Tom O'Bedlam

  “So you know for sure? There’s one tomorrow? What we doing here, then?”

  “I don’t know shit about tomorrow,” Choke said. “I was only running my mouth, man. If there was an earthquake tomorrow, don’t you think everybody would be packed and out of town by now? Jesus Christ, Tamale, how can you be so dumb? I was only running my mouth.”

  “Yeah,” Tamale said, with a little laugh. “Yeah. I knew that. I knew it, man.”

  Tom sat quietly among them. The wonder of the visions still lay on his soul. Those marvelous unhuman cities, those noble beings moving about from place to place upon the faces of their amazing worlds. He thought of what he had said, that there was no such thing as an ugly city, not anywhere. He had never considered that point before, but it was true, and not just in the far galaxies. There was beauty everywhere in all places, in all things. Everything radiated the miracle of creation. San Francisco was beautiful, sure, but so were the desolate towns of the abandoned Valley behind them, the rusted crumbling wasteland towns, and so was everything else in the world, because everything had God’s hand in its design. Mujer was beautiful. Stidge was beautiful. Once you begin looking at things with eyes that have been opened, Tom told himself, you see only beauty wherever you turn.

  “Pull up here,” Charley said. “We can park across the street, look around, ask some questions, find ourselves a place to stay. Rupe, you watch the van, you and Nicholas. We’ll be back ten, fifteen minutes, maybe. Tom, you stay close to me. Are you with us, Tom? You back on Earth, man?”

  “I’m here,” Tom said.

  “Good. You make sure you stay here a while, okay?” Charley grinned. “What do you think of San Francisco? Pretty city?”

  “Very pretty,” Tom said. “The air. The trees.”

  They headed up the street, scattering out, Buffalo going first with Choke right behind him, then Stidge and Tamale close together, Mujer near them, and Charley and Tom a little way back. It was important, Charley said, not to look like an invading gang. Sometimes the bandidos came in from the back country in gangs of ten or twenty to clean out the city, and they got into wars with the city vigilante commissions. Charley didn’t want that. “We’re just going to spend the summer here, keeping low, easy and cool, not attract any attention, okay? This is a good place to be, in the summer. And maybe when the rains begin we’ll go somewhere else, up north, maybe, or maybe down to San Diego. It’s nice and warm there, San Diego, in the winter.”

  Tom stared. It was a long time since he had been in a city, a real city. Things looked old here, even ancient, all the small wooden buildings that seemed to come out of a vanished era when life had had certainty and stability. There was something very peaceful about San Francisco, very comforting. Perhaps it was the scale, everything so small and close together. Or perhaps it was the way everything looked old. The cities he had seen before were not anything like this, the ones in Washington, in Idaho, in the other places up north where he had been. Even the cities that had come to him in his visions were not like this.

  One thing that particularly struck him were the hills. The hills here were astounding. Tom looked up and saw the tiny white buildings climbing the hills, and it was hard to believe that they would build on hills like that. Of course he had seen worlds where they built their houses on glass-sided mountains that went straight up to the sky, houses jutting out from the side like eagles’ nests, but that was on other worlds where everything was different, the air, the gravity. Some had no air at all. Maybe some had no gravity at all. There were all sorts of worlds. But this was the Earth and for a long time Tom had been living in places that were flat, and now he was in a city that seemed to be all peaks and valleys.

  They moved warily to the end of the street and across. There wasn’t much traffic, a few old combustion cars and some ground-effect ones. The sky was a bright hard blue and the air was amazingly clear, sunlight bouncing almost visibly off the dazzling white facades. A cool dry wind, very sharp, was blowing from the west, where the ocean lay hidden from view by the hills.

  Charley said, walking close by Tom’s side, “That was beautiful, you know, what you were telling us on the bridge. About those cities. Sometimes you can get a little crazy, but all the same you got a wonderful mind, Tom. The things you see. The things you tell us.”

  “I know how lucky I am,” Tom said. “The bounty of God has been conferred on me.”

  “I wish I saw a tenth the things you see. I do see them, you know. Some of them, anyway.” Charley’s voice was low, as it was sometimes when he didn’t want the other scratchers to overhear him. But they were all up ahead, halfway up the block. “I been dreaming, almost every night, fantastic dreams. Fantastic. You know I saw that blazing bright world, the one you told me about, where the Eye People live? I didn’t care to say while we were traveling. But I saw it just like you told it, that flood of light filling everything. And I saw another where there were two suns in the sky, a white one and a yellow, the damnedest shadows over everything and the sky all red.”

  “The Fifth Zygerone World,” Tom said, nodding. “I thought you would. It comes through very strong.”

  “You know their names and everything.”

  “I’ve been seeing them practically all my life. Since I was small, when at first I thought everybody saw such things. It scared me, later, when I knew nobody else did. But I’m used to it now. And now others are seeing, too. And what I see, it gets clearer and clearer all the time.”

  “You think I’m starting to see them because I’m traveling close to you? Can that be it?”

  “That could be,” Tom said. “I don’t know. Am I the source? Or are we all having the visions all at once? Maybe the other worlds are breaking through to the whole human race now, and no longer just me. I don’t know.”

  Charley said, “I think some of the others are having the dreams too but they don’t want to own it up. Choke, I think, and maybe Nicholas. Maybe everybody is. But they’re all afraid to talk about it. They look a little strange some mornings, but nobody says anything. They think they’ll be called crazy if they say they’re seeing the things you see. They think they’ll be made fun of. That’s the thing they hate most, these guys, being made fun of. Worse than being called crazy.”

  “I don’t mind it. I’m used to it. Either one, being made fun of, being called crazy. Poor Tom. Poor crazy Tom. Sometimes it can be pretty safe, being crazy. Nobody wants to hurt a crazy man. But the things that poor crazy Tom sees are real. I know that, Charley. And one day the whole world will know too. When we’re called to the Crossing, I mean. When the skies open and we go forth unto the worlds of the Sacred Imperium.”

  Charley smiled and shook his head. “Now that’s when I begin to feel funny about you, man, when you start talking like that. When you start to go on and on about—” He stopped in midstride. “You hear anything back there, Tom?”

  “Hear what?”

  “No, you wouldn’t, would you.” Charley turned, looking halfway back toward the place where they had left the van. Mujer, who had been up the street ahead of them, came galloping back and halted, panting, at Charley’s side.

  “That was Nicholas,” Mujer said. “Calling for help.”

  “Yeah. God damn.”

  Charley swung around, and Mujer, and then the others, too, running past Tom, heading back in the direction of the van. Stidge went sprinting by, his eyes wild, his spike in his hand. Tom felt his skin prickling. Trouble coming, no doubt of it. He trotted behind them back toward the parking place. Nicholas was shouting now, again and again. Tom looked ahead and saw two strange men in worn jeans and loose white shirts on the far side of the van, running away, firing bolts of red heat as they ran. Rupe’s blocky body lay sprawled in the street, face down. Nicholas was crouched behind the van, firing. By the time Tom reached the van it was all over, the strange men out of sight, the weapons put away. Charley was scowling and pounding his fists together in fury.

  “You get a good look at them?” he said to Nicho
las.

  “No doubt of it. The two farm kids, the ones who got away from us when Stidge killed the father and the mother.”

  “Shit,” Charley said. “Our quiet visit to San Francisco. Shit. Shit. Rupe’s dead?”

  “Dead, yeah,” Mujer said. “Burn clear through the belly.”

  “Shit,” Charley said. “All right. We got to go after them. Stidge, you got us into this, you track them down, wherever. We don’t find them, they’ll haunt us, pick us off easy. Move your ass, man. You got to go get them.” Charley shook his head. “Go. Go.” He looked toward Tom. “You see what I mean about killing? Once you begin you got to finish.” He touched the laser bracelet on his right wrist. “You stay here with the van,” he said. “Inside the van, don’t open it for nobody. Try to keep your wits about you, you hear me, Tom? We’ll be right back. God damn,” Charley said. “And everything moving along so nice, too.”

  * * *

  Four

  When short I have shorn my sow’s face

  And swigged my horny barrel

  In an oaken inn I pawn my skin

  As a suit of gilt apparel.

  The moon’s my constant mistress

  And the lowly owl my marrow;

  The flaming drake and the night-crow make

  Me music to my sorrow.

  While I do sing, “Any food, any feeding,

  Feeding, drink, or clothing?

  Come, dame or maid,

  Be not afraid,

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”

  —Tom O’ Bedlam’s Song

  FOR Elszabet it was a quiet evening. She had a simple dinner about 1900 hours in the staff mess hall at the east end of the GHQ building: salad, grilled fish of some kind, small carafe of tangy white wine from one of the little wineries nearby. She shared her table with Lew Arcidiacono, who did most of the mechanical and electronic maintenance work at the Center, and his girlfriend Rhona, who was Dante Corelli’s assistant in the physical therapy department, and Mug Watson, the head groundskeeper. None of them seemed to have much in the way of dinner conversation that night, which was fine with Elszabet. Afterward she went over to the staff recreation center and listened to Bach harpsichord concertos with holovisual accompaniment for an hour or so, and by 2130 she was making her way down the path to her cabin far over on the other side of the Center. A quiet evening, yes.

  In the evenings things were always quiet for Elszabet. Generally her last sessions with patients took place about 1700—end-of-day counselling, periodic progress reviews, crisis intervention if any crises had popped up, stuff like that. Then she liked to meet briefly with individual staff members to check out special problems, theirs or their patients’. By 1830, usually, the workday was over, and the social part of the day, such as it was, was beginning. For Elszabet that part was never anything much. First an early dinner—she had no regular dinner companions, just sat at any table that happened to have a free space—followed by an hour or two in the staff rec center for a movie or a cube or a nighttime splash in the pool, and then back to her cabin. Alone, of course. Always alone, by choice. She might read for a while, or listen to music, but her lights invariably were out well before midnight.

  Sometimes she wondered what they all thought of her, an attractive woman keeping to herself like that so much. Did they think she was peculiar and aloof? Well, they were right. Did they think she was antisocial or snobbish or asexual? An uppity bitch? Well, they were wrong. She kept to herself because keeping to herself was what she wanted to do these days. Was what she needed to do. The ones who knew her best understood that. Dan Robinson, say. She wasn’t trying to snub anyone. Only to pull inward, to rest, to give her weary and eroded spirit time to heal. In a way she was as much of a patient here as Father Christie was, or Nick Double Rainbow, or April Cranshaw. Whether or not anyone else was aware of that, Elszabet was. She was living on the edge, had been for years, had taken the post at Nepenthe Center as much for the sake of healing herself as anything else. The difference was that instead of giving herself over to the mindpick every day so that the jarring dissonances could be scraped from her soul and a healthy new personality could form in the blank new places, she was trying to do it on her own, living cautiously, marshalling her weakened inner resources, letting her strength come gradually flowing back. This place was a sanctuary for her. Life outside the Center had worn her down the way it wore everyone down: the uncertainties, the tensions, the fears, the knowledge that the world that had been handed everyone was a badly broken one in danger of coming apart entirely. That, she had decided, was what Gel-bard’s syndrome was all about, really, the awareness that life nowadays was lived at the brink of the abyss. The Dust War had done that to people. For a hundred years everyone worries about the horrors of atomic war, the flash of terrible light and the shattered cities and the melted flesh, and then the atomic war comes, not with bombs but very quietly, with its lethal radioactive dust, far less spectacular but a lot more insidious, great chunks of land made permanently unlivable overnight while life goes on in an ostensibly normal way outside the dusted places. Nations fall apart when bands of hot dust are spread through their midsections. There are migrations. There are upheavals of the body politic. There are ruptures of communication and of transportation and of ordinary civility. Societies fall apart. People fall apart. These were apocalyptic times. Something bad had happened, and everyone believed that something worse probably would happen, but no one knew what. These weird dreams, were they the harbingers? Who knew? Were they cause or effect? Was everybody going to go crazy? Was everybody already crazy? Elszabet thought she was in better shape than most, which was why she was here as one of the healers instead of as one of the patients. But she didn’t kid herself. She was at risk in this maimed and broken world. She could fall into the pit just as Father Christie had, or April, or Nick. There but for the grace of God went she, and she didn’t know how much longer God’s grace would hold out. So nowadays she moved through her life with care, like someone crossing a field mined with explosive eggshells. The last thing she needed now was emotional turbulence of any kind, or emotional adventure. Let other people have the stormy love affairs, she thought. Let them have the winning and the losing. Not that she didn’t miss it. Sometimes she missed it terribly. She missed that wonderful warm embrace, hands on her breasts, belly against her belly, eyes looking into her eyes, the sudden hard thrust, the warm flood of fulfillment, his, hers, theirs. She hadn’t forgotten what any of that felt like. Or just the presence of the other, leaving sex out of it, just the comforting knowledge that there was someone else there, that you weren’t minding the store all by yourself. She had had that once, or thought she had; maybe she would have it again someday. But not now, not here, not while the edge lay so close. The thing she feared more than anything else was having it again and losing it again. Better not to try for it. Not until she felt stronger inside. Sometimes she wondered: If not now, when? And had no answer.

  She slipped out of her clothes and stood for a little while on her porch in the darkness.

  The night was warm. Owls were talking in the treetops. The long golden Northern California summer still had a few weeks to run, maybe even many weeks. This was only September. Sometimes the rains didn’t begin until the middle of November. What a change that was, when the unending months-long procession of sunny days suddenly yielded to the implacable downpours of the Mendocino County winter! It could rain for weeks at a time, December, January, February. And then it would be spring again, the trees greening up, the drenched land beginning to dry out.

  She heard distant laughter. Staff people, fooling around up front. For some of them this place was just a big summer camp for grown-ups all year round. Do your work by day, fool around by night, hanky-panky in this cabin or that one, maybe on the weekend drive over to Mendocino, take in a club or a restaurant or something like that. Mendocino was the closest thing to a city that there was around here. Fifty years back it had actually had a little flurry of a boom, trying
to set itself up as a rival to San Francisco for preeminence in Northern California at a time when San Francisco was suffering from a lot of self-inflicted wounds; but in the end what became clear was what everyone had really known all along, which was that San Francisco had been designed by geography to be a major city and Mendocino hadn’t been. Even so, it still looked more or less citylike, and you could have a good time over there on the weekend, or so Elszabet had heard. Even in the present condition of the world you could have a good time, if you had the knack of shutting your eyes to what was really going on.

  Again, laughter. Higher-pitched, this time. A squeal or two. Elszabet smiled and went inside and got into bed. A little music, she thought, while falling asleep. Bach? No, she’d had enough Bach for tonight. Schubert, the string quintet. Sure. Warm web of sound, deep, melodious, thoughtful. She flicked the stud to automatic so the system would shut down when the music was over, and turned on the cube. And lay there, half-listening, thinking more about tomorrow’s staff meeting than she was about the music. Space dreams from Vancouver, space dreams from San Diego, space dreams from Denver. Everywhere. Paolucci was coming up from San Francisco to deliver a report. There was even a possibility that Leo Kresh had been able to make it all the way from San Diego. Something very odd was going on in San Diego; that was the word. But what was going on everywhere was odd. She had laughed at Dan Robinson’s idea that afternoon when they were down at the beach, that the dreams were messages from an alien spaceship approaching Earth. Wild, weird, far-out notion, she had thought then. Now she wasn’t so sure that it was all that wild. She wondered if Robinson had done any further work on that, to check out whether such a thing was possible. Tomorrow at the meeting I’ll ask him if…

  Still thinking about the meeting, she wandered off into sleep.

  And somewhere during the night she had a space dream herself.

  The greenness came first. Little wisps of thick furry fog, sidling into her mind. She was close enough to consciousness to know what was starting to happen. She was sleepy enough not to care. She had fought this thing off as long as she could. The invasion of the sanctuary, alien strangenesses creeping in from God knows where. Now she wasn’t able to hold it back any longer. It was almost a relief, giving in to it at last. Go on, she told the dream. Go ahead and happen. It’s about time, isn’t it? My turn? Okay, my turn, then.