Текст книги "Gypsies"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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Chapter Twenty

“Maybe,” Laura said, “he went out for a walk.”

Which was at least plausible. It was obvious from the state of his open suitcase that Michael had dressed before he left. So, Karen thought, yes, that was a possibility. He could have slipped out sometime after dawn. Maybe he would be back.

It was a reassuring idea and at the end of a quarter hour she had almost convinced herself of it, at which point she became aware that the hotel room door was still locked and, worse, still chained—from the inside.

So he had not left the room after all. Not in this world.

Odd that it was possible to be calm at this revelation. She pointed out the chain lock to Laura, who said, “Goddamn,” and punched out a flurry of numbers on the telephone. It was the number Tim had left. “Room 251,” Laura said tightly, and then, after a long pause, “Fauve—Timothy Fauve… He what? Oh, Christ… No. No, that’s all right. Thank you.”

The receiver rattled down.

“He’s gone,” Karen interpreted.

“Checked out this morning. Damn!”

So Michael was gone and Timmy was gone.

They have him now, she thought. He was the one they wanted and they have him now. That’s what this means.

But Michael had only been gone a few hours at most. It was hardly any time. She wanted to reach back for him … unwind the clock until he was here in the room and she could grab him and hold him, hold him so hard that no one could take him away.

“One time,” Karen said, “when Michael was just two years old—it was a couple of days after his birthday—I had him in a stroller and I was doing some shopping. We were downtown. It was almost Christmas; the stores were crowded. I was bending over a shelf and my back was to him. I was looking for that scented soap I used to send Mama every year—she loved that soap so much—but they didn’t have it, so I was picking through the merchandise. It was like, well, there must be just one, it must be behind something. So I spent a lot of time rooting around, with these crowds just pushing past me. And they still didn’t have what I wanted. So finally I stood up and I looked for the stroller. But it was gone. Gone with Michael in it. And I didn’t panic. I just went cold. It was like the bottom had gone out of everything. I was dizzy but I was very systematic. I called out for him. I asked people, ‘Did you see a stroller—a yellow flowered stroller?’ And I worked my way down the aisle.

And then I saw it. It was like radar—I picked out that stroller in the crowd. It was way off down by the escalators. My heart started to beat hard. I ran over there. I pushed people out of the way—I didn’t care. It was like the hundred-yard dash.

“And when I got there it was just this very confused old woman pushing Michael around. She had spotted the stroller and grabbed hold of it. She thought she was back in 1925 or something. I pried her hands off the push bar and she just looked at me, and there was such confusion and, I guess, grief in that look, I couldn’t be angry. Five seconds earlier I was ready to tear her apart. But I just said, ‘I’ll take care of him now,’ and she said, ‘Oh. Well, all right. Thank you,’ and went wandering down the escalator.

“But what I remember is that run. Spotting his stroller and just going full tilt after it. Nothing mattered but getting there. I’d never run like that before. Never in my life. But I wish—”

She faltered suddenly.

“I wish,” she said, “I could run like that again.” Laura said gently, “Maybe you can. Maybe you have to.”

Karen looked at her sister, trying to make sense of this.

“Maybe he left here on his own,” Laura said, “or maybe he was taken. Either way … I don’t think we have any choice but to follow him.”

“Follow him where?”

“The most obvious place would be the world Tim was talking about. The Novus Ordo. But that’s hardly specific. We have to know where he went—we have to feel it.”

“Can you do that?”

“No. I want to! I’ve been trying. But it’s like trying to follow smoke—I can feel him but it just goes away into the air.” She focused on Karen. “Maybe you can do it.”

But that was absurd, Karen thought. I don’t have any talent at all. She told her sister so.

Laura said, “Karen, I know better. I know you’ve been trying to live a certain kind of life. And I know it’s been a long time. But you were as strong as I ever was—all those years ago.”

“We were kids!”

“It doesn’t change.”

“It does change!”

“You tell yourself that. But it was only ever a lie. Karen, do you understand what I’m saying? Because this is important. If you don’t at least try to do this– well, maybe we’ve lost him. The Gray Man wins. Maybe we don’t get him back ever.”

And Karen thought, My firstborn son. Michael!

But I can’t, she thought. Laura is mistaken. It’s been too long.

But she sat in the silent hotel room with her sister’s eyes on her, and all she could think about was that sprint, running after the stroller, Michael lost in the crowd. She had found him then. And how good it had felt—to run.

Michael? she thought. Was he out there now? Was it really possible to reach for him, to find him?

She felt a faint, sudden electricity … a kind of dizziness, as if the room had fallen away around her.

But that was bad. She knew that for a fact. It would be very bad to allow this back into her life, to give in to it now, to do the wrong thing. She thought of Willis Fauve. She saw his face in her mind, and it was the way he had looked twenty years ago, cropped hair still dark, his eyes like rain clouds under those huge brows. A bad and dangerous thing.

But Willis was just scared, Karen thought. Willis was scared and in the end Willis had lost his children: they had run out of his life altogether. And now Karen was scared and Michael was gone. Maybe that was how it worked. Maybe it was inevitable, like a wheel turning.

All these thoughts flashed through her mind. But he’s out there, she thought. That was the fact of it.

He’s out there and maybe Laura’s right: maybe I can find him.

So she closed her eyes and put away the thought of Willis once and for all and opened herself in a way she had almost forgotten. All you have to do is look, she thought. Worlds out there like petals on a flower. How long since she had done this last? A quarter of a century? But it was easy, and maybe that was the essential secret she had kept from herself all these years—the easiness of it.

And oh, Karen thought, how much she had forgotten.

Energy coursed through her body. Doors and windows, she thought, like a prism, like peering into a kaleidoscope and seeing it shift and change with every motion of your wrist. Every shard of colored glass a door, every door a world. And through one of them she would find Michael. She would spot him from a distance. She would run.

He had passed this way not long ago. Her eyes were squeezed tight, but she saw a city, a dark complex of winding, snowbound streets, pale sunlight filtered through massed clouds, noisy automobiles and horses breathing steam.

She saw a dark building behind dark stone walls. Instinctively, she reached out for Laura. “Take my hand,” she whispered. “Now! I don’t know how much longer I can do this!”

Felt Laura’s fingers twine into hers.

It was as simple, she thought, as stepping over a threshold. You moved—but it was not quite a motion —in a certain direction—but it was not exactly a direction. Here and here and here. And then—

The cold air bit into her skin. She opened her eyes and saw the stone walls, prosaic and quite real, right in front of her. The walls were high and unassailable. But Michael was behind them. She could feel it. And she was lucky. The big iron gate was standing open.

Chapter Twenty-one

1

Cardinal Palestrina was awakened at dawn by the brash clattering of the telephone. Disoriented, he scrambled the receiver to his ear. The hotel switchboard announced Carl Neumann. “Put him through,” Palestrina said wearily. Neumann’s voice across the telephone exchange was shrill, piercing. “It’s happening,” he was saying. You should be here as soon as you can.” Palestrina sat up. “So soon?” “Right now, Your Eminence. As I speak.” The boy?”

“The boy. And not only the boy.”

Plucked out of thin air, Palestrina thought dazedly. From a world beyond the world’s edge. It was—in its own way—a sort of miracle. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“Excellent,” Neumann said.

Cardinal Palestrina dressed hastily and drew a heavy fur coat around himself as he left the room. He stopped in the hotel lobby to buy a coffee in a waxed-cardboard cup—so hot it scalded his lips—and then hailed a taxi from the icy margin of the street.

2

Laura could not say just when or how she became separated from her sister.

It simply should not have been possible. The words repeated in her head like a cracked record: not possible. They had been together… she had been holding Karen’s hand. It was like that time back in Pittsburgh when they followed Tim into what she guessed now was some distant corner of the Novus Ordo. They were like kids, clinging to each other.

After they arrived here they had moved through the snow to the black iron gates of this ugly building through the long morning shadows across the courtyard. Michael was inside, Karen said. Laura couldn’t feel it but she took her sister at her word. Find him and get out, she thought. Because we can do that: we can step sideways out of here anytime we feel like it.

It was a reassuring idea.

But then, if that was true, why hadn’t Michael come home? How had they contrived to hold him?

But it was an unanswerable question. Just push on, she thought. On down these twining corridors now, corridors like the roots of some immense old tree reaching deep into the earth. The air was stale and smelled like anesthetic, with some cloying scent laid over that, like cloves. Turn and turn and turn in the dim light. It became automatic.

And then she paused and looked for Karen and Karen wasn’t with her.

The loss troubled her, but maybe not as much as it should have. She moved on in spite of it… not quite aimlessly, but without any goal she could name. It just happened. It was like sleepwalking. She felt asleep. She felt drugged.

That was it, Laura told herself: it was like being under the influence of some drug, not a mind drug or a stimulant but some sleepy narcotic, something syrupy and potent, the way she imagined opium must be. She moved down these antiseptic drab tiles thinking, This way to the Emerald City… through the poppy field…

The corridor narrowed until it was only a little wider than her body.

A bell was ringing somewhere. An alarm bell, Laura thought. Some sort of emergency in progress. But she ignored it, walking.

And then the corridor came to an end and there was only a room, a last windowless cul-de-sac revealed dimly through a final archway; and Laura thought, Why, this must be what I want, this is where I meant to go.

She stepped through the narrow doorway and saw a woman.

It took her by surprise. The woman looked so utterly ordinary. She was an ordinary middle-aged woman in familiar clothes, Levi’s and a loose blouse, dressed maybe too young for her age. Her hair was graying faintly and the expression on her face was? poignant, Laura thought, a mixture of bewilderment and longing. This woman, she thought, must have lost her way somehow.

But then Laura took a second step into the room —and so did the woman—and she realized that the far wall was in fact a mirror and that this sad middle-aged person was herself.

Her knees felt suddenly weak. Not me! she thought. That’s not me, I’m not like that at all! I’m the pretty one, she thought—and, incidentally, what am I doing here, and where is everybody? Where was Karen, where was Michael?

She wanted to turn away but could not. Instead she took another step forward (and so did that sad bewildered reflection) and she turned and saw—to her horror—that the side walls were mirrored, too, and facing each other at a canted angle, so that there were suddenly more images of herself than she could tolerate, an infinity of them, multiplied down dark mirrored aisles, all of them staring back at her with this same dumbfounded expression. Not me, she thought again, none of them are me, and she raised her hands as if to push them away, as if they were physical bodies crowding in around her. She wanted to leave… but she was, mysteriously, too weak to move; the door was. too far away. They can’t keep us here, she thought, and groped for a secret way out, a route back to San Francisco and the sunlight, a hidden door or private window.

But there were none. No doors or windows or angles here. Only the mirrors, like wells, drawing her down. She felt a surge of claustrophobic terror and saw the mirror-woman staring back at her wide-eyed, mouth opening in a scream; realizing all at once that she was trapped, that there was no way out and nobody here but herself.

3

Cardinal Palestrina joined Carl Neumann in his office in the Defense Research Institute. The room was crowded. There was a man Cardinal Palestrina identified as a Pentagon bureaucrat—Neumann’s superior. There were three of the Institute’s seers, dwarfish creatures in cheap cotton smocks. There were two of the men Neumann called scientists, whom Palestrina preferred to think of as mages: the men who had cast the binding spells.

The sense of excitement in the room was palpable. It showed, especially, in Neumann. This was his I triumph, the gratification he had deferred for too many decades. His face was flushed; his eyes darted around the room as if he were memorizing it, every detail of this day, the people present, their expressions. He looked at Palestrina and then approached him.

Palestrina said, “The boy is here already?”

“We’ve had him in containment for hours.” Neumann grinned. “And the boy seems to have attracted the others. Bees to honey. It’s all coming together.”

“When can we see him?”

“Soon. We’re waiting here until everything is in place. We have spells and geases twenty years in the making—and they’re all coming to a peak, right here, right now. God, you can feel it in the air.”

Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could. The air smelled odd, as if it had been singed in some vast, hot machine.

Neumann said, “We’re just waiting for word from our seers.”

The seers—the three dwarfish beings, who from the knotted closeness of their features must have been homunculi—sat staring into space. There was one for each of the three, Neumann said, Karen and Laura and Michael, each one linked in tandem to its subject. One of the creatures yawned and stretched as Cardinal Palestrina watched, and the gesture was so animalistic—so simian—that Palestrina suppressed a shudder.

The homunculus grinned at him from across the room, an animal grin.

Palestrina said to Neumann, “But can you hold them?”

“We’re certain of it. This building is a cage—it’s been designed that way. Since that original escape we’ve contemplated the problem and designed what we believe is an impenetrable barrier. You understand, not a physical barrier.”

“Prison magic,” Palestrina said.

“Exactly.”

“Can you calculate that so precisely?” “We believe so.”

“It’s been said—please don’t take this the wrong way—the Americans have a genius for the profane sciences.”

Neumann was in a generous mood. “But it’s true,” he said. “Look around.”

Cardinal Palestrina drew a second cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. Too much would aggravate his stomach, but he felt he needed the alertness. So much was happening here.

Good things, presumably. After all, Palestrina thought, Neumann’s arguments were hard to dismiss. His amorality was unmistakable, but the American understood the significance of events in the Middle East. A weapon is a weapon, after all. Death, deceit, ravaged innocence: wasn’t that what warfare meant? Cardinal Palestrina had been dispatched by the Vatican to evaluate Neumann’s secret weapon and its utility in war. Also its position in the moral order… but maybe that was finally irrelevant, a luxury the West could ill afford. Is a sword more humane than a bullet, a bullet more godly than a bomb? The news from Sicily was very bad; bad enough, perhaps, to overrule a delicacy concerning means.

But it was impossible to look at these grinning homunculi and white-coated mages without at least a shiver of disquiet.

He found Neumann and said, “Assuming you keep these people… can you guarantee their utility?”

Neumann seemed to resent the distraction. “They can be revised into utility.”

These words, Palestrina thought. These cool, blank, terrifying words. Revised! “You mean surgery.”

“It’s delicate, obviously, but we’re more sophisticated than we were when we intervened with Walker. This is a faculty of the imagination we’re trying to capture. It’s like some fabulous rare butterfly. The trick is to contain it without killing or crippling it. Fortunately there are certain neural functions that can be localized, at least generally. With the right scalpel in the right place you can sever the will from the imagination, cauterize the one without destroying the other. We can make them work for us.”

“But it’s the boy you need… not the others.”

Neumann looked at his watch. “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me the truth.”

Palestrina was surprised by the tenor of authority in his own voice.

Neumann said, “This is not a confessional.”

“You’ll operate on them—you’ll fine-tune your surgical procedures.” (He thought, I know these words, too.) “You’ll mutilate them and then use them or kill them, as it suits you.”

Neumann said, “This tone of yours—look, I don’t appreciate—” He stopped and recovered his composure. Cardinal Palestrina felt something of his own power here: legate from Rome, the ancient Imperium, Old Europe and all that implied. Neumann took a breath and began again: “These are moot questions, Your Eminence, or ought to be. In this kind of enterprise a certain amount of cruelty is built in. We all know that.”

Cruelty and guilt, Palestrina thought. It amounted to Neumann saying, Here is your share.

The door opened then; Walker entered. Cardinal Palestrina flinched away from the man. Walker wore his customary gray clothing and gray slouch hat and was looking at Neumann now with a strange intensity of expectation, as if Neumann had promised him something, a gift, the answer to a question.

Neumann, consulting his seers, turned to the room and smiled. “It’s almost done now… just a few more minutes.”

The homunculi grinned among themselves.

4

Karen was not aware that she had lost her sister, or at least the awareness was not enough to make her hesitate. Her mind was fixed on Michael.

She had seen him.

It happened not very long after they entered this building. The silence of these long stony corridors had been oppressive and she was reluctant to break it; there was only the sound of her footsteps against the ugly green tile… and Laura’s, until those faded. She moved steadily and purposefully, although she had never been here before, as if she possessed an instinct of direction, a cellular map. Michael was here somewhere. She knew it; his presence pervaded the building; the air was full of him. Somewhere very near now.

And then she saw him. She saw him at the end of this corridor, where it branched in an unequal Y to the right and to the left. Seeing him, she gasped and faltered. He looked oddly far away, an image through the wrong end of a telescope. But it was Michael. There was no mistaking his lanky figure, his untucked shirt and his baseball cap. He looked toward her but seemed not to recognize her; and then—agonizingly —he was gone again, retreating to the left.

Karen stumbled, then picked herself up and began to run.

She remembered the story she had told her sister, the old woman wheeling Michael away in his stroller and how she had chased after her. It should have been the same, she thought, this running now, but somehow it was not; there was no pleasure or relief in it; only a grim and breathless determination.

The corridor twisted again and she followed it in a long downward spiral. She could not estimate how far she had come or how far she might yet have to travel. There was only the image of Michael in her mind.

And then the corridor straightened and she saw him again—heartbreakingly, even farther away. “Michael!” She called out his name, and her own voice sounded strange to her, as shocking, in this dim door-less hallway, as a gunshot. “Michael—!”

But he was running… running away from her.

She gasped and began to sprint. She felt a kind of submerged panic, something that would be panic if only she could think more clearly. The important thing—the only thing that mattered now—was to keep him in sight.

She ran as long as she could run. Periodically Michael would stop, look back, and he was too far away for Karen to see the expression on his face, but she was afraid that it was a kind of taunting smile, a way of beckoning her on. It was cruel and she could not understand it. Why would he act like this? What was he thinking?

But there was nothing to do but follow.

When she could not run any longer she careened up against a stone wall. The wall was cold against her shoulder but she couldn’t move, could only huddle against the pain of her struggling lungs. She looked up finally and saw Michael again, closer now, his face unreadable; she staggered forward and saw him sidestep through an archway. It was the only door Karen had seen in this labyrinth and she approached it warily. She understood now that something was wrong, things had gone wrong in a fundamental way, a way she had not foreseen. But here was Michael again —she saw him clearly through the empty doorway– alone in a small room watching her impassively, waiting for her. Karen made a small noise in her throat and stepped inside, reaching out for him.

But it wasn’t Michael after all.

She blinked at the image, which would not focus. Suddenly this was not Michael but, horrifyingly, a thing the size of Michael, but smooth poreless plastic, and she recognized it: it was Baby, it was the doll the Gray Man had given her all those years ago, grotesquely inflated and staring at her through painted china-blue eyes.

Karen bit the heel of her hand and took a step backward.

And then Baby was gone, too, and there was the final image—a fleeting impression—of some wrinkled, shrunken creature grinning madly at her… and then the space was simply empty, vision dispersed like smoke, and she was alone in the room.

She turned to leave. But she was tired. She was as tired as she had ever been in her life, and her feet wouldn’t do what she meant them to do, and so she sat on the cold stone floor and folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes—just for a minute.