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 hell 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? Nobody’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
FOR a 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. Nobody 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 sexes, 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 space 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 hoarded 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 space 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 assured in Paolucci’s presence. He was a comfortable sort of man, round-faced and sturdy, with dark olive skin and deep-set amiable eyes. She had trained with him in mind-pick 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 multitudes 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 Nepent
he; 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 tumbondé?” 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.”
“Tumbondé,” 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 tumbondé that are relevant to us, Dr. Lewis. One is that there seems to be a remarkable correlation between the space gods 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 tumbondé people have been receiving the space dreams too, and have used them as the basis for their—ah, theology. In particular their god Maguali-ga, who is said to be the opener of the gate who will make possible the breakthrough of the space deities on the Earth, seems identical with the massive extraterrestrial being who is invariably seen in the so-called Nine Suns dream. And their supreme redemptive figure, the high god known as Chungirá-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, Chungirá-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 tumbondé manifestations, which have been widely publicized in San Diego County and elsewhere in Southern California, may actually be encouraging a wider locus for the space dreams through mass suggestion: that is, people may think 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 tumbondé has not yet been publicized. But that brings me to my second point, which is a rather urgent one. A significant aspect of tumbondé theology is the revelation that the point of entry for Chungirá-He-Will-Come is the North Pole, identified in tumbondé terminology as the Seventh Place. Senhor Papamacer has vowed to lead his people toward the Seventh Place in time for the advent of Chungirá-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 tumbondé 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. Chungirá-He-Will-Come. She remembered now: Tomás Menendez, the cube he had been playing on his bone-phone, the strange barbaric African-sounding chanting she had heard. Those names had been repeated again and again: Maguali-ga, Chungirá-He-Will-Come. Menendez had friends in the Latino community in San Diego who sent things to him here. So tumbondé 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 tumbondé marchers will pass 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.
“Who’s going to go?” Elszabet wanted to know.
“Teddy Lansford, Dante Corelli, and one of the security men. And I suppose I will also.”
“Count me in too.”
Robinson shook his head. “The copter only holds six, Elszabet. We need to leave room for Ferguson and Alleluia.”
“Let Dante stay behind, then. I ought to supervise the pickup operation.”
“Dante’s a strong and resourceful woman. They could be dangerous, especially Alleluia. I’d like Dante to go.”
“Then Lansford—”
“No, Elszabet.”
“You don’t want me to go.”
Robinson nodded. As though speaking to a child, he said, “Right. At last you see it. I don’t want you to go. You practically became delirious at the staff meeting, you’ve been under sedation for the past two hours, you’re wobbly as hell. It makes no sense for you to go chasing off in a helicopter after a couple of unruly runaways who happen to be the two least predictable and most amoral individuals we have here. Okay? Do you agree that you’re going to skip the pickup mission?”
She couldn’t argue with that. But the rest of the afternoon was a fidgety time for her. Runaways were serious business: she was responsible not only for the mental condition of the patients but for their physical well-being as well. It was very much against the rules for any of them to leave the Center grounds without permission, and permission was granted only with stringent precautions. There were legal aspects: Ferguson was here in lieu of a jail term, after all. And the synthetic woman, though she was not actually regarded as a criminal, was uncontrollably violent at times, extremely dangerous to others because of her superhuman strength. In her pre-Center days she’d done more than a little damage to people during wild moments of blackout. Elszabet didn’t want either one of them wandering around loose. They would need extensive double-picking when they got back, and maybe some preventive reconditioning as well—and what if they somehow gave the pickup squad the slip, or harmed a staff member while they were being apprehended?
So there was that to worry about. And the aftermath of her dream still to wrestle with. And she supposed she also had to give some thought to that horde of tumbondé people heading this way, although that was far from being an urgent problem right now if they were still somewhere south of San Francisco. Sufficient unto the moment were the headaches thereof.
It was a long couple of hours.
The helicopter returned toward sunset. Elszabet, feeling tired but much more calm than she had been during the day, went out to greet it. Alleluia was out cold: they had had to hit her with an anesthetic dart, Dante said. Ferguson, looking rumpled and sullen and abashed, came limping out: he had hurt his ankle pretty badly romping around in the forest, though otherwise he was okay. “Put him under pax and let him sleep it off,” Elszabet said. “We’ll double-p
ick him in the morning after we find out where he thought he was going. Ask Bill Waldstein to look at that ankle, too. Set up an immediate pick for Alleluia when she wakes up, and make sure she’s secured against any kind of violent outbreak. We’ll pick her again tomorrow, too.” Elszabet paused. Someone unexpected was coming from the copter: a tall, thin, shabby-looking man with intense, burning eyes. She glanced toward Dan Robinson. “Who’s that?”
“His name’s Tom,” Robinson said. “If he’s got any other name we don’t know it. He was with a band of scratchers when we found Ferguson and Alleluia. The scratchers ran for it, but Tom stuck around and asked us to take him in. Pretty far gone, you ask me: paranoid schizophrenic’s the quick two-dollar diagnosis. But very gentle, harmless, hungry.”
“I suppose we can give him a bath and a few meals,” Elszabet said. “The poor scruffy bastard. Look at those eyes, will you! They’ve seen the glory, all right!” She started to walk toward the newcomer, who was prowling around in a vague, perplexed way. Then she paused and looked back at Robinson. “Hey, I thought you told me the copter only held six!”
He grinned at her. “So sue me. I lied.”
“Tom’s hungry,” the scratcher said. “Tom’s cold. Will you take care of me here?”
“We’ll take care of you, yes,” Elszabet said. She went over to him. How strange he is, she thought. The strangeness seemed to radiate from him like an aura. Schizophrenic, maybe: it was, as Dan Robinson said, a pretty good two-buck diagnosis. Certainly he was a little off center. Those eyes, those fiery biblical eyes—the eyes of a madman, sure, or the eyes of a prophet, or both. “You’re Tom?” she asked. “Tom what?”
“Tom o’ Bedlam,” he said. “Poor Tom. Crazy Tom.”
He smiled. Even his smile had a fierce strange intensity. She put out her hand to him. “Come on, then, Tom o’ Bedlam. Let’s go inside and get you cleaned up, okay?”