Debate was raging through the Greater World. As the human polis expanded to completion, it had begun to take over certain tasks from the Travellers—chiefly, the management of the Earth. It was an onerous burden.
The Travellers had approached the Earth like a benevolent but clumsy giant. For all their wisdom, they hadn’t foreseen a ratio of resistance as high as one in ten thousand. They had underestimated the stubbornness of humanity, William thought, no doubt an easy mistake to make. Their own transition from a biological/planetary species to a virtual/interstellar epistemos had been self-generated and nearly unanimous.
But the question remained: How should the human collectivity, the Greater World, relate to this stubborn minority?
Leave them, one faction asserted. They’ve chosen their independence and we ought to respect it Let them find their own destiny. The destiny of the polis was among the stars; the Earth could fend for itself.
It’s inhumane to abandon them, other voices argued. They’re free to choose for themselves, but what about their children? If the human birthright is among the stars, how can we condemn another generation to death?
No resolution had emerged.
William’s problem was a miniature of the larger debate. He knew what Colonel Tyler was; he understood the threat Colonel Tyler posed… but should he intervene?
For the sake of his last sojourn on Earth he had elected to become a child again. He had put a great many memories behind him, stored them temporarily elsewhere, because he wanted this unmediated experience—not just to feel like a twelve-year-old but to be one. And so the Presidency had vanished into the misty past; the Greater World became a presence vaguely perceived.
Now this crisis had forced him out of his ekstasis and troubled him with doubt.
He supposed it wasn’t coincidence that had led him back to Colonel Tyler. Some unperceived connection had been forged as long ago as that day in Washington when he sat in the park with Colonel Tyler’s pistol at his throat. The boy had pedaled aimlessly across America; the man inside had maneuvered him into meeting this sad expedition. It wasn’t clear what events might unfold, but he felt a role for himself in their unfolding.
And a scant half mile down the road was the Connor farmhouse, another dilemma. {Rosa, he broadcast silently. Rosa, hurry!)
He heard Miriam come up behind him. Her footsteps dragged on the gritty parking lot. She’s tired, William thought. Miriam had demonstrated an enormous strength for her age—she insisted on driving her own camper. William recognized and appreciated her resilience. But she tired easily and was often short of breath.
She stood beside him, looking at Home where it dominated the horizon.
“In its own way,” Miriam said, “it’s beautiful.”
It was. Like a vast canyon wall at sunset, Home was every shade of blue, from the palest pastel at its summit to the indigo shadows at its base. A few tenuous clouds had formed along its western slope.
“You look sad,” Miriam said.
“I was thinking,” William told her.
“About what?”
He shrugged. “Things.”
There was a distant clatter of broken glass, the sound of Colonel Tyler breaking into the truckstop restaurant.
“William,” Miriam said. Her voice was solemn. “I wasn’t sure whether I ought to mention this. But perhaps the time has come. William, you don’t have to lie to me anymore. It’s not necessary to pretend. You see, I know what you are.” She regarded him loftily. “You’re one of them”
* * *
Miriam had doubted him from the beginning.
Why not? Doubt had been her constant companion for months. Since Contact, all her certainties had melted away.
Miriam had said a resounding No/ to the offer of immortality, but she had seen certain things that long-ago August night—had glimpsed certain immensities that shook her to the roots.
She went back to the Red Letter Bible her father had given her and read it from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. The Bible had always been a cornerstone for Miriam. Not because it explained everything, as the TV evangelists alleged. The opposite. She trusted the Bible because it was mysterious. Like life, it was dense and contradictory and resisted interpretation. Rightly so, Miriam thought. How authentic could a book of wisdom be if you understood it at a glance? Wisdom didn’t work like that. Wisdom was a mountain; you climbed it, short of breath, dizzy, unsure of yourself even as you approached the summit.
But after Contact—
Here is a solemn blasphemy, Miriam thought, but after Contact the Holy Bible had seemed almost provincial.
All that earthly preoccupation with slaves and kings, shepherds and patriarchs.
For one unforgettable moment last August, Miriam had beheld in her mind’s eye the universe itself—indescribably ancient, large beyond comprehension, and as full of worlds as the sea was full of water.
Where was God in that immensity?
Perhaps everywhere, Miriam thought. Perhaps nowhere. It was a question the Travellers had refrained from answering. Increasingly, Miriam doubted her own access to the answer.
No, she told them. I don’t want your immortality. She would be immortal at the Throne of God. It was enough.
But the world had never looked the same since.
By the time William came cycling from the east with his wide eyes and half-a-name, Miriam had grown accustomed to doubt; she knew at once he wasn’t a normal sort of youngster.
For one thing, she liked him. During her years as a secretary at the elementary school, Miriam had not much cared for children. They were messy, impudent, and vulgar. The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. Luke 12:19. But Miriam guessed the children of Galilee seldom addressed their elders as “fuckhead.”
Neither did William. William was different, and Miriam suspected he had once been much older. She told him so now.
He sat thoughtfully on the hood of the empty car, his heels tapping the grill. “I didn’t lie to you.”
“But you’re not what you appear to be.”
“I am what I appear to be. But I’m something else, too.”
“Older.”
“Among other things.”
“You’re not human.” He shrugged.
“You don’t want the others to know?” He shrugged again.
Miriam shifted her weight. Her feet were tired from standing for so long. “I won’t tell them,” she said. “I don’t think you’re anything to be afraid of.” William’s smile was tentative. She said, “But will you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Talk to me. Tell me about—” She couldn’t find a word for it. He said, “The Greater World?”
“Yes.” He was perceptive. She added, almost shamed by the admission, “I’m curious.…”
“All right,” William said.
“But first we should go eat dinner.” She hugged herself and shivered. “It gets so cold these nights. I’m cold to the bone.”
* * *
The Colonel had organized dinner in the truckstop cafeteria. Abby Cushman had uncovered a cache of canned chili, and she warmed it in a big steel pot over the restaurant stove. It tasted like tin and vinegar, William thought. But any kind of hot food was a pleasure nowadays.
The group had divided into clusters. William watched Matt Wheeler and Tom Kindle, conspicuously silent, sharing some private uneasiness.
He watched John Tyler conferring with his cadre: Joey Commoner, Paul Jacopetti, Bob Ganish. There was some troubled conversation there—hushed and indecipherable.
Beth Porter stood with a bowl in her hand, glancing nervously between the two groups.
William didn’t like the sour atmosphere of the room. The sooner we move on, he thought, the better. He thought about Miriam (who was silently spooning a bowl of soup: the chili, she said, was indigestible)—Miriam, who had guessed his secret.
He thought about Rosa Perry Connor struggling out of her confinement a
scant half-mile away.
He thought about Home.
* * *
Back at the camper, he did his best to answer Miriam’s questions.
She wanted more than he could give. She wanted a tour of the architecture of the universe. He was hobbled by words. But he did his best—tried to translate into simple English his own new grasp of time and space.
We live in a well of time, William told her. Call up your most primitive memory, a cradle memory, something from your childhood. Now think of all the hours that have passed since then, all the ticks of all the clocks in all those years. An ocean of time. Double that amount, he said, and double it again, and multiply it by a hundred and a hundred more, and still, Miriam, still you haven’t scratched the surface of the past. Multiply it by a number so large the zeroes would run off a page and you might reach as far back as the Jurassic or the Precambrian, when the Earth was a planet inhabited by monsters; but only an eyeblink in its history. Multiply again and again and eventually you reach the dawn of life, and again, the planet’s molten origins, again and again, the formation of the sun. And multiply again: the elements that would form the sun and all its planets are forged in the unimaginable furnace of a supernova. And still you haven’t removed more than a grain of sand from Time Itself.
“Lonesome,” Miriam whispered.
And space, William said, was a mystery, infinite but bounded. The galaxy was a mote among billions of galaxies; the sun, a star among billions of stars; this moment, the axis of a wheel as big as the sky.…
“It’s too much. William! How can you stand it?” Her voice was faint and sad. “So lonesome,” she repeated.
But out of all that blind tangle of particles and forces had come life itself. It was a miracle that impressed even the Travellers. Consciousness unfolding from a cocoon of stars and time. Pearls of awareness growing in the dark. “Miriam, how can it be lonely?” He couldn’t disguise the awe in his voice. “We were implicit in the universe from the moment it began. We’re the product of natural law. Every pondering creature in the deeps of the sky. We’re the universe gazing back at itself. That’s the mystery and the consolation. Every one of us is an eye of God.”
* * *
She woke three hours after midnight, turned in her bed, and saw William in his sleeping bag with his arms cradled behind his head and his eyes still open in the faint light.
The curse of age was the elusiveness of sleep. An older person, Miriam thought, gets too familiar with the dim hours of the night. But William, the boy-man, was also awake.
Both of us restless, Miriam thought. The aged and the ageless.
“William” she whispered.
He was silent but seemed attentive.
“There is something I wonder about,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about us. Us on this trip. And those in Ohio or other parts of the world—who said no. Who didn’t want that immortality. That… Greater World. Do you think about it?”
His voice small in the darkness: “Yes.”
“Do you think about why?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why some of us chose to stay in our mortal bodies?” Nod.
“William, is there an answer to the question?”
“Lots of answers.” He paused as if to assemble his words. “As many answers as there are people. Sometimes it was religious faith. Though not as often as you might think. People say they believe this or that. But on the deepest level, where the Travellers spoke, words are only words. People call themselves Christians or Moslems, but only a vanishing few held those beliefs so deeply that they turned down immortality.”
“Am I one of those?”
He nodded again.
At least, Miriam thought, I used to be. “And the others?”
“Some are so independent they don’t mind dying for it.” Tom Kindle, she thought.
“And some people want to die. They might not admit it, they might even fear it, but in the deepest part of themselves they long for it.”
Who was that, Miriam wondered. Bob Ganish, the fat used-car dealer? Maybe. Paul Jacopetti, the retired tool-and-die maker? Scared of death but secretly wanting it? Perhaps.
“Some are convinced they don’t deserve immortality. The belief in their own shamefulness has gnawed down to the bone.”
Joey, Miriam thought.
“Or some combination of these.”
Beth.
“Perhaps,” Miriam said, thinking of Colonel Tyler, whom she had distrusted from the day she set eyes on him, “perhaps some of them are simply evil.”
“Perhaps,” William agreed. “But some evil people laid down that part of themselves as gratefully as they might have given up a tumor. Others didn’t. Others… Miriam, this is hard to accept, but some people are born so hollow at the heart of themselves that there’s nothing there to say yes or no. They invent themselves out of whatever scrap comes to hand. But at the center—they’re empty.”
“Colonel Tyler,” Miriam said.
William was silent.
But she recognized the description at once. John Tyler, hollow to the core; she could practically hear the wind whistle in his bones.
“But there are people like Dr. Wheeler—or that Abby Cushman. They don’t seem exceptional.”
The prairie wind rattled a window. William hesitated a long while.
Then he said, “Miriam, did you ever read Yeats?”
“Who is Yates?”
“A poet.”
She had never read any poetry but the Psalms, and she told him so.
“Yeats wrote a line,” William said, “which always stuck in my memory. Man is in love, he said, and loves what vanishes. I don’t think it’s true—not the way the poet meant it. Not of most people. But it may have been true of Yeats. And I think it’s true of a certain few others. Some few people are in love with what dies, Miriam, and they love it so much they can’t bear to leave it behind.”
What a difficult kind of love that must be, Miriam thought.
* * *
By some miracle of Traveller intervention, there was water pressure in the restrooms of the truckstop restaurant. A pleasure—Miriam despised chemical toilets.
At dawn, the new Artifact a crescent of pearl and pink on the horizon, Miriam hurried from her camper into the cold green-tiled ladies’ room with the Bible clasped in her hand.
She opened it at random and began to read.
Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Matthew 28:20.
There was blood in the toilet again this morning. I am dying, Miriam thought.
Chapter 30
Fireworks
Matt woke to a knock at the door of his camper: Tom Kindle in ancient jeans, a cotton shirt, high-top sneakers, and a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. He was carrying a rifle.
“Looks like you’re loaded for bear.”
“Rifle’s for you,” Kindle said. “Kind of a gift.”
“Don’t you need it?”
“I can pick up a fresh one plus ammunition in Laramie. Matthew, you might not like it, but you’re on some dangerous turf these days. You’re liable to need this.”
Matt took the rifle in his hands. He didn’t come from a hunting family, and he’d never done military duty. It was the first time he’d held a rifle. It was heavier than it looked. Old. The stock was burnished where it had been handled over the years. The metal parts had been recently oiled.
He didn’t like the sad weight of it, any more than he liked the sad weight of Kindle’s leaving.
He gave it back. “Not my kind of weapon.”
“Matthew—”
“I mean it.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Don’t be stubborn.”
“Shit,” Kindle said, but he took back the rifle in his left hand and looked more comfortable with it there. “Talked to Abby yet?”
“I’m about to. Not looking forward to it.”
“You could change your mind.” Kindle shrugged. “I doubt it.” He put o
ut his hand; Matt shook it. “Take care of yourself, old man.”
“Watch your back, Dr. Kildare.”
* * *
“We thought you should know,” the radio said, “all our Helpers have gone silent.”
It was not a routine call, coming at this hour of the morning, and Tyler listened with a rising interest.
He and Joey had set up the receiver in a seedy staff lounge at the back of the truckstop cafeteria. Tyler had made the room his command quarters, and he was alone in it.
As alone as he ever got, these days.
He held the microphone in his right hand and thumbed the talk button. “Say again, Ohio?”
The transceiver was hooked to a mobile antenna and plugged into a wall socket. Since they came over the Coast Range, they’d been doing radio wherever they found live AC. Joey wanted to rig a ham unit to run off a car battery—it was easy, he claimed, and would be more convenient. But Tyler had discouraged him. Tyler didn’t much care for the radio anymore. He had begun to see it as a liability.
“Helpers have fallen silent,” the Ohio man said. Ohio ran a twenty-four-hour radio watch, and this was their morning shift, a guy named Carlos with a faint Hispanic accent. “Wondered if you had the same experience.”
“We’re not currently near a Helper, Ohio.”
“Theory here is that the Travellers are fixing to move on. Maybe the Contactees take over, maybe not. Could be we’ll see the Artifact move out of orbit soon. End of an era, huh? If that’s true.” The man seemed to want to chat.
Sissy appeared in a corner of the room, faintly luminous and anxious to speak.
“All the Helpers are silent?” Tyler wanted to nail down this new fact. “Every one,” Carlos said. “They don’t talk anymore. Or move or nothing.”
Tyler thought about it. He turned it over in his head, wanting to make sense of it.