Tom listened in wonder.
The priest shook his head and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Say, what about breakfast?”
“Got a better idea,” Ed said. He reached into his breast pocket and drew forth some little squeeze-flasks. “Too early in the day, maybe? A quick drink? I got Canadian here, bourbon, Scotch. Here, here’s one special for you, Father: a flask of Irish. Tom? You a drinking man?”
Father Christie said morosely, “I can’t use this, Ed. You know that.”
“You can’t?”
“I guess you forgot, on account of being picked. But I’m an alcoholic. I’ve got a conscience chip in my gullet. Any booze hits my throat, the chip’s going to make me throw up. You don’t remember that, huh? Here, maybe your friend Tom wants it.”
“Conscience chip,” Ed muttered. “Right, I forgot. All these scientific things they stitch into us. Conscience chips to keep you from drinking. Homing-vector implants in case we run away. The bastards, they stick a sliver of this and a sliver of that in us and they operate us like machines. You be a smart guy, Tom, you get yourself out of here fast, you hear?”
“They’ve been nice to me so far.”
“You be a smart guy anyway. You want one of these?”
“Thanks,” Tom said. “No.”
“Well, I do. Down the hatch!” Ed pressed the squeeze-tab and put the flask to his mouth. “Ah, that’s what I needed!” He looked a little more cheerful. “So you get visions of other worlds too, huh? God, I’d like to see one of those! Just one. Just to find out what all the fuss is about.”
“You never have?”
“Not once,” Ed said. His red-rimmed eyes seemed to blaze suddenly with rage and anguish. “Not even once. You know how much I envy all of you, with your green worlds and your blue ones and your nine suns and all the rest of it? Why don’t I see too? Some goddamn tremendous thing is going on all around me, some weird colossal thing that nobody can understand but that’s plainly of gigantic tremendous importance, and I’m shut clean out of it. And that stinks. You know? It stinks .”
So that’s it, Tom thought.
Now he understood where the pain lay inside this man, and what he might be able to do about it, maybe. He wanted to do something about it.
Tom said, “Give me one of those drinks.”
“Which one you want?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Bourbon,” Ed said. “Here, have the bourbon.”
Tom took the squeeze-flask from him, studied it a moment, pressed the tab. The top popped open and he put it to his lips and let the dark liquor roll down his throat. It hit all at once, hard and hot and good. It was a long time since Tom had had a drink, and he sat there relishing it, feeling it go to work in the crevices of his soul. Good, he thought. I can handle this. This is going to work out just fine.
He turned to Ed. “You got to stop worrying about those space dreams, okay?”
“Stop worrying, the man says. I’m not worrying. I’m just a little pissed off. Am I a freak or something? Why don’t I see what the others all see?”
“Easy up,” Tom said. He took a deep breath and put his hand over Ed’s hand and leaned close and said, “You will see. I promise you that. You’ll have the dreams too, Ed, just like everybody else. I know you will. I’m going to show you how, all right? All right?”
5
“Monday, the eighth of October, 2103,” Jaspin said. He was sitting in the back seat of his car, speaking into the golden gridwork of a hand-held mnemone capsule. “We are well up into Northern California now, camped in open country about fifty miles east of San Francisco Bay. The march is about to take on a new aspect, because Senhor Papamacer has decided to swing due west here and go through Oakland before we resume our northward journey. We have avoided passing through cities up till now, ever since setting out from San Diego. I think the Senhor would actually like to cross the bay and enter San Francisco, which he says is a profound focus of galactic forces. But even he sees that that’s logistically unwise, maybe even impossible, because San Francisco is so small and is accessible only by bridge, except from the south. Trying to bring a mob this size into San Francisco would cause major disruptions both for the city and for us. There would be no place to camp, and the main routes out might become blocked, possibly causing a breakup of the entire march. So we will go no further than Oakland, which is readily accessible by land and has adequate camping space in the hills just east of the city. While we are there, of course, thousands of its citizens will certainly join the march, and perhaps an even larger number will come over from San Francisco to enroll. It’s just as well that there are no more major population centers along the coast between here and Mendocino, because we’re quickly reaching the point where our numbers are becoming unmanageably unwieldy. This is already the greatest mass migration since the end of the Dust War, certainly, and since Senhor Papamacer intends to get at least as far north as Portland before the onset of winter, and maybe even to Seattle, the possibility exists that serious disorders will—”
“Barry?”
Jaspin looked up, annoyed at the interruption. Jill stood by the window, thumping on the roof of the car to get his attention.
“What is it?” It was two or three days now since he had had a chance to bring his journal up to date, and there was plenty of important material he wanted to enter. Whatever she wanted, he thought, couldn’t it have waited another half an hour?
“Someone to see you.”
“Tell him five minutes.”
“Her,” Jill said.
“What?”
“A woman. Red frizzy hair, looks sort of trampy in a high-class way. Says she’s from San Francisco.”
“I’m trying to dictate my notes,” Jaspin said. “I don’t know any redheads from San Francisco. What does she want with me?”
“Nothing. She wants an audience with the Senhor. Got as far as Bacalhau, Bacalhau says she should talk to you. I think you’re now the high muckamuck in charge of excitable Anglo broads around here.”
“Christ,” Jaspin said. “Okay, five minutes, tell her. Just let me finish this. Where is she now?”
“At the Maguali-ga altar,” Jill said.
“Five minutes,” he said again.
But his concentration was broken. In his journal entry he had wanted to discuss the way the racial makeup of the tumbondé procession was changing as the march went along—the original San Diego County group of followers of Senhor Papamacer, heavily South American and African in ethnic origin, having been diluted now by hordes of Chicanos from the Salinas Valley farming communities out back of Monterey; and now up here in the north there had been an Anglo influx too, rural whites, causing some alterations in the general tone of the whole event. The newcomers had no real idea of the underlying Dionysiac flavor of tumbondé, the pagan frenzy and fervor; all they seemed to hear was the promise of wealth and immortal life when Chungirá-He-Will-Come finally came waltzing through that gateway at the North Pole, and they wanted to be in on that number, oh, yes, Lord. Already that was creating disorder in the march, and it was going to get worse, especially if Senhor Papamacer continued to reign in absentia, as he had been doing for days, from the seclusion of the lead bus. But getting his observations on all these matters down on the mnemone capsule would have to be postponed now. Jaspin realized he should have gone off by himself for an hour or two to do his dictation, but too late for that now. He turned off the capsule and got out of his car.
It was a hot muggy afternoon. Heat had plagued them all the way up the center of the state, and there was still no sign of the rainy season. They said that up here it sometimes began raining in October, but apparently not this October. The low rounded hills of this unspectacular countryside were tawny with the dry summer grass. Everything here was shriveled and parched and golden-brown while it waited for winter.