“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 injured 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.