yeah, sure,” Judy said, “but why are they out in the alley?” That le Brun couldn’t explain. Nor did she really want to, because her attention was abruptly taken up with the discovery of the lacks in their accommodations. She reacted with displeasure when she found out that they had no running water, then with horror when she realized what that implied. The only available “toilet” was a slit trench just off the driveway, with canvas walls for “privacy.” And then, when she discovered what the two girls were offering for a meal, her reaction became simple fury. “That stuff is just goddam CHON-food!” she snapped. “They’re giving that crap away downtown! How’ve you got the nerve to charge us for it?”
Ella gave her a cold shrug. “Rather stand in line? Eat or don’t eat. I don’t care.”
While they were talking, the Heechee pair had put the finishing touches on their bedding and were now placidly unwrapping round patties of something that smelled of raspberries and roasted garlic. That was one provocation too many for Orbis McClune. God might have chosen to punish him by putting him in the company of these foul creatures—unfairly, of course, but McClune believed that being unfair from time to time was one of God’s perquisites. However, He surely didn’t demand that His servant McClune eat with them. Orbis took an arbitrary handful of the rations and retired with them to the edge of his cot, as far from the Heechee as possible.
The wrappings of the food packets came in a rainbow of color. Although they were textured like silk, they split wide as he ran a thumbnail over them. McClune ate them in alternating bites, unconcerned that one packet was doughy and tediously bland, while another crackled like peanut brittle in his teeth and tasted like some sort of meat broth. After a brief and silent grace he chewed stolidly away. Food had never been important for Orbis McClune. Eating was just something you had to do to keep life going, no more pleasurable than moving your bowels, and worth no more thought.
When he finished eating he visited the slit trench. He paused on the way back, gazing at the great starfield overhead. Then he went back indoors. Cara le Brun was having a desultory conversation with the two girls, apparently mostly to exchange complaints, but as Orbis McClune had no wish to talk to any of them he stretched out on his cot and closed his eyes.
He was no more than halfway through his bedtime prayer when a shuddery, dizzying feeling let him know that something unwelcome was going on. The room seemed to be rocking. He felt an urgent need to sit up, and managed to do it on the second or third try.
It wasn’t just him. Noises from across the room let him know that the women shared the experience. When they became articulate, the loudest voice was Cara le Brun’s: “Jesus! What was that, an earthquake?” And when Ella confirmed her guess, “Well, I never signed up for any goddam earthquakes. Cripes! Next thing, the goddam wave’ll be coming back, only this time it’ll take the whole damn state with it!”
That was as far as McClune cared to listen. It had been nothing but an act of God, and he had never feared those. He closed his eyes. The last thing he heard was Ella’s complaining voice: “Give it a rest, will you, lady? It’s just like leftover shocks after the tidal wave. Happens all the time, for God’s sake. Get used to it.”
IV
The next morning Orbis McClune was up with the sun and ready to begin the work that had brought him to this place. Even so, the Heechee were up before him and already gone—to do what, McClune had no idea. He left Cara le Brun squabbling with the two young girls about the lack of a shower and their refusal to drive the old wreck downtown in broad daylight, so that she had to walk. It wasn’t really far. In less than twenty minutes McClune was where the people who were his targets were stirring.
Barstow’s downtown was like every other in the world, with all the same familiar logos over the same storefronts—the same yogurt and ice-cream shops, fast-food restaurants, travel agents, p-vid repairers and tax preparers. He passed a workout gym and a VR total-immersion entertainment center, a Tae Kwan Do studio and half a dozen hair stylists and dental cosmeticians—clearly, the people of Barstow were as interested as those of any other community in looking as good as modern technology could make them. McClune not only passed them all by, he hardly noticed they were there. What he was looking for was a corner with a lot of people—but that described every corner in Barstow—and a convenient bench, porch or picnic table he could stand on to address the throng.
Soon enough the perfect spot appeared. It was a traffic circle with a little park in the middle. It held a couple of flowering bushes and, in the center, a tall statue of someone wearing a hood and a robe. Like everywhere else in Barstow, the park was already crowded with aimlessly moving refugees, and it was rich with stone benches. They were, of course, already all occupied, but that was not a problem for Orbis McClune. All it took was an, “Excuse me, brother, I’m doing God’s work,” with that great, loving smile, and in a moment the elderly men sharing the bench had made way for him. As he climbed up he saw that there was a name carved into the base of the statue—Fra Junipero Serra, whoever he was—and he took that as a good omen. That person would have been a papist, of course, but nevertheless a man who had dedicated his life to God—even if it was the wrong God—and thus a colleague. Pleased, McClune turned, raising his arms in benediction to address the bystanders…
Then he saw what was across the street, on the far side of the intersection. It was a storefront with a bright marquee that said Here After.
That omen was not good.
If there was one thing McClune loathed more than the Heechee themselves it was the Here After chain of machine-storage establishments, where the dying, or the merely despondent, could avail themselves of that accursed, Heechee-spawned substitute for actual death. It wasn’t simply the blasphemy involved, though blasphemous it certainly was. Orbis McClune had more personally powerful feelings at stake.
But he let them distract him only for a moment. McClune had years of experience at suppressing his personal feelings for his duty. He raised his arms. “Brothers!” he called. One or two passersby paused incuriously to look. Then, more strongly, “Brothers! Sisters!” And the spirit within began to move him. That sweet, empty, enormous smile bathed everyone nearby in its meaningless love as he thundered, “Listen to me, for I bring you salvation and eternal life in the bosom of the Lord!”
Some things are universal. For example, the victims of a great natural disaster—any disaster, any time in the history of the world—share a fixed cocktail of losses. Possessions are irreparably gone: houses, cars, furnishings, the plants that once hung from the ceiling of the family room that doesn’t exist anymore, the lamp that was an ancient wedding gift, the thirty-year-old Teddy bear that had once belonged to a now forty-year-old son. Friendships are ruptured as the friends and neighbors are driven apart. Many certain and familiar expectations disappear, with nothing to replace them but worries about what the new future holds. These are universals. It was how it was for the people of Martinique, and the Johnstown flood, and burned-out Dresden and bombed-out Hiroshima, and those things never change.
But there were very large changes of another kind here. Not one single person in Barstow went hungry in the wake of the tsunami. Nor, of course, did almost anyone else in the world; the limitless riches that poured out of the Food Factories could feed any multitudes. Not one person had lost a penny
of savings—or of debts, either, for the machine minds that managed the world’s banks and credit institutions and tax authorities had instantly, electronically, fled to safer stores. Not one had lost his medical records and list of drug regimes, nor did anyone lack the facilities to get treatment—doctors and mobile treatment centers had been about the first things to be flown in—and many of the survivors still had their own personal machine minds to keep them provided with information. Well, the ones that were well enough off to own them in the first place did, anyway.
But the one thing almost all of them lacked was something to do with their time. That was just fine for Orbis McClune.
So for three hours, without respite in the hot morning sunshine, McClune pleaded, exhorted, warned, threatened, condemned. He put on one of the greatest performances of his life. Sadly, the refugees weren’t responding. Most listened apathetically for a while and then moved on. Sometimes some of them tittered. Occasionally a few heckled. But mostly they just moved on.
That never left McClune without a crowd around his bench, however. There was a constant replenishment of aimless strollers, though the next batch was no more interested than the last. Sometimes from his perch McClune could catch sight of Cara le Brun moving about in the crowd, taking pictures of McClune himself as he preached, or trying to get a useful interview from people in the audience. She wasn’t the only newsperson doing the same thing, either. There had to be dozens of them, sometimes with palm cameras going, occasionally with elaborate multilens setups. He thought this must be the most thoroughly documented catastrophe in the history of the human race.
He even caught an occasional glimpse of the two Heechee doing whatever it was they were doing. It appeared to be no more than simple sightseeing, but with Heechee how could you tell? They didn’t seem to be talking to many people, though many gaped at them. Most of the crowd made a space around them. Even when McClune pointed dramatically toward the lingering Heechee and thundered, “Behold the embodiment of evil! Behold the vile tempters who brought death and hellfire down upon your dearest ones!”—even then the Heechee remained impassive. While the human crowds only muttered to each other. And moved on.
It was a real challenge. Here was the biggest audience McClune had ever dreamed of having, and if he had saved one single soul of them, there was no sign of it on their faces.
Perhaps, McClune thought, the problem was in the makeup of the throng. This wasn’t only the largest group he had ever faced, it was the youngest and the healthiest. There weren’t any tottering oldsters, no cripples, none that showed any sign of wasting disease. In this they were completely unlike McClune’s lost Rantoul congregation, where all the younger and healthier members had long since fled to less dismal churches, leaving only those for whom Judgment Day could arrive at any time.
That didn’t matter to McClune. He graded the successes and failures of his life not according to how many souls he actually saved, only on how indefatigably he worked at trying to save them. But even he had now and then to bow to more basic needs. When thirst and the need to pee mandated a break, he took it.
In refugee-mobbed Barstow at this time these needs were not easily satisfied. It wasn’t until he spotted Cara le Brun standing irritably in a line before the Tae Kwan Do store that he found the solution. There were toilets inside, she told him, and showers, and of course drinking water, all available for a price, and if he chose to wait with her she would pay his way in. So he joined her in the line. She looked him up and down. “Saving plenty of souls, Reverend?” she asked, but the tone showed that it wasn’t a serious question, only a sort of social noise. He ignored it. But her need for conversation to take her mind off the indignity of standing in a line was not slaked. “What did you think of our earthquake last night?” she asked. “You know what caused it, don’t you?”
He shrugged. Science had never been his favorite subject. “Something about faults, I guess?”
“Not this time,” she said, looking superior and sounding that way, too. “It was that damn tsunami. My machine mind explained the whole thing to me. She said all that weight of water squeezed all the, you know, cracks and things that were there all the time in California, and now they’re kind of relieving the strain.”
“Huh,” he said, his thoughts more concentrated on the prospect of a latrine.
“So we’re likely to have more of the damn things,” she said, somberly gleeful at the opportunity to share her bad news with someone else. “And that’s not all. Did you know they’re running out of food?”
Even after McClune had relieved himself at the Tae Kwan Do’s urinals and slaked his thirst at the taps in their men’s room, he was still puzzling over that.
Running out of food! But that was preposterous. People didn’t “run out” of food anymore. There was always plenty of food; that was a given. Sure, there had been times when hungering people had even mined coal to grow on it bacteria that could be pressed into horrid little edible lumps that, however textured and flavored, always tasted like used motor oil.
But that was then. That was before the Heechee Food Factories were discovered, orbiting in space in the Oort cloud of comets to suck from them their elemental carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen—what they called CHON—and make them into almost any kind of food you could imagine. And after that it was only a step to redesign the Food Factories for Earthly use, floating in ocean waters and pulling the elements they needed from the sea. Why, there were hundreds of the things, churning out rations day in and day out, everywhere! McClune had seen pictures of them, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Red Sea, off the coasts of Morocco and China, wherever there was enough organic matter to give them the carbon and nitrogen they needed to go with the hydrogen and oxygen from the water itself. Of course he had hated what he saw—more Heechee deviltry!—but they certainly had kept Earth’s dozen billion people alive. One of his parishioners had actually worked on one of the things until he retired to Rantoul. His job had been mixing the raw CHON with trace elements enough to provide the consumer with all the vitamins and minerals he needed, in a giant floating factory that was moored off the coast of Baja California, and fed most of the Southwest…
Then enlightenment struck. Baja! Of course! The same tsunami that had planed most Pacific shorelines bare would certainly have demolished the Baja Food Factory—and probably the ones on the Oregon coast and the Aleutians and the shores of Central America, and wherever else in those destroyed parts of the world where a Food Factory could have been put. And so, yes, it was possible that, for the first time in a generation, food might indeed be running out.
V
When McClune called it a day, he was hungry, tired and, he suspected, probably seriously sunburned as well. He was also as close to being happy as he usually allowed himself to get.
Then, to make his day even better, there was good news waiting for him at home. As he pushed past the creaky old door, he saw Cara le Brun and the two girls gorging themselves from a heap of CHON-food packets. Whatever else might happen, his mission was not endangered by the threat of starving. “Run out?” Ella said scornfully. “Course they’re gonna run out. We knew that was coming, so we stocked up days ago.”
Le Brun had her news too. “I was hunting for interviews at the Here After and I found out something. It’s where the Heechee are hanging out. You know that offer they’re making?”
Ella and Judy nodded, but McClune looked blank. “What offer?”
“You didn’t know? Oh, hell,” she said, remembering, “you don’t have a machine mind, do you? It’s the immigration thing. Like for people who don’t have anywhere to go?” And when he looked even blanker, “To the Core, see? They’re offering to take anybody who wants it to the Core. Only thing is, it’s only for people who’ve been machine-stored, so most likely they’ll have been dead first.”
Then the change in McClune’s expression—puzzlement to shock to outright anger—registered with her at last. “Hey,” she said, her grin placatory, “don’t look
like that. The Here After deal’s kind of weird, sure, but when you look at the alternatives it’s not so bad, is it?”
And then she frowned, puzzled, as McClune’s expression softened, the rage draining away, the vast, heart-warming, meaningless smile replacing it. “Bad?” he said, considering. “Why, no, Ms. le Brun, it isn’t just bad. It is totally, blasphemously, hopelessly evil in all its parts, and I have prayed a thousand times, on my knees, that those responsible for it should boil in a lake of fire for all eternity in the nethermost reaches of Hell.”
The smile broadened still more as he turned and walked away. He knew the value of making a good exit, so he did not stop there but kept on making it, right out the creaky old door.
Outside the twilight was warm and the breeze gentle. He glanced at the Heechees’ mound of rags, thought briefly of kicking them to the four winds, decided against it as an interior rumble suggested a more immediately important project. He headed toward the latrine.
A good bowel movement was after all a blessing. He took his time about it. By the time he was returning to the others a couple of stars had begun to peep out overhead. Most of the world thought those first glimmers of evening starlight rather pretty, if they thought of them at all. To Orbis McClune they carried a load of guilt. It was they that had lured the world to spaceflight, and thus to the Heechee and all their wickedness.
But they were far away, and on this world McClune was almost at peace as he pushed the door aside and went in. As much peace as the tormented soul of Orbis McClune ever had, at least.
It didn’t last. Cara le Brun was sitting in a corner of the room, whispering to her machine mind but with her eyes on him and her expression absorbed. She stopped talking, got up and walked toward him, looking unexpectedly apologetic. At once McClune’s defenses went up. He was wary of surprises, which in his experience seldom portended anything good.