The Visitor

  And time has gone by, all the time there is, and I’ve gone on pretending to ignore what happened between Jerry and me. The last week or so the family has slept in the shelter. I want the kids used to the shelter before the thing happens, and I made it happen by removing all the beds from the house, stacking them in the garage “to have the bedrooms painted.” The contractor has the rooms full of drop cloths and buckets. It’s due to hit today, Saturday, but the published date is several weeks away.

  When I left the kids this morning, I knew I wouldn’t be back. I tried to make the morning hugs and kisses just as quick and perfunctory as usual. Jerry will be at home with the kids for the day, and I didn’t tell him I wouldn’t be returning.

  “See you later,” I said, sort of over my shoulder. “There’s a meeting late afternoon. If I’m late, don’t wait for me.”

  “Pizza for supper,” he said, with his lofty smile.

  “There’ll be a meteor shower tonight,” I warned him. “If you and the kids go to bed before I get home, be sure to shut the outside door.”

  “It won’t be necessary,” he said, still smiling.

  “It would make me feel better,” I begged, giving him a pitiful look and a chance to be magnanimous. If he promised, he’d do it. That was part of his code. “Please. Jerry?”

  The superior smile. “Anything to make you feel better.”

  “Promise?”

  The smile faded, but he conceded. “I promise.”

  I already had a small suitcase in the trunk of my car: pictures of the children, of my folks. I’m here, where Nell is supposed to be, but where Mommy had never planned on being…

  Here I’m switching from writing to recording. There won’t be time to write things, or any quiet place to do it…

  “Here’s your ID card. Muster area is down front.”

  That was my fellow sleeper, Hal, checking me off the list and handing me a tag. The place isn’t strange to me. We’ve all been here several times, for briefings, and they collected ova from the sleepers here. They fertilized the ova with sperm from a number of different donors—the only one I know is my old friend Alan Block, because he told me—and then blastulas were split to provide numerous embryos. Each one of us female donors could be Eve all over again. The embryology is a lot further advanced than the artificial wombs are. There’ve been some successes, not a lot, but what we have at Omega site is state of the art.

  The sleepers are trickling in. I don’t know many of them, but I see one woman I’d just as soon not see, because I upset her needlessly one of the last times I was here. Since there are only two hundred of us, selected from all over, none of us know many of the others, so I was surprised to recognize a woman in the clinic as Janitzia Forza, a woman I knew in college. She’s a chemist, and her name tag said “Janet Gerber.” She asked what I was doing there, and I told her they were storing my gametes, figuring she knew all about it. Turns out she didn’t know, and she was furious, accusing me of pulling strings to become a donor. She was so irrational that I asked around. Her husband is infertile and religious. He won’t permit AI, and she’s bitter against anyone who has children.

  I’m in the largest room at Omega site, and it holds two hundred “coffins,” though no one calls them that out loud. The power comes from several little nuclear plants buried in solid rock, way off thataway. Omega site is shaped like a theater, the coffins arranged in rows up the sloping floor, the shape of the place dictated by the strata it’s buried in. Up top, where the lobby would be, are the current stores, the living quarters, big enough for four to eight of us at a time, and the infirmary—several of the sleepers are medical doctors, and there’s a diagnostic and treatment computer.

  Down where the stage would be is the control console, the monitors, and a door that goes through to the warehouses, the biology labs and cold storage, all the habitat machinery, and the enormous fuel tanks that run generators for ordinary things like lights and computers. Omega site wasn’t as far along as some of the others, and the available power units were smaller than in some of the other sites, so the fuel tanks are supplementary, to be used up first, just in case. The lighting was engineered to be as close to sunshine as possible—a lot of it over the little underground garden in the bio lab where we can plant seed crops, harvest them, see that some are planted outside—conditions permitting—and keep some to start over with. Several crops a year will keep many different kinds of food and medicine plants viable, just in case.

  There’s Alan. Father of some of my unborn children in the cold storage. Alan Block, my colleague and fellow snoozer, evidently just arrived.

  “Nell? When are you due for waking?”

  “I don’t know. Should I know?”

  “It’s on the back of your ID card. Hal gave it to you when you checked in.”

  “I didn’t think to look…where is the thing, oh, here. Oh, God, Alan! Twenty-one twenty-six through twenty-one twenty-nine.”

  I felt dizzy, and I guess he saw it, because he took the card, and he’s over talking to Hal, at the door, trying to see if it can be changed, I guess. Twenty-one twenty-six means I’m in the last waking team. Inside I’m screaming. Now, even if I make it to my first waking, my children will be gone, gone, gone, gone…

  He’s coming back.

  “No luck, Nell. I’d hoped we could work together.”

  “When’s your shift, Alan?”

  “First shift. I’m one of the guys who stay awake while it happens. My second shift’ll be after yours, so wake me a little early on your shift, and we can spend some time together.”

  “Do something for me, will you?”

  “Anything, dear heart, you know that.”

  “I have a letter here I was going to leave the first watch, but since it’s you…I planted a camera and a mike in the shelter, where Jerry and the kids are. They’ll transmit for a couple of days, and they’re being recorded on the ping recorder at the location written down here. Put the tape away for me.”

  “Nell, do you really want to watch that?”

  “If it’s too awful, just…don’t tell me. But if they survive, tape it for me. Leave it in my stasis locker, along with my journal, here, and the tape that’s in this recorder when they shut me in.”

  He didn’t answer. He just gripped my shoulder, we pressed our cheeks together, and then he went off to take care of something. I keep reminding myself we’re no better off than those outside; inside or out, we supposedly have less than one chance in a hundred of surviving.

  I want to cry. I want to be with the children, no matter what, even if Jerry’s demons do come drag me away into hell. Oh, God, what am I doing here…

  There’s some confusion going on…Something on the TV. I’m going to look. Oh, Lord, it’s a hash-up. Some amateur astronomer called the media, some guy who hadn’t given up his scope or who’s built a new one. They’re all reporting it, no response from the observatories, huge, coming fast…I’m turning off for a minute.

  “Good lord, the moon moved. Did you see that? The moon moved, the thing actually moved the moon, it jerked backwards in its orbit, look at this thing. It’s in two pieces. It’s split. There’s two parts of it. One looks like it’s coming faster than the rest of it…”

  Those words were a famous news anchor, just before someone turned the TV off. So I’m outside, looking up. There’s time, still…There it is, quite visible…I can smell that purple smell, dense smoke rolling up from an endless brushfire of prayer. No. It went away. That smell is gone, completely. I smell something else, cedar? No, no. Sandalwood! And roses, like my grandmother’s garden. Where is that coming from. And I hear…

  There’s a damned voice in my head. It’s the voice that carries the smell. That doesn’t make sense. It says, “Come to me quickly, with all your children.” Now what the hell? over and over. “Quickly with all your children.” Who’s it talking to?

  I shake my head to get it out of my nose, my ears, but it just hangs there. Am I smelling a sound or hearin
g a smell? Or maybe both hearing and smelling something I can see! I don’t know. I’m going back inside to tell Alan.

  Alan’s busy. I ended up not telling anyone. The last few of us are being put in the coffins…They just gave me a sedative, to keep me calm…

  I’m still sitting here, recording…

  “You want to give me that recorder, Nell?”

  “Take the book. Take the recorder after they put me out. Gimme a hug, Alan, for old time’s sake.”

  He laughed and cried, and so did I. Auld lang syne. The techs are headed in this direction to connect me up. Except for me and Alan and his three shift mates, who won’t be put to sleep for four more years, the coffins have been filled in order of waking, and I am the last one. Only a few hours left before the Bitch, the event, the occurrence. The happening.

  And here I go. Stretched out in the sterile pod with a needle in the arm, the recorder still at my lips. Some of us have teddy bears or pictures of our families. Mine’s in my locker. Thank whoever I’ll be asleep before the cold. Look at the techs, so sober. Well, hell, why wouldn’t they be. The Bitch will be here in a few hours, but they won’t be down here when she comes. Nobody much will be down here. Just us. The selected ones, chosen because of stuff we know, or think we know, and the fact that we’re young enough to have forty years left, in ten four-year chunks.

  Goodbye, Jerry. You’re in as safe a place as anyone could be. Goodbye, Jerry I used to love.

  Goodbye Michelle, Tony. Mommy’s going bye-bye. They’re coming to lower the lid. I have to put this away. My throat is full of tears. Here’s Alan again.

  “Nell?”

  “Ummmmm?”

  “Sleep well.”

  20

  sorcery

  Sometimes after class, Dismé sneaked into the research wing of the museum, hid herself, and listened to sorcerous talk.

  “At the College of Sorcery, Bice Dufor said the parchment or paper a spell is written on can be dangerous in and of itself.”

  “Why would the one who wrote it make it dangerous?”

  “The one who writes it wants power over the one who uses it, and the more the magician uses it, the more power the original sorcerer has over him.”

  “If that’s true, you wouldn’t want to use someone else’s spell.”

  “Bice says it’s all right if you know what you’re doing.”

  Faience workers wore long white coats, white wraps covering their hair, and tight goatskin gloves and visors so none of their skin or hair could fall on magical artifacts that might be what they called potentiated by contact. People had been mysteriously burned or crushed or infected with terrible diseases from touching ancient things the wrong way. The search for sorcery would have been given up long ago if it weren’t for the rare discoveries that proved magic really worked.

  Dismé had watched from a shadowed balcony when Bice Dufor, Warden of the College of Sorcery, delivered a guest lecture on sorcel-sticks.

  “This is a fire spell,” he began, fussily laying out materials upon the altar. “First, the magician lays the kindling. Mine is here, in this cresset, splints of wood over shavings. The implementor must be dressed as I am, in a cotton or woolen robe unmixed, with hair combed out and feet bare. Mixed fabrics and tangled hair have a tendency to ‘knot’ or depotentiate enchantments, and shoes separate one from the foundation of power.

  “This particular kind of sorcery is called contagious magic, which means it catches its impetus from the intention of the ‘assembly,’ the materials we assemble around it, for every material and artifact conveys at least one intention, and for things with multiple intentions, the assembly serves to identify the particular intention that is meant. Since we wish to start fire, we use fire-making implements. A fire-drill, flint and steel, and a lens of glass,” and he took one of these rare items from its protective covering, “sometimes called a burning glass. We also need one or two sorcel-sticks.” He held them in his hand while the researchers gathered closely around. “They are made of ordinary wood, with clay heads colored red to signify power and no doubt also containing some sorcerous material we have not yet identified. We get them from non-demonic peddlers, who tell us they mine them from the ruins of a great old city east of here.

  “Now, we have on hand some transfer fuel for the fire, a bit of soft cloth or shavings. We take a sorcel-stick and touch it to each of the fire-making implements in order that it be infected with the intention of fire before laying it on a flat surface. The spell is as follows: ‘Angel of Fire, hear me! EEG-nis EEG-nis EEG-nis FAH-tyu-us FAH-tyu-us FAH-tyu-us.’”

  Warden Dufor then struck the sorcel-stick with the arrowhead. It blazed up, and all the students gasped in astonishment, as he transferred the blaze to the kindling, remarking, “Sometimes you have to give the fire your breath to get it going—that’s contagious magic also—and with hair long and loose, you risk being burned unless you’re careful.”

  A student asked, “Warden, wouldn’t it be quicker just to use the flint and steel? Why go to all that trouble?”

  The warden snorted. “Well we obviously don’t go to all that trouble. We don’t use magic for simple things like this. My showing you this enchantment is like teaching the alphabet to a toddler. He must know the individual letters before he can learn to read. When The Art is totally rediscovered, our population will be ready to use it. One step leads to another until we recover all the ancient Art…”

  “But, sir, at the Newland Fair, last year, I saw a sorcerer start a fire with one gesture and six words: She cried out, ‘Hail Tamlar, let there be fire,’ and the fire blazed up. That seems more magical.”

  The warden scowled. “It’s more efficient, certainly, but it’s an unreliable spell. Only a few people can do it, and even they can’t do it unfailingly. Also, we consider it suspect that those who can do it are mostly young people who have never studied the Inexplicable Arts. That smacks of demonism.”

  “Sir, where do we get sorcel-sticks?”

  “You don’t. The College of Sorcery in Apocanew buys a few for teaching purposes. The peddlers call them matches, because they match the effect of other implements, such as flint and steel, but they’re terribly expensive, and used only for educational purposes.”

  Rashel dismissed the class, then invited the warden to tea. Dismé watched them leave—the Warden very pink and importunate, Rashel very coy—and when they had gone, Dismé came out of hiding to pilfer one of the sorcel-sticks. She would never have stolen anything from a person or from a shop, but this seemed more like research than stealing, like taking a leaf from a tree in order to identify it with the help of old books.

  She left the museum grounds by a side path that led to the dilapidated barn, and once settled in the loft, she set the sorcel stick in a crack in a board and looked at it for a while. It seemed a simple enough thing. Too simple, really. Why was a thing this simple needed at all?

  Inside herself, near that place where Roarer dwelt, she sensed an opening as if a gateway swung wide into an echoing space. She heard a chime of bells, very distant, almost at the far edge of hearing. She reached her hand toward the sorcel-stick, without touching it, palm upward, and murmured, “Hail, Tamlar. I summon fire.”

  It was there on her palm, a standing flame, burning from what fuel she could not tell. Her hand felt no heat, the flame felt no wind, for it was rock steady while all the air about it seethed with rushing and whispers. “See, see, she has called the light and it has come…”

  She looked through the flame to see a wall of ouphs, ouphs frozen into place, fixed upon the flame, for once not grieving or wondering but silent, as though held by a core of stillness outside and beyond themselves. When she focused her eyes on her palm once more, the flame was gone. When she looked up at the ouphs, they too had gone and there was only quiet all around.

  So, she could do it herself. The Art was not lost; it was here—or some small part of it was, unless Rashel learned of it and harassed it out of her. Which wasn’t going to h
appen. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about this very small talent, this tiny magic, of no use whatsoever unless one were lost in the dark.

  21

  omega site

  Nell awakens.

  At first there is pain: a sick horror that invades bones, crawls along nerves, and surrounds every living cell. Awareness whimpers before intransigent ice. The ice does not want to let go. Pain is the battlefield on which cold contends against consciousness.

  Inevitably, cold gives way, easing gradually into deep chill, then into mere clamminess, the feeling of a springhouse, where deep water flows. The sense of suffocation is strong, the panic of smothering, the frantic horror of no air, no air—nor can there be, for nothing moves, lungs are still, diaphragm is still, nothing breathes, nothing screams. When the torture becomes merely ache, when the terrible coldness becomes merely chill, then the body—not necessarily hers, it has no owner yet—rotates to one side on cushioned robot arms, the face turns downward, the head lowers, and liquid runs freely from nose and mouth, emptying lungs.

  Now that the body is capable of screaming, vomiting, gasping, the need to do so has passed. It lies limp and passive as it is turned supine once more, as nozzles enter nostrils and puff to inflate lungs, once, twice, three times. The fourth time the body manages to gasp on its own. Then comes music, a soft repetitive strain in strings and woodwinds with an occasional, almost random reverberation of a deep-toned chime. The ache fades. Blanketing arms hold the body and warm it. Nose detects a minty and resinous smell; muscles click and twitch as hair-thin electrodes are inserted, tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick, an endless zipping-up which starts at the top of the head and ends at the soles of the feet. Soft pressure rolls up and down arms—they are becoming her arms—a gentle stroking as if this body were a kitten being licked down by a conscientious mother. First arms, then legs, then shoulders and back. Finally a drop of something on the tongue. The taste varies from moment to moment, but is always delicious and seductive, like the music and the stroking, all of it provided by her coffin.