Of course there were no such places, she knew, except in the land of dreams. It was pure fantasy, a phantom of the night. Nevertheless she wanted to go back there. It seemed unfair, a brutal imposition, to have to wake up: as cruel as a snowstorm on a summer afternoon.
The powerful pull of the Green World had drained her vitality all morning. Going through her rounds, calling on Father Christie and Philippa and April and Nick Double Rainbow and all the rest, she had been barely able to pay attention to their problems and needs and complaints; her mind kept drifting back to the other place and its dukes and countesses, its parties, its symphonies of form and color and psychological interplay. She had already forgotten the names of those among whom she had moved in her dream, and the details themselves were blurring: they had more than two sexes, she knew, and there was something about a new summer palace, and a poet and his poem. Knowing that she was starting to forget filled her with despair. She grasped at the fading memories. She yearned to go back to that blessed world.
No one had told her that the space dreams were this wondrous. Was it that she had dreamed more intensely than anyone else? Or that they forgot within an hour or two of awakening? Or that they kept the richness and complexity of what they had seen to themselves, a sweet hoarded interior treasure?
Elszabet had feared the dreams before she had ever had one. Now she feared them even more, now that she knew what risk to her sanity they presented. How could she let dreams be the answer? A dream so lovely as that one could beckon her straight into madness, she realized. The edge was always near, perilously near. Dreams were unreal. Dreams were the negation of reality. That land of dreams, the poet had said, so various, so beautiful so new: it really offered neither joy nor love nor light, nor help for pain.
By mid-morning, though, she was beginning to think that she had shaken the dream-world off. She had the distraction of the two visitors, Paolucci from San Francisco and Leo Kresh from San Diego, to draw her back to reality.
Dave Paolucci had arrived with a bunch of charts and graphs showing his latest information on the geographical range of the space dreams, and a packet of cubes containing spoken accounts of them that patients at his center in San Francisco had recorded. Elszabet felt comfortable and assured in Paolucci’s presence. He was a comfortable sort of man, round-faced and sturdy, with dark olive skin and deep-set amiable eyes. She had trained with him in mindpick technique at the San Francisco headquarters before coming up here to Mendocino; in a way Paolucci had been her mentor. Later in the day she intended to tell him about her own dream experience of last night and ask him to counsel her.
Kresh, the San Diego man, was not at all a man to feel comfortable with. Tidy, fastidious, a little on the pedantic side, he seemed in full command of himself and of his emotions and probably did not have a great deal of sympathy for those who were not. It was a considerable concession for him to have traveled this far, seven or eight hundred kilometers, for this meeting. Perhaps he had simply wanted to get out of Southern California, teeming with its multitudes of second-generation Dust War refugees, to spend a few days in the cool clean air of the redwood country. When Elszabet met with him shortly before the general staff meeting was due to begin he showed relatively little interest in what had been going on at Nepenthe; he wanted to tell her instead about some religious phenomenon that was centered in the refugee-inhabited towns surrounding San Diego proper. “You know about tumbondé?” Kresh asked.
“I’m not sure that I do,” she said.
“I’m not surprised. It’s been a purely local San Diego thing. But it isn’t going to be much longer.”
“Tumbondé,” Elszabet said.
“It’s a hybrid Brazilian-African spiritist cult, with some Caribbean and Mexican overtones. A former San Diego taxi driver who calls himself Senhor Papamacer runs it, and there are thousands of followers. They hold ritual ceremonies, apparently pretty wild stuff, in the hills east of San Diego. The essential thing of it is apocalyptic: our present civilization is near its end and we are about to be led to the next phase of our development by deities who will break through to our world from remote galaxies.”
Elszabet managed a smile. She felt a tendril of the Green World brush across her consciousness, and shivered. “These are very strange times. . . ”
“Indeed. There are two notable aspects of tumbondé that are relevant to us, Dr. Lewis. One is that there seems to be a remarkable correlation between the space gods that Senhor Papamacer and his followers invoke and worship and the unusual dreams and visions that have been reported lately by a great many people, both at mindpick centers and in the general population. I mean the imagery appears to be the same: evidently the tumbondé people have been receiving the space dreams too, and have used them as the basis for their—ah, theology. In particular their god Maguali-ga, who is said to be the opener of the gate who will make possible the breakthrough of the space deities on the Earth, seems identical with the massive extraterrestrial being who is invariably seen in the so-called Nine Suns dream. And their supreme redemptive figure, the high god known as Chungirá-He-Will-Come, appears to be the horned being experienced by those who have the dream termed Double Star One, with the red sun and the blue one.”
Elszabet frowned. Those names were familiar somehow: Maguali-ga, Chungira-He-Will-Come. But where had she heard them? She was so weary this morning—so preoccupied with the vision that had come to her in the night—
Kresh went on, “As I’ll explain more fully at the meeting, it’s possible that these tumbondé manifestations, which have been widely publicized in San Diego County and elsewhere in Southern California, may actually be encouraging a wider locus for the space dreams through mass suggestion: that is, people may think they are having the dreams when in fact all that is happening is an influence from media coverage. Of course, that couldn’t be a factor here, where tumbondé has not yet been publicized. But that brings me to my second point, which is a rather urgent one. A significant aspect of tumbondé theology is the revelation that the point of entry for Chungirá-He-Will-Come is the North Pole, identified in tumbondé terminology as the Seventh Place. Senhor Papamacer has vowed to lead his people toward the Seventh Place in time for the advent of Chungirá-He-Will-Come. And, though evidently you haven’t heard the news yet, the migration has now begun. Anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand tumbondé followers are traveling slowly northward in a caravan of cars and buses, gathering new supporters as they go. I understand that they’re somewhere in the vicinity of Monterey or Santa Cruz by now—Dr. Paolucci probably has more accurate word on that—”
Maguali-ga, Elszabet thought. Chungirá-He-Will-Come. She remembered now: Tomás Menendez, the cube he had been playing on his bonephone, the strange barbaric African-sounding chanting she had heard. Those names had been repeated again and again: Maguali-ga, Chungirá-He-Will-Come. Menendez had friends in the Latino community in San Diego who sent things to him here. So tumbondé evidently had at least one adherent already in Northern California, she thought. One right here at the Center, in fact.
“—But it’s quite possible,” Kresh continued, “that the tumbondé marchers will pass right this way, along the coast at Mendocino, and there are so many of them that they could very well spill over onto the property of your Center. I think it might be a good idea to give some thought to setting up special security precautions.”
Elszabet nodded. “We certainly should, if a hundred thousand people are heading our way,” she said. “I’ll bring it up at the staff meeting today. I’d like to talk about all these things at the meeting. Which is just about due to begin, by the way.”