From hill to hill, all across the saddle of this valley, all you could see was tumbondé: pilgrims everywhere, a surging sea of them. In the center of the whole circus were the buses in which the Senhor, the Senhora, the Inner Host, and the holy images were traveling. Nearby was the big patch of consecrated ground with the altars and the blood-hut and the Well of Sacrifice and everything all set up, just as though this were the original communion hill back of San Diego. Wherever they went, they set up all that stuff. And then beyond the central holy zone there was a horde of patchwork tents, thousands upon thousands of pilgrims, innumerable smoky campfires, children yelling, cats and dogs running around, every imaginable sort of ramshackle vehicle parked in random chaotic clusters. Jaspin had never seen so many people together in one place. And the numbers grew from day to day. How big would the army of tumbondé be, he wondered, a month from now? Two months from now? He wondered also, sometimes, what was going to happen when they reached the Canadian border—the Republic of British Columbia’s border, actually. And what was going to happen if they kept on going north and north and north for month after month, and winter closed in on them, and Chungirá-He-Will-Come did not make an appearance? There will be no more winter, Senhor Papamacer had promised, once Maguali-ga opens the gateway. But Senhor Papamacer had spent all his life in Rio, in Tijuana, in San Diego. What the hell did he know about winter, anyway?
Screw it, Jaspin thought. The gods would provide. And if not, not. Mine not to reason why. I lived by reason all those years and what good was it ever to me? Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come. Yes. Yes.
The woman was easy to find. She was standing by the Maguali-ga altar, just as Jill had said: staring at the nine globes of colored glass as if she expected the bulgy-eyed god to materialize before her eyes at any second. She was shorter than Jaspin was expecting—somehow he had thought she would be tall, he didn’t know why—and not quite as flashy, either. But she was very attractive. Jill had said she was trampy in a high-class way. Jaspin knew tramps and he knew high class, and this one wasn’t really either. She looked shrewd, she looked energetic, she looked like she’d been around some. An enterprising woman, he figured.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked. “I’m Barry Jaspin. The Senhor’s liaison aide.”
“Lacy Meyers,” she said. “I’ve just come over from San Francisco. I need to see Senhor Papamacer.”
“Need?”
“Want,” she said. “Want very much.”
“That’s going to be very difficult,” Jaspin told her. He realized that somehow he was standing closer to her than was really necessary, but he didn’t move back. Quite an attractive woman, in fact. About thirty, maybe a little more, the red hair close to her head in a caplike coif of tight ringlets, her eyes a deep lustrous green. Delicate tapering nose, fine cheekbones, the mouth maybe a little coarse. “Is this for a media interview?” he asked.
“No, an audience. I want to be received into his presence.” She was wound up tight: one poke and she’d explode. “He may be the most important human being who has ever lived, do you know? Certainly he is to me. I just want to kneel before him and tell him what he means to me.”
“So do all these people you see here, Ms. Meyers. You understand that the Senhor’s burdens are very great, and that although he would make himself available to all his people if that were possible, it isn’t—”
The green eyes flashed. “Just for a minute! Half a minute!”
He wanted to help her. It was completely impossible, he knew. But even so, he found himself wondering whether he might be able to find a way. Because you find her attractive, is that it? If she were plain, or old, or a man, would you even consider it?
He said, “Why is it so urgent?”
“Because he’s opened my eyes. Because I’ve gone through my whole life not believing in any goddamned thing except how to make life softer for Lacy Meyers, and all of a sudden he’s made me see that there’s something really holy in this universe, that there are true gods who guide our destinies, that it isn’t all just a dumb joke, that—that—I don’t really need to tell you, do I, what a religious conversion is like? You must have been through it too, or you wouldn’t be here.”
Jaspin nodded. “I think we actually have a lot in common.”
“I know we do. I saw it right away.”
“And you’ve been following the path of tumbondé even up here in the Bay Area? I didn’t think it had—”
“I didn’t know anything about tumbondé until a couple of weeks ago, when you people started getting up into this part of the state. But I’ve known about the gods all summer. I had a vision in July, a dream, a red sun and a blue one, and a block of white stone, and a creature with golden horns reaching out toward me—”
“Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” Jaspin said.
“Yes. Only I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know what the hell it was. But the dream kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back, and each time I saw it more clearly, the creature moved around and seemed to say things to me, and sometimes there were others like him in the dream, and then there were other dreams—I saw the nine suns of Maguali-ga, I saw the blue light of—what’s the name, Rei Ceupassear?—I saw all sorts of things. I tell you, I thought I was going nuts. That the whole world was going nuts, because I know everybody else was having these visions too. But I didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody did. Until I read about Senhor Papamacer. And I saw the pictures he had—the pictures of the gods—”
“The computer-generated ones, the holographic repros.”
“Yes. And then it all fell into place for me. The truth of it, that the gods were coming to Earth, that they were going to bring the jubilee, that the millennium was coming. And I saw that Senhor Papamacer must truly be their prophet. And I knew that I was going to come over here and join the pilgrimage to the Seventh Place and be part of what was going to come. But I want to thank the Senhor personally. I want to go down on my knees to him. I’ve been looking for some sort of god all my life, you know? And absolutely sure I could never find one. And now—now—”
Jaspin saw Jill coming toward them. Worried, maybe, that he might be getting something on with this woman? Flattering that she even gave a damn, she who came in every night reeking of Bacalhau’s sweet greasy hair-oils, with Bacalhau’s sweat mingling with her own. Screwing her way right through the Inner Host and back again, and he could hardly remember the last time she’d been willing to make love with him, his wife Jill. Jealous, now? Jill? Not very likely.
What the hell, even if she was, Jill had no right to complain. He’d been damned miserable all month long on Jill’s account. If he happened to find some woman attractive now, and she happened to feel the same way about him—
Lacy was saying, “The ironic thing, all this space stuff, is that a couple years ago I was actually involved in a fraud, a scam that involved promising to send people off to other stars. It was like we were selling them real estate that didn’t exist, the old underwater development bit: give us your money, we’ll put you on the express to Betelgeuse Five. A man named Ed Ferguson, a real shifty operator, he was running it, and I was working the marks for him. Well, they caught him, they were going to send him in for Rehab Two, but he had a good lawyer—”
Jill walked up next to Jaspin. “He being of any help to you?” she said to Lacy.