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.
A hatch opened and two men jumped out, then a woman, then a third man. “All right, Ed,” one of them said. “Alleluia. It’s time to go home now.”
“For the love of suffering Jesus,” the man named Ed said. “You been flying all over the county after us?”
The woman said, “It’s not all that hard tracing you. You’ve both got homing-vector chip implants, you know. I guess you forgot that, right?”
“Jesus,” Ed muttered. “They pick you, how can you win?” He swung about and started toward the woods in a hopeless hobbling clumsy way. When he had gone eight or nine steps he tripped over his own crutch and went sprawling and lay there cursing and pounding his fist against the ground. The woman and one of the men went to him, helped him up, began leading him toward the helicopter.
The woman named Allie did not move at all at first. Tom had expected her to try to escape into the forest too, but she stood as though she had been turned into a statue. And when she did move it was not away from the people who had come to get her but straight toward them, with amazing speed. She was on them in an instant. She knocked one of the men almost to the far side of the road with one swipe of her arm and seized the other one around the neck.
“Okay,” she said. “You leave us the hell alone,” she said, “or I’ll pull his head off, you hear? Now take your hands off Ferguson. You hear me, Lansford? Let go of him.”
“Sure, Alleluia,” said the man who was holding the man with the injured foot. He stepped away from Ed, and so did the woman on the other side of him. “No problem,” the man said. “You see? Nobody’s holding Mr. Ferguson.”
“All right,” Allie said. “Now I want you to get into that helicopter of yours and take yourselves right back to—”
“Alleluia?” said the woman.
“Don’t talk to me, Dante. Just do what I say.”
“Absolutely,” the woman named Dante said. She brought her hand up and something bright flashed in it, and the woman named Allie made a soft little sound and fell to the ground.
Tom said, “Did you kill her?”
“Anesthetic pellet. She’ll be asleep about an hour, time enough to get her back and cooled off. Who are you?”
“Tom’s my name. Poor Tom. Hungry Tom. You’re from the center? Where people go to rest and be soothed?”
“That’s right,” the woman said.
“I want to go there. That’s where I need to go. You’ll take Tom with you, won’t you? Poor Tom? Hungry Tom? Tom won’t hurt anyone. Tom’s been with the scratchers long enough.” They were staring at him. He smiled. “That’s their van, the scratchers. Charley and his boys. They all ran off into the forest, but they aren’t far away. They thought you were the police. When you go they’ll come back for me if you leave me. I’ve been with them long enough. They hurt people sometimes, and I don’t like that. Tom’s hungry. Tom’s going to be cold, out here by himself. Please? Please?”
3
For a little while that morning, while she was trying to get ready for the meeting with Kresh and Paolucci, Elszabet had seriously considered asking to undergo mindpick herself. That was how scary it had been, coming up out of the Green World dream and discovering that vestiges of the strangeness were still clinging to her, a dream that would not go away.
Of course, pick really wasn’t an available option, and she knew that. Nobody on the staff had ever been picked: it was strictly for patients only. You didn’t just reach for pick the way you might for a martini or a tranquilizer whenever you felt the need to mellow yourself out. Setting someone up for pick was a big deal involving weeks of testing, fitting the electroneural curves just right so no damage would be done. Pick was supposed to be a therapeutic process, not a destructive one. When chopping away at somebody’s memory-banks, you had to be sure you chopped only at the pathological stuff, and that required elaborate prepick measuring and scanning.
All the same, the moment of awakening had been so terrifying for her that she had simply wanted to unhappen the dream as fast as she could, by any means available. Get it out of her mind, obliterate it, forget it forever.
What was frightening about the dream was how beautiful it had been.
Seductive, that cool green fog-wrapped world. Irresistible, those elegant shimmering many-eyed people. Delicious, the intricate baroque dance of their daily existence. Those magnificently civilized beings, moving gracefully through lives untouched by conflict, ugliness, decay, despair: a civilization millions of years beyond all the nasty grubby sweaty little flaws of human existence, all those disagreeable things like aging and disease and jealousy and covetousness and war. Having once plunged into that world, Elszabet did not want to leave. Awakening had been like the expulsion from Eden.