Suddenly restless, she stirred, turned, sighed. Through the greenness she was able to glimpse a distant beacon of hard yellow light, and that bright beam aroused dismay in her and a kind of vague fear. A voice within her urged her to pull back, and after a moment she recognized the voice as her own. You must be careful, she told herself. Do you know where you are going? Do you know what will happen to you there? How tempting this is. How seductive. But be careful, Elszabet. If you get too far in, there may be no coming out again.
Or has that already happened? Perhaps you are already in too deep. Perhaps there will be no coming forth. She touched the poem again, and again green light leaped from it, and the poet smiled, and the crystallines applauded and whispered her name. How green everything is, Elszabet thought. How beautiful. How green, how green, how green.
2
So now they were going to kill again.
Tom stayed calm about that. You travel with killers, you have to expect them to do some killing. Still and all, he didn’t particularly like it. Thou shalt not kill, the Bible said, right out front. Thou shalt do no murder, said Jesus. You couldn’t argue with commandments like that. Of course in wartime those commandments were suspended. You could make out a pretty fair case, Tom told himself, that these days it’s a kind of wartime, every man’s hand lifted against all others. Maybe.
He sat hunched up in the front of the van, looking at Rupe’s body on the back seat. Rupe seemed to be asleep. His eyes were closed; his big meaty face was peaceful. His head lolled forward a little. You could practically hear him snoring. Mujer and Charley had propped him up in a sitting position back there, and Stidge had draped an old blanket across his lap to hide the laser burn that went through his shirt and his gut and out through his back. You looked at him, you thought he was asleep. Well, Rupe had never had much to say even when he was alive.
And now they were going off to kill again. A life for a life: two for one, in fact. No, it wasn’t that, Tom thought. Not just revenge. They were going to kill because that was the only way they could feel safe: with those two gone. In wartime you have to eliminate your enemies.
Maybe they won’t be able to find them, the two farm kids, Tom thought. The city has a million alleyways, a million basements. Those two kids could be hiding anywhere. They had a five-minute head start, didn’t they? Well, two or three minutes, anyway. So maybe they’ll get away. It was a shame to have more killing now, when the Last Days were so near, when the Crossing was almost about to begin. You die now, you miss out on the Crossing. What a pity that would be, to have to rot here in the soil of Earth with all the other dead ones from before, when everyone else was setting out on his way across the heavens. To miss out, right at the last minute. Those poor kids.
“Rupe?” Tom said. “Hey, you, Rupe?”
Very quiet back there. Tom took out his finger-piano, played a few random notes up and down the scale, hunting around for a tune.
“You mind if I sing, Rupe?”
Rupe didn’t seem to mind.
“Okay,” Tom said. And he sang:
“You ever hear that one, Rupe? I guess you never did. I guess you never will.”
He heard what sounded like someone rapping on the far side of the van. He didn’t bother to look. Back so soon, Charley? Tom shrugged and went on singing:
The rapping again, louder. A voice, angry. “Open the goddamned window, will you? You hear me, open up!”
Frowning, Tom leaned over and peered out. He saw a stranger out there, a short man with curling golden hair and a short frizzy golden beard and cold blue eyes. The stranger looked bothered about something. Tom wondered what to do. You stay here with the van, Charley had said. Don’t open it for nobody.
Tom smiled and nodded and moved away from the window. He started to feel a vision coming on. The usual roaring sound deep down in his mind, the whistling of the wind. The light of strange suns was kindled in his mind, blue, white, orange.
He still could hear the angry voice, though. “You move this van or I’ll blow it away,” the golden-haired man was saying. He pounded on the metal door, hard. “Who the hell said you could park here? Where’s your goddamn permit? Hey, you ain’t even got a license, this van. Will you open the fuck up?”
“Here is the Magister of the Imperium now,” Tom said sweetly. “That shining, that glow hovering there. You can’t see him, can you? Them, really. He’s a corporate entity, three souls in one. Can you feel the power? A Magister like that, he has the power to loose and bind. They tell the tale among the Sorgaz warriors that at the time of the Theluvara withdrawal, the Great Abdication, a Magister of the Imperium was all that stood between the Sorgaz and the Fount of Force, and they would have been engulfed except for—oh, look at the colors, will you? Look there!”
“I can’t hear what you’re saying, you fucking idiot. Open the goddamn window, you want to talk to me.”
Tom smiled. Tom said nothing. Tom was moving farther and farther away every moment. The angry voice went on and on.
“—under powers vested in me, City and County of San Francisco, Vigilante Street Authority, I declare this van in violation of Civic Code article 117 and I herewith—”
Then another voice, a familiar one.
“All right, fellow. We was just about to move along. My friend in here, he’s not permitted to drive, medical reasons. Neither of them.”
Charley.
Tom struggled back to awareness of the world about him. The pulsing blue sun faded, the white, the orange.
“It’s okay,” Charley said. “You can let us in, Tom.”
Tom saw Mujer and Stidge standing next to Charley. Across the street were Nicholas, Choke, Tamale, Buffalo. They had two other men with them, young-looking ones, pale, frightened-looking ones. The kids from the farm. Too bad, Tom thought. Too bad.
Uncertainly Tom said, “This man, he was banging on the van. I wasn’t sure—”
“It’s okay,” Charley said. “Just open up.”
Tom wondered why Charley didn’t open the door himself. He had the key, didn’t he? But Charley was starting to look impatient. Tom reached across and threw the latch, and when the door slid back Charley jumped out of the way and Mujer and Stidge grabbed the golden-haired man quickly under his arms and pushed him inside, throwing him face down on the floor. “What the hell,” the golden-haired man said, his voice muffled. “I’m an officer of the San Francisco Vig—”
Stidge hit him on the back of the head with something and he was quiet.
Then the others were piling into the van too, Charley and Nicholas and Choke, Tamale and Buffalo, and the two boys from the farm. “Okay, come on, move it, Mujer!” Charley snapped. “We can’t stay here.” Mujer jumped behind the wheel and the van went floating off quickly down the middle of the street.
“What did he want?” Charley asked Tom. “What was he trying to tell you?”
“I’m not sure,” Tom said. “Something about parking here. And not having a license. He was banging on the door, but you said not to let anyone in, and then you came back and—”