Tom O'Bedlam

  “Some nights, yes. I dream the visions two, three times a week.”

  “You see all seven loving galaxies?”

  “By now, yes,” said Jaspin. “All seven.”

  “And you believe, these are the homes of the gods, verdademente a verdad?”

  “I believe it, yes,” Jaspin said. He wondered what the Senhor was getting at.

  “You ever wonder, maybe it is only dream, maybe it is a foolishness of the night that you have, that I have, that all of us have?”

  “I believe the gods are true gods,” Jaspin said.

  “Because you have the faith. Because you know that you know.”

  Jaspin shrugged. “Yes.”

  “I have here the proof absolute,” said the Senhor. He opened the portfolio. Jaspin saw a thick stack of holographic repros inside. Senhor Papamacer passed the top one across to Jaspin. “You know this place?” he asked.

  Jaspin stared. Even in the dim light of Senhor Papamacer’s bus the holo gleamed with an inner radiance. It showed a string of dazzling suns—he counted six, seven, eight, nine—strewn out across a dark purple sky, and an alien landscape, eerie and bewildering, all harsh angles and impossible perspectives. And in the foreground stood a massive six-limbed figure with a single great glowing compound eye in the center of its broad forehead. Jaspin began to tremble inside.

  “What is this, a photograph?” he asked.

  “No, not a photograph. A painting only. But a very real painting, no? What is this place? Who is that standing there?”

  “That’s Maguali-ga,” Jaspin murmured. “The nine suns. The Rock of the Covenant.”

  “Ah, you know these things. You recognize.”

  “It looks exactly the way I’ve seen them myself.”

  “Yes. Yes. How interesting. You look at this one, now.” He passed Jaspin a second holo. It was a different view of the world of Maguali-ga now: the angle much steeper, and instead of Maguali-ga by himself there were five such beings. This repro too could have passed for a photograph; but now that Jaspin had been given the clue he was able to see that in fact it was only a painting, probably computer-generated and very realistic but nonetheless a work of the imagination. “And this,” said the Senhor, laying a third view of Maguali-ga’s planet down in front of Jaspin: somewhat different technique, considerably different subject matter—this time a strange stone building was in view, high-vaulted and rugged, with Maguali-ga standing at its threshold—but there was no question that it depicted the same world as the other two. “Now these,” the Senhor said, and dealt three more pictures from his pack. Red sun, blue sun, fiery arch in the sky, golden figure in the foreground with curving ram’s-horns. Each of the three was clearly the work of a different artist; but all three showed the same thing, identical in all details. Jaspin shivered. “Chungirá-He-Will-Come.”

  “Yes. Yes. And these?”

  Three more. Green world, thick wisps of fog, shimmering crystalline figures moving about. Three of a world of blazing light, the entire sky one vast sun. Three of a fiery world whose sun was blue, and there was Rei Ceupassear, soaring high overhead in a shining radiant bubble. Three of a world whose suns were yellow and orange—

  “What are these things?” Jaspin asked finally.

  The Senhor beamed like an ebony Buddha. He had never looked so joyous. “It is truly the truth, and I know that I know it. But others are not so sure, and there are some who will oppose us. So I have had the truth made into pictures for them. You know, there are devices, they turn the pictures in a man’s mind into a picture on a screen, and then it can be made like this. I sent for three different people and I said, Make pictures of the worlds of the gods. Put them into this machine, so everyone can see the visions that you see. Well, Jaspeen, you can see. If you make the photograph, three people, you point the camera at the same street in Los Angeles, you will get the same picture. And here too we have the same picture, although it just comes out of people’s minds. So everyone is seeing the same thing. Look, this is Maguali-ga, this is Narbail, this is where O Minotauro dwells—who can doubt it now? These things are true and real. When they come into our minds, they are coming from true places. Because we all see the same. There can be no doubt now. You agree? There can be no doubt!”

  “I never doubted,” said Jaspin, dazed. But he knew that he was lying. Some part of him had maintained its skepticism all along. Some part had insisted that what he was experiencing was only some sort of crazy hallucination. But if everyone was having the same hallucinations—exactly—down to the little details—these weird little plantlike things here that he had seen so often but which he had never mentioned to anyone else, here they were, in this holo and in that one and here too—

  He was altogether stunned. He had not asked for these proofs; he had been willing to act on faith alone; but the holograms before him were overwhelming.

  “Truly the truth,” Senhor Papamacer said.

  “Truly the truth,” Jaspin murmured.

  “You go now. Write down what you feel, how you think this minute. Now. You go, Jaspeen.”

  He nodded and rose and went stumbling through the dim musty bus, groping in the darkness of the chapel, then out the front way. A few men of the Inner Host were sprawled on the steps of the bus: Carvalho, Lagosta, Barbosa. They smirked up at him. White eyes flashed mockingly in dark faces. He moved sideways through them, carefully, not giving a damn about their smartass smirks: the presence of the gods was still on him. Go write down what you feel, how you think. Yes. But first he had to tell Jill.

  Dusk was coming on. The air was cool. They were somewhere up near Monterey now, inland a little way, camped in what had been somebody’s artichoke field before a hundred thousand pilgrims had driven their buses and vans and trailers into it. Jaspin heard the sound of chanting in the distance. Three enormous campfires were blazing, sending black columns of smoke into the darkening sky. He looked into his car for Jill. Not there.

  From behind him he heard laughter. More Inner Host: Cotovela, Johnny Espingarda, leaning against their little orange-and-yellow bus. He glanced toward them.

  “Something funny?”

  “Funny? Funny?”

  “Either of you see my wife?”

  They laughed again, forcing it a little. They were deliberately trying to make him feel uncomfortable. He despised them, these chilly-faced inscrutable Brazilian bastards, these apostles of the Senhor. So smug in their assumption of superior holiness.

  “Your wife,” Johnny Espingarda said. He made it sound dirty.

  “My wife, yes. Do you know where she is?”

  Johnny Espingarda balled his hand into a fist, put it to his mouth, coughed into it. Cotovela seemed to be choking back laughter. Jaspin felt the awe and astonishment that the Senhor’s holograms had aroused in him vanishing under the weight of his anger and irritation. He swung around, turned away from them, peered around for Jill in the gathering darkness. He walked to the far side of his car, thinking she might have spread a blanket over there. No Jill there either. When he came around to the front again, though, he saw her, walking toward the car from the general direction of the Inner Host bus. She looked flushed, sweaty, rumpled; she seemed to be fumbling with the belt of her jeans. Behind her, Bacalhau had emerged from the bus and was saying something to Cotovela and Johnny Espingarda: Jaspin heard their rough laughter. Oh, Christ, he thought. Christ, no, not Bacalhau.

  “Jill?” he said.

  Her eyes were a little out of focus. “You been visiting the Senhor?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  She seemed to be making an effort to see straight; and then suddenly she was, her eyes locking on his, her expression a chilly, defiant one. “I’ve been interviewing the Inner Host,” she said. “A little field anthropology.” She giggled.

  “Jill,” he said. “Oh, Christ, Jill.”

  2

  STANDING between these two strange new people, the beautiful dark-haired woman who was not real and the scowling-looking man with the inju
red leg, Tom was sure he felt a vision coming on. Right here, in front of everyone on this lonely back-country road as the sun was going down.

  But somehow it didn’t arrive. There was the roaring in his brain, there was the first beginning of luminous flickering, but that was all. The vision stayed on hold. Something else was happening, maybe, some sort of omen unfolding within him.

  He looked at Charley. He looked at the dark-haired woman and at the scowling-looking man who had hurt his leg. Charley was asking questions about the place that the scowling man had called a center. Where is it, who runs it, what do they do there? Tom listened with interest. He found himself thinking that he might like to go to that center, go there this evening, sit down and rest for a while in its gardens. He had been on the road too long, wandering this way and that, and he was tired.

  “You mean this place, it’s a kind of funny farm?” Charley asked.

  “Not exactly,” the scowling man said. “They got a lot of troubled people there. I think not quite as troubled as your friend here, most of them. But troubled, you know? Deeply upset inside. And they take care of them there. They got ways of soothing them and caring for them.”

  Tom said, “Tom could use some soothing. Poor Tom.”

  No one appeared to notice that he had spoken. He glanced toward the sky, still afternoon-blue but growing dark around the edges. The sun was hidden now by the tops of the tremendous redwood trees. The forest began just a little way off the road and went on and on and on. Overhead he saw stars appearing and drifting around the sky, colored pinpoints of light, red and green and orange and turquoise.

  Tiny floating sparks. But each one at the heart of an empire spanning thousands of worlds, and each of those empires bound in a confederation encompassing whole galaxies. And on those worlds a billion billion wondrous cities. Compared to the smallest of those cities, Babylon was a village, Egypt was a puddle. And the light of all those stars was focused now on this unimportant little world, this sad Earth.

  Charley said, “Who are you two, anyway?”

  “I’m Ed. That’s Allie, here.”

  “Ed. Allie. Okay. Out for a stroll in the woods.”

  “Uh-huh. A little hike. I put my foot in a gopher hole and twisted my ankle.”

  “Yeah. You got to be careful.” Charley was measuring them. “And what’s the name of this place, this center?”

  “The Nepenthe Center,” the man named Ed said. “Some foundation runs it. They take people in from all over California. It’s almost like a country hotel, hiking and recreation and everything, except they also give you treatment there for your troubles. He’d like it there. It’s just around on the far side of that forest, between the woods and the coast. There’s a big gate out front, and signs. You can’t miss it. If you wouldn’t mind driving Allie and me over to Ukiah first, and then there’s a road that goes straight out from Ukiah to Mendocino, and you can pick up a road off that takes you to the Center.”

  “How come you know so much about it?” Charley asked.

  “My wife’s been treated there,” Ed said.

  “Allie? What was wrong with her?”

  “No, not Allie.” Ed looked uncomfortable. “Allie’s a friend. My wife—” he shrugged. “Well, it’s a long story.”

  “Yeah. I bet.”

  Tom realized that Charley was going to kill these people when he was finished talking to them. He had to. They could identify him now. If the local police came around and said, “We’re looking for some scratchers who killed a vigilante officer in San Francisco, did you see anybody unusual driving around up here,” these two could say, “Well, we saw eight men in a van drive through this way, and this is what they looked like.” Charley couldn’t risk that. Charley said he didn’t like to kill, and very likely he meant it. But he didn’t mind killing, either, when he felt that he had to.

  The woman said, “Tell me something. Do you people have space dreams?”

  The man turned to her, his face getting red, and said, “Allie, for Christ’s sake—”

  Yes. He’d kill them sure as anything, Tom knew. The idea that he had to do it was starting to show in Charley’s face: that the man was dangerous to him, the man might somehow tip off the police. The only reason Charley had stopped in the first place was that he thought the woman was by herself on the road. The scratchers had wanted to use her. But then when the man appeared, limping out of the underbrush—that changed everything. The man had to die because he was too dangerous to Charley. And that meant the dark-haired woman had to die too. Once there’s killing, there’s got to be more killing. That was what Charley had said a long time ago.

  The woman was saying, sounding stubborn, “No, I want to know. It’s important. These are the first people we’ve seen since—since. I just wonder. Whether they have space dreams too.”

  “Space dreams?” Tom said, as if hearing for the first time what she was saying.

  She nodded. “Like visions. Other worlds. Different suns in the sky. Strange beings moving around. I’ve been having dreams like that, and I’m not the only one. A lot of people I know. Not Ed, though. But a lot of others.”

  “Harbingers,” Tom said to her. “The Time of the Crossing is coming near.” He saw Stidge turn to Tamale and tap his forehead and make a circle in the air with his fingers. Well, that was Stidge. Tom said, “I get the visions all the time. Do you ever see the green world? And the world of the nine suns?”

  “And there’s one with a red sun and a blue one too,” she said, sounding excited. “It’s all coming back to me now. I thought I had lost them, but no, I can find them in my mind now. Why is that? That stuff was gone. But I remember a big blue sun sizzling in the sky—shining cities that looked like floating bubbles—”

  “Yeah,” Charley said. “I know that one. I heard about it from Tom. That’s the Loollymoolly planet, right, Tom?”

  “Luiiliimeli,” Tom said. He felt excited too, now. Maybe Charley wouldn’t kill them after all, now that he had found out that the woman had the dreams too. Charley could get interested in people, and that made a difference sometimes. Tom said to the woman, “What other places have you seen? Was there one where the whole sky was filled with light just radiating down from all over?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s one of those too. And—”

  “It’s getting late,” Charley said. Charley’s eyes looked dark and hooded suddenly, and his voice was flat. Tom knew that look and that voice. Chilly look, scary voice. “We been having a nice talk here, haven’t we? But it’s getting late.”

  He’s going to kill them anyway, Tom thought. No matter what.

  It was no good, this killing. All this killing had to stop. He had already explained that to Charley. The Time of the Crossing was too close at hand now. It wasn’t fair to deprive anybody of their chance to go to the stars, now that the Time of the Crossing was almost here.

  Charley turned and said, “Stidge—Mujer—”

  “Wait,” Tom said. He had to do something, he knew, right now, right this minute. “Here. Here. It’s starting to come on. I feel the rush beginning.”

  He had never faked a vision before. He hoped he’d be able to bring it off.

  Charley said, “Save it, Tom. We got things to do.”

  “But this one’s special, what I’m seeing,” he said, begging for time. That was all he could do now, beg for time and hope for something to happen. “The whole sky is moving! You see the stars? They’re drifting around like goldfish up there.” He threw his head back and waved his arms around and tried to look ecstatic, hoping he might somehow bring a real vision on. But nothing was coming. Desperately he said, forcing it, “Can you see the Kusereen princes? They move freely through the Imperium. They don’t need spaceships or anything. It would take too long, getting from world to world by spaceships, but they understand how to make the Crossing, you know? All of them do. They can leave their bodies behind and enter into whatever kind of body the host world has.”

  “Tom—”

/>   “This woman here, this Allie. She’s really Zygerone, Charlie. She’s a Blade of the Imperium. And the man, he’s a Kusereen Surveyor. They’re visiting us, preparing us for the Crossing. I can feel their inner presences” Tom felt himself beginning to tremble. He was at the edge of believing his own story. The man and the woman were staring at him, astounded, bewildered. He wanted to wink at them and tell them to go along with everything, but he didn’t dare. Words poured from his lips. “I’ve felt the consciousnesses of these two many times, Charley. She’s a true Fifth Zygerone herself, even though consciously right now she doesn’t really have access to her own identity. They lock it away, so they don’t get into trouble. And him, I can’t even begin to tell you what he is, he’s so powerful in the Kusereen hierarchy. I tell you, we’re in the presence of great beings here. And it could even be that the whole destiny of the human race is going to be settled right out here on this road tonight and—”

  “Shit, just listen to him,” Mujer said.

  Charley said, “Take him back into the van. Nicholas, Buffalo. Don’t hurt him any, just take him in there, keep him occupied. Go on. Go on, now.”

  “Wait,” Tom said. “Please. Wait.”

  Suddenly there was a droning noise in the sky.

  “Christ,” Mujer said, “what’s that? Helicopter?”

  Tom blinked and stared. A dark gleaming shape hovered above them, descending gently.

  “Son of a bitch,” Charley muttered.

  “Cops?” Buffalo asked.

  Charley glared at him. “You going to stay around to ask them? We got to scatter. Scatter. Into the woods, every which way. Go on, run! Run, you idiots!”

  The scratchers disappeared into the dusk as the helicopter floated down to land by the side of the road. Tom stood still, watching it in fascination. He heard Charley yelling to him from somewhere in the woods but he paid no attention. The helicopter was small and sleek. It bore the words Nepenthe Center Mendocino County along its glossy pearl-colored sides in bright blue lettering.