The Vistor

  Not all Jerry's friends think alike, but every one of them shares a belief in divine—or at least supernatural—intervention in the minutia of everyday human life. They believe in miracles, in angels, in a god who watches everything every individual man does, and sometimes reaches down and stirs his own creation. Some of them are very angry people, but others have warm, kindly and nurturing Ned Flanders sort of personalities. I always feel stilled when they're around, which seems bitchy and ungrateful of me, but it's like being smothered in nice. Still, they aren't my worry; Jerry is. I can accept whatever he believes, for him, but I can't accept being shut out. When he told me to go into the redoubt, that was the ultimate shutout.

  "If I go into that redoubt, I'll be separated from the children. We belong together!"

  He took my hands firmly in his own. "Nell, my dear, do listen. You and I both know that this is the end of the world. My friends and I regard it as something that's been foretold for ages. I'm not even slightly frightened because I trust in the Lord to get me and the children through the last days. I have absolute faith in that. You don't have that kind of faith."

  I admit to being horrified at the indulgent calm of his voice, his unrestrained acceptance of death and devastation. "Oh, Jerry, don't go off on this now, for God's sake..."

  He patted me as he might have patted a fractious pet. "Exactly. For God's sake. I trust we'll be taken care of if we live. If we die, it will be painlessly, fearlessly, and our afterlife will be wonderful. The children will believe me when I reassure them, because I believe it. They'll be calm because I am calm. Frankly, I'd rather they'd face the last days with me than with you. Science is cold comfort compared to finding enlightenment."

  That was what he called it. I had called it "acting weird."

  "And that's what you teach the children?"

  He looked over my head at nothing. "When the children were old enough, I would have. As it is now, I won't have to."

  Would have. Won't have to. I'd halfway accepted his indifference to his own survival, but his indifference to the children's survival hadn't penetrated until then. I should have thought of it when Michy asked me one bedtime whether she was a good girl, because "Daddy says when the asseroid comes, all the bad people will get roun-ned up and go down to hell." I told her Daddy was wrong; only cruel and vicious men create hells, a merciful God does not, and besides, she was the best little girl in the world.

  So then, with the invitation to be one of the sleepers in Omega site still hanging there, I didn't know whether to scream or laugh or just run for my life. He took advantage of my being speechless.

  "I believe that destruction will come, yes. But, the children and I will not feel it. I'm sure of that, Nell. Positive. And since I'm positive, I think you should relieve your mind of worry and do what your own spirit tells you to do."

  "What will you feel?" I demanded, still fighting against his placid certainty.

  "The children and I will feel only peace, and rapture," he intoned, like a reading from scripture, an expression of satisfaction on his face that I hadn't seen for years. "I'm sure of that. It's true, the ungodly will meet their horrible fate, we'll see that, but it won't touch us."

  Something in his voice, some hint of particular satisfaction struck a sudden insight from me, like a flint hitting steel. I swallowed and said, as casually as I could, "And you want me in the redoubt rather than with you because it will be easier for the children if they don't have to watch Mommy being hauled off to hell?"

  He flushed and looked sheepish, and I knew I'd hit it on the nose. First I wanted to go into hysterics, then I felt a kind of sick fury pushing me to hit him or throw up, or both. Well, well. And he had been thinking this for some time. His recent warm affection hadn't been love, it had been piety. He was among the elect, poor little Nell was damned, and she wasn't worth trying to convert so he'd pity her until the end. Strange to believe you know someone, believe someone loves you, and then find out you don't know them and their emotions toward you are ... well, what? Vengefulness? Born from what cause? Envy? Had all this started when I'd had that fleeting moment of journal cover eminence, five years ago? Or that article published the year later? Both were nice, but neither was important, and he knew that! Or maybe he didn't.

  I tried to see myself through his eyes, a woman who had had undeserved success. It was a ten-second equivalent to a bad divorce. His look of satisfaction was a vault door closing with the time lock set on forever.

  The only way I can handle what I wrote about above is to repress it. Pretend it hasn't happened. There is no further argument. There is no further discussion. Jerry goes right on conversing with God, and I'm going into the redoubt.

  I am doing one sort of crazy thing. I have a friend who's an expert in surveillance, and he's agreed to put a camera and mike in the shelter at my house. It will transmit data to the Omega redoubt. If Jerry and my children are visited by angels, I honest to God want to see it happen.

  15

  exploring high places

  Though General Gowl had received his visitation late in the spring, it was several days before he called a meeting of his officers to relay the message he had received from the Rebel Angel. One of those present was the general's closest colleague, the Colonel Bishop, Lief Laron Comador Turnaway, a long time associate, who was stunned by what the general had to say.

  "We have always said that the Spared, all of them, are here in Bastion," said the bishop, querulously. "It's an article of faith. After the Time of Desperation, all those who were Spared were miraculously joined together in the great trek, and they all came here. Either they arrived here or they were frozen en route and bottled once we arrived and discovered how bottling could be done. We have never believed there were Spared ... out there."

  "I know," said the general in a strong voice. "But it was revealed to me that some, perhaps many, may be out there. Out of a great cloud of darkness lit by flame, I had a vision."

  "A vision," said the Colonel Bishop, doubtfully.

  "I was visited by a Rebel Angel," said the general. "Who commanded the Spared to go out into the world and bring our lost brethren into Bastion while there is yet time."

  "How are you going to do that?" asked Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav in an interested voice. "Are we to offer an invitation, or what?"

  "We are to take an army," said the general, frowning so the listeners would know this was serious. "We are to go out and offer salvation to the unenlightened. Those who are Spared will accept, and those who are not Spared will reject, and if the ones who reject fight us, we'll kill them, that's all."

  "We have a non-aggression agreement with the demons," Doctor Ladislav offered. "They may object to this."

  "That's why we're having this meeting," grunted the general. "We need to figure out what to do about the demons..."

  "...also," said the doctor, "there's the matter of how many Spared we might find out there. Bastion won't support a great many more people than are already here."

  "We can bottle a lot of our people to make room," offered Over Colonel Commander Achilles Rascan, of the Bureau of Defense. "We have lots of unproductive elderly, lots of supernumerary children among the poorer classes. Or we could bottle the outsiders before we bring them in."

  "Ah," said the doctor, still in a pleasant voice. "I hadn't thought of that." He turned to the general. "Do you think it matters to the Angels? I mean, whether the Spared are bottled or not before they come in?"

  "No difference at all," snorted the general. "We bring them among the Spared, either way."

  "But..." murmured the doctor, "if that is the case, why do we need to gather them into Bastion at all? It will be most inconvenient. Surely we can just bottle them out there, build a repository and put someone in charge of maintenance."

  The general squirmed slightly in his chair, frowning. "They want us to gather them, that's all. They said so. They didn't say where the bottle walls had to be."

  "Ah," murmured the doctor, hiding incipien
t hysteria with a serious nod. "Putting the bottles outside Bastion will make it much easier. I'm glad the Angel will allow that."

  He subsided, taking notice of the expressions of those around the table, which were variously interested, avid, or appalled (a junior member of Rascan's staff who hid his expression behind a handkerchief).

  "Over Colonel Rascan will begin by strengthening the army," said the general. "It'll take some time as we have to deal with outsiders for the purchase of weapons and supplies. And we'll be sending out many, many small missions to start bottling any Spared Ones they find out there, as well as spying out the strengths and weaknesses of the places we'll be conquering."

  The doctor kept his face expressionless as the general remarked in his direction, "And we'll need medics trained as well. To take care of the wounded."

  "Perhaps we should just let the bottling teams take care of the wounded," murmured Jens. "It would be more economical."

  "No," said the general. "We have to keep up our numerical strength. We can't be bottling five or ten percent of the army after every battle."

  "Very true," said Over Colonel Rascan. "Though of course the doctor is correct in certain cases. I think for the seriously wounded, bottling would be more sensible. A seriously wounded man with a lengthy recovery time is a drain upon resources."

  The junior officer who had retreated behind his handkerchief excused himself and slipped out the door.

  "Bottling out there will be rather different from bottling in here," remarked the doctor. "In here, we merely put those to be bottled through a demon portal and the demons cut out an appropriate bit of flesh before putting the bodies down the chutes into the firepits. They do the bottling, the labeling, and add the bottles to a community wall—or leave it for our Bottle Maintenance people to install in a house if it's a private installation. If we do it out there, with our own people, we'll need a lot more maintenance people trained. Or, it would require a contingent of demons to travel with us, and since our agreement with them specifically forbids our going outside in any kind of... aggressive way, we may find that difficult to achieve."

  "I know," said the general in a surly voice. "We all know. Of course there are problems! There are always problems, and it's your job to figure out how we can get around them! Perhaps Bottle Maintenance will have to train some people to go with us. Maybe we'll have to conquer the demons first and enslave demons to do the bottling. Get them out of the way, so to speak. At any rate, this meeting was just to announce the Vision. It was a real Vision, by the way," this with a searing glance at the Colonel Bishop. "Not something I dreamed of while I was asleep."

  The general did not mention the rite he had conducted before receiving the visitation. Such things as this, Hetman Gone had impressed upon him, were not to be spoken of. Leaving the rite aside, there was no reason he could not expand upon the vision part of the thing.

  "The Rebel Angel came to me up on the roof, late last night, long before dawn, in smoke and fire. It said we must... avenge ourselves against those who refuse the faith of the Spared. I know it will take a while to get used to the idea. It took me a while, even though I heard it from the angel's own lips. So, I thought we'd meet a span from now, same day and time, to report our progress."

  The general started to rise, but the doctor stopped him by asking, "Excuse me, General, but did the being you saw actually say it was one of the Rebel Angels?"

  The general frowned. "I asked who he was; he asked me who I thought he was I said I thought he was a Rebel Angel, and he didn't contradict me. I wouldn't have dragged you all in here otherwise!"

  He nodded at each man, got to his feet and departed, surrounded by the Holy Guard of Bastion. Jens stayed behind, staring moodily at the table while the others rose and departed, some silently, some whispering, all troubled to one degree or another.

  "So?" asked the Colonel Bishop, from behind Jens's shoulder. "What do you think?"

  "I think," said the doctor, "that I would feel more secure if the Rebel Angels had appeared to all of us."

  "Visions ... well, they tend to be solitary things," said the bishop, twisting and stretching his neck as though to unkink it, a sign the doctor well knew to be one of nervousness. "All the books say so. Which doesn't mean the visions are untrue."

  "Not necessarily," said the doctor.

  "No, not necessarily," agreed the bishop. "What worries me is that I'm not at all sure we have the strength to take on all the rest of the world."

  "From what I know about the Outside..."

  "Which is more than the rest of us," said the bishop, a bit sarcastically. The bishop's tolerance for the doctor's derelictions was wearing a little thin as envy and irritation gradually overtook forbearance.

  "I don't know a great deal more, Bishop, but from what I do know, I'd say we aren't strong enough. Unless we have some weapon or system that I don't know about."

  "Where would we have obtained such a thing?" the bishop asked.

  The doctor shook his head. "I don't know, Bishop Laron."

  "But you go outside! You should know!" This was said as a challenge, almost reproachfully.

  The doctor replied slowly, carefully. "I go along the borders seeking medical knowledge, which I use for your benefit and the general's as well as for others of the Spared. I have never seen a weapon in Bastion or along its borders that would make Bastion stronger than the people outside."

  After a moment's simmering silence, the bishop remarked, "Perhaps the general needs to talk to his vision again. Perhaps it has some special weapons to lend us."

  When the bishop left the room, the doctor stared after him with a long, measuring look before murmuring, under his breath, "A prospect that I, personally, would find extremely worrying." It worried him to the extent that he brooded his way to an anonymous door giving on a narrow corridor leading to narrower passageways and steeper staircases, all of them winding through the Fortress like mold in a cheese.

  With the exception of several elderly maintenance supervisors, the doctor probably knew the Fortress better than anyone else. He knew that the general's quarters were connected by a short stair to the lavish penthouse that opened directly upon the roof garden. He knew that particular stair was reputed to be the only access to the roof garden, but he also knew that chimney sweeps and roofers and people who maintained the water tanks and carried water to the garden had to have access, and they most certainly did not go through the general's quarters to get there.

  Therefore, there were alternate ways to get there, and he had long ago gone looking for them, finding many, among them the route he was now following. If the general had indeed received a visitation from a Rebel Angel in the smoke from the great chimney, perhaps some sign of that visitation might still be present.

  The last constricted stair went between two huge flues to end at a thick stone that pivoted near its edge, creating a door so narrow that even the slender doctor had to turn sideways to sidle through. He was deep inside the great chimney's bulk, at the inner end of a crooked passage, above which the smoke was driven horizontally, hiding the place completely. He paced slowly among alcoves and intervening chimney pots, searching for footprints or hand smears that might have been left by a soot-garbed, fiery angel as it came or went.

  After a time he found a broken stone in the likeness of a threatening monster, and as he went toward it he recognized the signs of a hidden door. The mechanism took him only a few moments to solve before he entered a slit between two towering flues, a deep dogleg passage with strange signs and symbols marked upon the walls, probably with a burned stick. At the corner, the passage widened, and here he discovered a huge brazier half full of dead coals standing in an area befouled with loathsome-looking spillage that gave off repugnant stinks.

  While he had no desire to touch it or, indeed, even to go closer, the matter demanded investigation. He took up a lengthy stick, partially burned, perhaps the very one that had been used to make the symbols on the walls, and used it to probe the remna
nts of the fire. He scratched up a lump of carbon that could have been anything. He scratched more deeply to find another lump of carbon, this one only charred. He took it between thumb and forefinger to pull it clear, stepping back with a muffled exclamation as it came into view. The charred part was a wrist. The largely unburned part was a hand, the right hand of a very small child.

  The doctor stood for a moment frozen, a sick violence in his belly, eyes filling with tears that were whipped into runnels by the wind. For several days, the Fortress had buzzed with rumors that one of the general's children had disappeared. Angelica. The five-year-old daughter the doctor had seen at the general's birthday reception, playing tag with the other children. Laying the object back into the brazier, the doctor swallowed deeply and bid his bowels to contain themselves. When he was calm he went past the brazier to another stone monster head, finding another door through which he explored only far enough to verify that it gave access to the general's roof garden.

  He returned to the brazier, used his handkerchief to wrap the hand and the lump, as well as several other anonymous lumps that did not seem to be merely charcoal, and put them in the deep pocket of his coat. He then stood a long, long moment in thought as his coat lashed around his legs, listening to the wind. The storm was still building. It would be windier yet before it was through, and even in this sheltered place, he could feel the rising gale.

  He took the brazier by its legs and deliberately upended it, spilling the ashes upon the roof tiles to be driven about in tiny whirlwinds, like tattered gray veils. He left the brazier on its side, as though it had blown over, though he carefully checked the contents once more, this time finding nothing but ashes.