Текст книги "Gypsies"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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3

Laura slept downstairs that night, with Emmett.

The affair was on-again, off-again, usually at Laura’s call. Emmett was almost pathologically easygoing about relationships. If Laura wanted to be his lover, fine. If she had something else to do or somebody else to see, well, he could live with that, too.

It was not an unhealthy attitude—it pretty much mirrored her own approach—but it lacked something in the way of passion.

But tonight she needed his warmth. She lay beside him in his bed, a beat-up four-poster he had acquired at a junk shop in Pueblo de Los Angeles, cradled in this outrageous down-filled mattress. They had made love and now the bedroom was dark and cool, a comforting place. Sometimes she liked to imagine Emmett’s bed as a sailing ship drifting out to sea, timbers creaking. She thought that was a fine way to fall asleep.

Emmett sat up, lit a joint, offered it to her. She toked, but only lightly. She was afraid it might make her paranoid. It was good, though, to take the rough edges off things. Tonight she wanted gentility, calm, ease.

Outside the bamboo blinds there was darkness and the sound of the tide coming in. Emmett’s big hand moved in time, stroking her shoulder. The sheet on Emmett’s bed was light and cool as rain. Emmett toked deeply; she saw the tip of the joint flare in the darkness.

She said, not exactly meaning to, “What would you think if I went away?”

Emmett, whose reaction time was glacial even when he was not stoned, thought it over. Eventually he said, “Where are you going? How long?”

She moved her hand through the bristly hair on his chest. “Can’t say where. Maybe for a while.”

“Long time?”

“Could be long. What would you say?”

“I would ask,” Emmett said thoughtfully, “whether you were coming back.”

“Coming back probably for sure.” She added, “You’re dodging the question.”

“You know the answer.” He sat cross-legged, and she admired the way the trickle of moonlight played over the exposed ridge of his hips. Pale flesh like distant mountains. He said, “I’d miss you ’til you came back.”

It should have pleased her. Oddly, it didn’t. She was annoyed both with Emmett and with herself. What did she want him to say? “I can’t live without you”? “Stay or I’ll shoot myself”? She had cultivated a certain kind of relationship with him and she could hardly complain if he cooperated in it.

But (the irritation peaking now) it was not just Emmett, it was everything, Turquoise Beach, her life here. Karen’s visit had jogged too many old memories. Laura had arrived here straight out of the heady psychedelic whirl of Berkeley at the end of the sixties, and Turquoise Beach had seemed like a distant colony, a gentler outpost of that same dizzying empire. And yet. And yet. In those days she had been full of energy, obsessed with the idea of going beyond, further, deeper. Since then, imperceptibly, by inches, her life had slowed. The final revelation, what they used to call the White Light in her sophomore LSD sessions, remained always out of grasp. And so the fervor cooled. Life became merely pleasant.

Her sometimes affair with Emmett was pleasant. It would always be pleasant. But Karen was—and this had taken Laura by surprise—a chastening example. Karen had showed up with her compulsive conformity, her exaggerated regard for the “normal,” her fears all intact; but Laura saw the way she cared for her son—cared for him profoundly, wordlessly, wholeheartedly—and understood that her own passions were trivial by comparison; that her idea of love was something truncated and selfish. Karen loved Michael in a way that was genuinely beyond, further, deeper.

She felt a wave of vertigo from Emmett’s highly potent grass. The bed seemed to rotate backward. The night had closed in, suddenly, like a wall.

Love, she thought, is a very dangerous thing.

Emmett stretched out, moving toward sleep. He turned his head against the pillow. “You know,” he said distantly, “Mike was right… you are kinda spooky.”

But time passed, a week, ten days, and she began to think she had been unnecessarily alarmed, unreasonably paranoid… until the evening Michael came home ashen-faced and said he had seen the Gray Man out along the beach.

Chapter Seven

“Who is he?” Michael couldn’t restrain the question any longer. “Where does he come from?”

But his mother and his aunt only exchanged furtive glances, as if to acknowledge some mutual guilt, a contract whose terms had come due at last.

He had climbed up the bluffs once again, the same place he’d talked to his aunt a couple of weeks back.

Michael understood why she liked this place. Turn one direction and you could see Turquoise Beach laid out between its hills in clean, logical blocks. Turn back and there was the ocean, sunlight glinting off the whitecaps. The height made everything seem far away and very still, very schematic.

Today even the air was calm. He stationed himself so that he could see the sandier part of the beach north of here, where a few people had laid out towels to catch this burst of late October sunlight. He watched the distant shapes of their sand-colored bodies and plucked out aimless tunes on the flat-top Gibson. He was a little more nimble-fingered now; he’d been practicing every day. He played Beatles tunes and thought with some amusement how impressed Emmett would be. Hey, he thought, if we stay here I’ll be a songwriter; I’ll call myself Lennon McCartney.

He had been exercising his other talent, too, these last few weeks.

Laura had taught him a lot. She had shown him the importance of discipline, control. “You have a great talent,” she had said, “in the raw, but you have to learn to focus it—to aim it. It’s the difference between going where you want to go and being tossed around in a storm. You have to know where you’re going and you have to know how to get back.”

She was with him the first time he made a door. In an angle of beach between two big stones Michael opened a passage and held it open while the two of them stepped through. Stepped from Turquoise Beach into the deserted shore he had glimpsed through the window of his fingers, seal herds moving in dark masses along the sand. He came into the sunshine with Laura behind him, and the seals looked up all at once, bobbing their heads with a distant, oblique curiosity. Michael understood that no one had ever hunted these animals… knew without thinking about it that this was a planet empty of man.

Laura guided him back, congratulated him, and told him not to do it again.

He was startled. “Why?”

“Because it’s not a toy,” she said. “Because it might be dangerous. And there’s another reason. I don’t know for sure, but I think it might draw attention … I wonder if it isn’t a kind of beacon light.”

Because, Michael thought, unlike the seals, we are being hunted. She didn’t say it but that was what she meant. Someone is hunting us.

Standing on the promontory, alone now, he made a tiny window between his fingers. Surely this would not attract attention?

And he looked between his fingers down at the distant beach and felt a first tentative rush of energy inside him… and then he hesitated.

Something familiar down there…

And in the Circle of his fingers, Michael saw the Gray Man.

The shock was immense. He dropped his hands to his side, wiped them on his jeans as if he had touched something foul. He backed up slowly and then crouched down so the tall grass and the slope of the promontory would hide him.

He crept forward again, sweating.

The Gray Man, Walker, was still there, was down on the beach among the bathers in his gray overcoat and hat like a bad hallucination. Incredibly, no one paid him any attention. He was invisible, Michael guessed. It was magic. Walker could do that—make himself unnoticed in a crowd. None of this seemed unlikely anymore.

And now the Gray Man regarded him across that distance.

Michael felt exposed, naked. He sees me. He realized that Laura had been right, the Gray Man was drawn to his energy, maybe drawn whether he practiced it or not, drawn down through the hidden doors of the world; that he could be evaded but not ultimately escaped. He sees us, Michael thought.

He stood up. There was no longer any reason not to.

A communication had been established now, a contact. He peered down across the rocky beach at the Gray Man and the Gray Man seemed to swell and occupy the whole of his field of vision. Michael imagined he could hear the Gray Man’s voice inside his head, softly insinuating.

You deserve an explanation, the Gray Man said. I can give you that.

No, Michael thought. No bargain. He was being hunted; he knew that now. He would be crazy to accept any kind of offer… he was crazy to be standing here like this, hypnotized.

But the voice was very compelling.

I know you, Michael.

He felt the truth in this.

I know you better than they do.

Walker moved toward the headland now. His motion was cautious, delicate; his eyes were on Michael’s eyes. Even over that distance Michael felt the pressure.

The Gray Man said, Come with me. Where? Michael wondered. Where does he want me to go?

The answer was immediate. He blinked and in the darkness behind his eyelids he saw an ancient industrial town, cobbled streets, tall black buildings, a stone gate engraved with the image of an eye and a pyramid. Well, hell, Michael thought, I could go there if I wanted. He was proud of his new abilities. I could find that place.

We can go there together.

It wasn’t very far…

But he was distracted by a flicker of color on the beach. A little girl ran up from the shore, bright yellow one-piece bathing suit. She ran toward the Gray Man. She can see him, Michael realized. She was something his magic had neglected. She ran toward him and then hunkered down and stared at him, this mystery, the Invisible Man, or at least a man who wasn’t dressed for the beach.

The spell broke as Michael’s attention shifted. He gasped for air, realized that he had been on the verge of a terrible capitulation.

He felt the Gray Man’s irritation radiate up from the shore like a brutal heat. In a gesture that was almost casual, Walker waved his hand at the little girl, and the little girl fell backward out of time: a motion Michael could only barely perceive, out and away into some chaos of possibility. The girl had vanished silently from the beach.

Michael hesitated a second, stunned by what he had seen. It was an act of murder as casual as the swatting of a fly.

He glanced back one more time at the Gray Man —at Walker—then turned to race down the grassy slope of the promontory, past these old whitewashed houses and their winter gardens, Emmett’s guitar banging out crazy discords against his hip.

Far away, he heard a woman’s voice calling a name.

His mother seemed paralyzed by the news. His aunt reacted more swiftly. She bolted the door and instructed Michael to pack his things. “I’ll tell Emmett to lock up downstairs.” And moved off toward the bedroom.

“Aunt Laura?”

She paused to look back.

Michael said, “Who is he?”

Her frown deepened. “We don’t really know. I think… maybe we have to find out.” “We’re leaving in the morning?” “Yes.”

“Where are we going?”

His mother broke the silence. Her eyes looked bruised; her voice was faint.

“A long way,” she said. “Back home.”

Interlude
NOVUS ORDO

1

Cardinal Simon Palestrina—of the Vatican Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and now de facto a legate to the Court of the Novus Ordo– wrapped his cloak against the October wind and grimly regarded the approaching coast of the New World.

The bleakness of the coast was mirrored in the Cardinal’s face. The severity of his expression, the pallor of his cheeks, had won him a reputation as a dour, almost Jesuitical scholar. In fact he was a Manichean Brother, and his countenance derived more from the periodic attacks of gastritis that had marked his entry into middle age than any surmised ecclesiastical purity. His friends were of course aware of it… but Cardinal Palestrina had very few friends. He suffers best, Palestrina often thought, who suffers alone.

For similar reasons, he had kept his own counsel through the course of this long transatlantic journey. In a sane world he would have made the trip by dirigible. The airships had been improved immensely since the days of the Teutonic tragedies. But the Curia was shamefully underbudgeted, even in light of events in the Mediterranean. Vatican conservatism, Palestrina thought dolefully; fear of potential allies … it could lose us this war.

Clutching the rail, he chastised himself with a vision of the Islamic hordes overrunning civilized Europe. A muezzin calling from the cathedral at Orvieto, ulemas hacking off the limbs of honest Christians. And here I stand, he thought, delayed a month on the tarry Madonna of Avignon.

It was not even a new ship. The rigging was ancient, the sails of much-mended hemp; the coal-oil engine belowdecks did more to pollute the immediate environment than to expedite the voyage. Cardinal Palestrina had spent his first week out from Genoa in a condition of relentless, rolling nausea. I will go home, he thought, and there will be wild Moslems in the basilica of St. Peter’s, and I will seek out Fr. Oswaldo of the Funding Subcommittee in whatever dungeon they have clapped him in, and I will say, I told you so.

He relished this fantasy as the Madonna of Avignon entered the windy harbor of Philadelphia.

The city appeared to be everything Cardinal Palestrina had been led to expect of the Americans. The harbor stank. It smelled of dead fish and marshland. Every summer the yellow fever bred in this miasma and ravaged the city. The piers were old, the pilings layered with the dung of the harbor gulls. The distant towers of the city itself rose huge and black, sooty monuments to the industrial supremacy of the Novus Ordo, the New Order of the Americas. How desperately they had striven to emulate the festering valleys of the Rhine and the Rhone, how thoroughly they had succeeded.

Cardinal Palestrina, allowing the other passengers to crowd past him onto the dock, felt a pang of nostalgia for Rome. An old-fashioned city, obviously– it was older by several proud millennia than anything the Americans had built. He thought of the Vatican Garden, the Leonine Wall; he thought of the street sweepers crossing the Giardino della Pigna like an army, leaving the cobbles wet and gleaming in the morning sun…

A marvel. At least when the wind was not running from the Tiber.

But this was not an authentic nostalgia, he told himself, merely a reluctance. He did not relish his work here. He was a scholar, not an Inquisitor. He was only truly at home in the company of books. He had written a hagiography of St. Eustace that the Curia Romana declared “blemishless,” and so he had been deemed trustworthy, bright but essentially incorruptible—or at least doctrinaire—and therefore suitable to carry out an act of ticklish ecclesiastical calculation. Perhaps more important, his English was very good. But the questions at hand were questions of means and ends, heresy and power, war and peace… above all, he thought, good and evil. And the dark powers were dauntingly active nowadays.

The thought was unwelcome. A spasm shot through his belly.

Sighing, Cardinal Palestrina clasped a handkerchief to his nose and descended into the New World.

He was met at the docks by a man named Carl Neumann, who drove an automobile.

The automobile was significant. The Jihadic Wars had interrupted oil traffic through the Persian Gulf; gasoline was prohibitively expensive. The Americans (Palestrina used the archaic term privately) possessed their own oilfields, of course. And their endless border crises with the Aztecs often involved mineral rights. Still, even here, an automobile was a rare indulgence.

Especially an automobile like this, large and low, immensely heavy—a kind of land boat. Palestrina, impressed in spite of himself, stowed his two small black bags in the auto’s capacious trunk and climbed in beside Neumann. The smell of upholstery was sharp and oppressive.

Neumann said, “We’re pleased you could make the trip, Your Eminence.”

Palestrina understood instantly that Neumann was one of those government functionaries who would refer to himself constantly in the plural. Neumann wore a blue tailored suit, a narrow black tie, a fedora. They shook hands; Neumann engaged the engine. Periodically, as they worked their way south through a crush of horse-drawn trucks and cabriolets, Neumann glanced over at Cardinal Palestrina’s black robes. Palestrina supposed this was the Waldensian legacy the Secretariat had warned him about: this mixture of curiosity and disdain. Annoying but, in its own way, useful. It would keep him on guard. It would remind him that he had entered a foreign country.

Not that he was likely to forget. Within the hour they had won through to a paved road leading south from the city; the forest closed around them. The Great Forest of the New World, Palestrina thought. It was legendary. Savages had lived here once. The automobile sped between endless aisles of trees. The clouds opened to show a gaudy sunset; the night came on quickly. The shadows behind the automobile seemed suddenly very dense, and Palestrina thought about wood sprites, elementals. But those were wholly European terrors—he had read that somewhere. In the New World the dangers were mainly secular.

Neumann spoke into the silence: “I’ll be your liaison for the duration of your stay here, Your Eminence. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to having me around.”

He smiled. Palestrina did not.

Neumann went on, “I can’t help but wonder about your name. Are you related to, uh, the famous Palestrina?”

“You mean the Palestrina who wrote the Marcellus Mass?” “That’s right.”

“Are you a historian, Mr. Neumann?”

“Music lover,” Neumann said modestly. “I collect records. It was the Missa Papae Marcelli that settled the issue of music in the liturgy, right?” Added, “A terrific piece. Very moving.”

Cardinal Palestrina disapproved of the secular recording of liturgical music. Though he himself did own one recording, Giovanelli’s Jubilate Deo on a Spanish lacquer disk, a secret love: he played it on his tiny electrical Victrola. “No,” he said primly. “No relation.”

Neumann seemed disappointed.

Palestrina said, “I’m really very tired. If you could tell me where you’re taking me—?”

“I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I assumed you’d been briefed. We’ll be in Washington by midnight. There’s a hotel room for you and I’ll be your guide, your contact, whatever. Then, of course, you’re looking at a daily commute to the Defense Research compound. There are people there you’ll need to meet …”

“We’ll be driving five more hours?”

“Afraid so, Your Eminence.”

God help me. “And then,, in Washington, I’ll be allowed to see him?”

“See whom, Your Eminence?”

“This prodigy, of course. This monster you’ve created. The man who walks between worlds.”

The silence in the automobile was brief but intense. The wheels ground against pavement. The headlamps played over deep grottoes of autumn woodland.

Neumann said, “Why, I assume so, Your Eminence.”

2

Cardinal Palestrina’s personal encounters with evil had been very limited.

Nevertheless he had a great respect for evil. Evil, this last century, had been what the Americans would call a growth stock. No one seemed exempt from it. Even the Church—he allowed himself a mildly blasphemous thought—even the Church had committed acts that might be called excessive. The Teutonic Inquisition, its oppression of the Jews and the Poles, doctrine wielded for political ends while Rome herself stood mute…

But that was history. History was replete with oppression. More important was that, lately, Christendom itself seemed threatened. Islam had swept like a brushfire through northern Africa, fomenting revolution against the Dutch, the French, the British; the Russians were battling rebellious Moslems on their southern borders. The Oriental races had evicted the military forces of the Novus Ordo from their Pacific outposts and banned commerce with the West. There were small wars everywhere and larger ones seemed inevitable.

All the portents were ominous. On Palm Sunday in 1982 the image of the Prince of Darkness had appeared in a cloud of trichlorophenol above San Pietro in Vincoli—hundreds had been hospitalized. This last Christmas, a rain of doves had fallen on the Palazzo Venezia. Sicily had nearly succumbed to the Turkish fleet; the Mediterranean was endangered; troops had been mustered throughout Italy and Spain. The situation was desperate, or why would he have been sent here, eking out this dubious liaison with the Americans on the chance that they might in fact have produced a secret weapon?

Because, Palestrina thought, for all their naive Protestantism and unrepentant superstition, they are more like us than the Arabs. Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitude-. It went without saying. Also: politics makes strange bedfellows.

He slept a little in the automobile. When he stepped out into the fierce artificial light of the hotel vestibule he felt permanently bruised. His spine shrieked in pain. Neumann, perversely, was as fresh as ever. He smiled up at Palestrina through the window of the automobile like the framed painting of an especially insolent harlequin. “Can I see you to your room?”

“I’ll find it myself.”

“I’ll be by tomorrow to pick you up. I imagine you can use the rest.”

“Thank you,” Cardinal Palestrina said dryly.

The hotel—it was called Waterwheel or Waterfall or some such fanciful name—overlooked the Potomac. It was in the Gothic style that had been so popular a half-century ago, a maze of courtyards and false spires. He checked in, rode the lurching elevator to the fifteenth floor, opened the door to a roomful of stale air, and collapsed into the bed. He slept without changing his clothes.

He woke in the dark hours before morning. He had slept deeply but briefly and he felt as exhausted as ever, dead in spirit. He offered a silent prayer and washed his face in the echoing tiled bathroom.

Feeling claustrophobic, he opened the curtains. Across the black gap of the Potomac he could see this American city breathing flame from its night foundries, sooty and dark. He pulled up a chair and sat drinking tap water from a hotel glass. The glass had been wrapped in paper: a novelty. So many new things. It occurred to him then that he was old… for the first time in his life, he felt old. As if to underscore the point, his belly clenched in a spasm.

He was old and he had never been so far from home.

So far from God.

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

But here, he thought unhappily, I am the Church.

He glanced at the phosphorescent hands of the bedside clock. It was 4:20 a.m. He felt bereft, spiritually empty. He put the glass on the windowsill; his head nodded forward.

He blinked, and suddenly it was dawn; the window was full of light and Carl Neumann was hammering at the door.