“No one’s going to hurt you here, Tom.”
“Oh, you won’t hurt me. But that don’t mean no one will. Not even here. Poor Tom. Tom’s always wandering. And the wandering won’t stop, will it, till we get to the Last Days and make the Crossing. But the Last Days are almost here, you know.”
She leaned forward, body tensed. That always happened when he came around to that subject. This was the third or fourth time he had talked with her this week, here in this little office of hers with the big green screen on the wall, and each time, the moment he had mentioned the Crossing or the other worlds or anything like that, he had seen the change in her right away.
She said, “Do you want to tell me some more about the Crossing this morning?”
“What do you want to know?”
“All about it. Whatever you want to tell me.”
“There’s so much. I don’t know where to begin.”
She said, “We’re all going to go to the stars, is that it? To jump across space somehow and take up new lives on other worlds?”
“That’s it, yes.” She had a little machine in front of her, something to record his words. He saw a red light glowing. Well, that was all right. He trusted her. He had never trusted many people, but he trusted her. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt him. “I mean, we’re not going to go in our actual bodies. We’re going to drop our bodies behind us here, and just our essences are going to go over to the new worlds.”
“And they’ll give us bodies there? If we go to the Green World, say, will we get the crystalline bodies, with the gleaming skins and the rows of eyes?”
Tom stared at her. “You know about the Green World?”
“I know about them all, Tom.”
“And you know that they’re real?”
Softly she said, “No, I don’t know that. I just know that I’ve seen them in my mind, and so have a lot of other people. I’ve walked around on the Green World with the crystalline people, Tom. In my mind. And I’ve seen the people of the other worlds, too, the Nine Suns people with the one big eye, and the Sphere of Light people with all the dangling appendages—”
“Sphere of Light, yes, that’s a good name for it. That’s the Great Starcloud, that light. Those are the Eye People that live there. All these places are real, you know.”
“How long have you known about them?”
“Ever since I can remember.”
“And you’re how old, did you say?”
He shrugged. “Thirty-five, I think. Maybe thirty-three. Somewhere around there.”
“Born just before the Dust War?”
“No, just after it started,” he said.
“Your mother was in the radiation zone when it broke out?”
“On the edge,” Tom said. “Eastern Nevada, I’m pretty sure that’s where we lived. Or maybe across the line in Deseret. Utah. I know she got a little radiation, just a touch, while she was carrying me. She was sick a lot afterward, died when I was a kid. It was a lousy time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” She really was. He could feel it. How nice she is, he thought. I hope she has a good Crossing, this Elszabet, this good, kind woman.
“And the visions? They go right back to your childhood?”
“Like I said, as far back as I can remember. At first, like, I thought everybody must see these things, and then I found out nobody else did and I thought I was crazy.” He grinned. “I guess I am crazy, huh? You live with stuff like this in your mind all these years, it makes you kind of crazy for sure. But now everybody’s seeing the stuff I see. Last couple of years, people around me have been talking, saying they have dreams, they see the Green World and the rest. A few. There was this black man in San Diego, a foreigner, South American, drove a taxicab: I stayed in his house a while, town called Chula Vista, he rented a room to me. He started seeing them, the visions. Dreaming them, I mean. Told all his friends. He seemed real crazy to me. I got out of there. And then other people, the scratchers I was traveling with, some of them saw them—and here you say you see them too—everybody’s starting to see them, right? And me, I see them better, clearer, sharper. I get a lot more detail now. The power’s been deepening in me almost day by day: I can feel it changing. That’s how I know the Time of Crossing is coming near. They picked me, the space people, who knows why but they picked me as a kind of forerunner, the first one to know about them, you follow me? But now everybody will know. And then one by one we’ll start to go to their worlds. It’s all part of the Kusereen plan. The Design.”
“Kusereen?”
“They rule the Sacred Imperium. They’re the current great race, been in charge millions of years, everybody reveres them, even the Zygerone, who are extremely great themselves, especially the Fifth Zygerone. I think the Fifth Zygerone will be the next great race. It does change, every I don’t know how many millions of years. It was the Theluvara before the Kusereen, three billion years ago. It says in the Book of Suns that the Theluvara may still exist, somewhere way out at the end of the universe, but nobody’s heard anything from them for a long time, and—”
“Wait a second,” Elszabet said. “I’m getting lost. The Kusereen, the Zygerone, the Theluvara—”
“It takes time to learn it all. I was jumbled up about it maybe ten years until it came clear. There are a zillion races, you know—practically every sun has planets, and the planets are inhabited, even ones that you would think couldn’t possibly have life on them because their sun is too hot or too cold, but there is life all the same. Everywhere. Like on Luiiliimeli where the Thikkumuuru people live, it’s a planet of this big hot blue star Ellullimiilu that’s like a furnace, the ground itself melts there. But the Thikkuumuru don’t care about that, because they don’t have flesh, they’re like spirits, you know?”
“Blue Giant,” said Elszabet, almost to herself. “Yes.”
“And the Kusereen, we were talking about their plan: they want new races all the time, they want life moving around from world to world so nothing gets old, nothing gets stale, there’s always change and rebirth. That’s why they keep making contact with the young races. Like us, we’re only a million years old, that’s no time at all to them. But now they want us to come to them and live among them and exchange ideas with them, and they know it has to be soon, because we’ve been in big trouble here, always on the edge of blowing ourselves up or dusting ourselves to death or something, and this is the last chance, right now. So we’re going to make the Crossing. And—”
“Are there wars among these races?” Elszabet asked. “Do they fight with each other for supremacy?”
“Oh, no,” Tom said. “They don’t have wars. They’re way beyond that. Any race that thought it wanted to make war, it destroyed itself long ago, millions, billions of years ago. That always happens to the warlike races. The ones that survive understand how stupid war is. Anyway, it’s impossible to have wars in the stars because the only way you can get from star to star is by making the Crossing, and you can’t Cross unless the host world is willing to receive you and opens the way for you, so how could there ever be an invasion? There was a time once during the Veltish Overlordry in the Seventh Potentastium when—”
“Wait,” she said. “You’re going too fast again. You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to make a list. All the different worlds, their names, the physical form of the people who live on each planet. We’ll put it into the computer, put it right up on the wall here where the big screen is. Just so I can get everything sorted out. And then after that I want you to tell me about the histories of these different worlds, whatever you know, the dynasties of ruling races and all that, just talk it all out and we’ll organize it later. Will you do that with me?”