Detective Barber interrupted my thoughts.
“I know you think that he’s your friend, kid,” he said. “But you knew those people too. If you think he cares more about you than them, you’re wrong. MacIlvey was his girlfriend and she’s dead.”
“We’re all dead, Officer,” I said. “Some of us just don’t know it yet.”
Barber shook his head at me. He was a good guy. At that moment I wanted to be like him. I wanted to forget the sad truth of Ordé’s prophecies.
Two
Phyllis Yamauchi was an astronomer working at Berkeley when the shaft of blue light came in through her laboratory window. A year later she heard about a fanatic who claimed that knives of blue cut through heaven to enlighten us. She came the following Wednesday. I had no special senses then, but I could tell that the meeting between Ordé and Phyllis Yamauchi was monumental.
The tall blond fanatic came down from his rock and took Phyllis in his arms. She was crying and he made sounds and faces that expressed no emotion that I knew.
Ordé picked up Phyllis, hoisting her with one arm as if she were a child and said, “God is not alone on this earth.”
At first there was silence among us. Then I started to clap. After that the applause came, applause and cheers.
It was Ordé’s power to see the past as it moved toward the future and to rouse the hearts of men with this knowledge.
But others had seen the blue light also. Gijon Diaz, a man who loved puzzles. Reggie and Wanita Brown. Eileen Martel, who brought home dozens of wounded animals, all of whom recovered even from the worst injuries. And there was Myrtle Forché, who was a playwright before blue light and a monologist after. They, and others, showed up at Ordé’s Wednesday sermons. They didn’t all come to every sermon, but there was a loose association that kept most of them coming back from time to time.
They were the Blues. Men and women who had transcended the human race. Part of their mind had lived among stars so far away that our science hadn’t even imagined them.
That I moved among them, shared smiles and drank from the same cups, elated me. I believed that I was privy to a pantheon of gods. Though only children in the first months after their creation, they heralded an evolution that would become the divinity their mortal lower halves had always dreamed of.
Doctor Edward Marie at the Alameda County Jail infirmary didn’t expect Winch Fargo to survive his wounds. But while Ordé made his prophecies, Winch’s wounds slowly healed. After seventeen months on a hospital cot Winch opened his eyes to confusion and his mind to pain. He asked for painkillers, but Doctor Marie saw no reason to comply. The wounds were mostly healed. Edward Marie couldn’t see into the half-life that infested Fargo’s mind and body, the fragment of that divine equation that flitted through him like a curse from some long-forgotten victim.
Fargo had to be chained in the courtroom because he would exhibit violent spasms now and again. His defense attorneys said that he had a degenerative nerve disorder. Doctor Marie disagreed. The prosecutor dismissed the jumping agony as a ploy by the defendant to save himself from the maximum sentence.
Winch didn’t care. The chains he wore were in his blood. Pain chains. Somewhere far, or near, or not at all, in his head. When the feelings converged he’d jump up, or at least try to, and scream.
Maybe the jury would have set him free. Maybe they would have sent him to a psychiatric ward, where drugs could have soothed his anticipation of eternity.
They might have except for Eileen Martel; she and the boy, Reggie, and the little girl, Wanita. They had already been to Ordé’s rock.
That’s how I know the tale.
Eileen had only recently found the Close Congregation when one day Reggie and Wanita were in the park with their mother. Wanita went right to Eileen and crawled into her lap.
Eileen made friends with the children’s mother. She said that she’d lost her husband on the same day that Mrs. Brown’s daughter Luwanda had died. She gave the family money and offered to baby-sit when Mrs. Brown needed time to work.
They were often seen at the Close Congregation — chalk white Eileen and her young brown charges. The older woman also traveled in the company of dogs wearing homemade casts, flightless birds, and all sorts of wounded wild animals that became tame in her presence. A broken leg or wing, yellowy oozing eye, or bloody gash all healed under Eileen’s care. Reggie’s mother told me that Reggie had gone wild after his sister died; he’d go out the window at night and sleep all day under his bed. He wouldn’t listen to her or even talk until Eileen met him in the park.
“It was like magic, Chance,” Mrs. Brown told me. “That old white lady stroked his forehead with her fingers, and just like that, he was my boy again. That white lady come straight from heaven.”
Ordé wanted to adopt the children, but Eileen told him no. She said that she would oversee the children’s well-being. It was the only time I saw Ordé back down to someone else’s will.
Winch felt them as soon as they came into the courtroom. For him it was a flood of light. The Blues told me that they all could feel the presence of others like themselves. Ordé called it a tinkling. Reggie said that it sounded like a roar.
“Whoa ho!” Winch shouted when he became aware of Eileen and her charges. He leaped for her, but the chains and guards stopped him.
“Please!” he cried loudly.
Eileen was there every day after that. She had come as a witness for the prosecution but returned out of charity. Winch would nod to her at the beginning of every day and then sit back peacefully.
Ordé said that Winch was soothed by the aura of someone who had imbibed the whole light. When Eileen and Reggie explained that they felt something like a jagged tear inside them when they came near Winch Fargo, Ordé knew, or said he knew, that Winch hadn’t seen enough of the light, that the presence of someone whole eased his pain.
“The composition of light is something like the schematic structure of a computer tape,” Phyllis Yamauchi explained to me one Wednesday before Ordé’s talk in the park. “Do you know anything about computers?”
I did not and said so. I was eager to hear whatever she had to say. I had already begun the History of the Coming of Light and wanted to hear about the blue light from someone other than Ordé. I wanted to be sure that my head wasn’t just fried from taking too many drugs and then brainwashed by the rantings of a fanatic.
“Every computer tape has a header,” Phyllis explained, “then unique information, and finally a trailer. The header gives you information on what you are about to receive. You read the unique information in light of what preceded on the header. The trailer, on a computer tape, controls routing, count information, and other statistics gathered while processing the unique data. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it does.”
It was a joy to talk to Phyllis. She was so calm, and calming, compared with Ordé. She was sane but still believed in the blue light.
“Blue light, as I see it, is similar to the computer tape in many ways,” she said. “Only the header is repeated along the body of unique data. This header tells of our history, starting with an ancient planet and the origins of life in the universe—”
“But how did it tell you?” I asked. I felt completely comfortable interrupting her. “Didn’t you have to learn the language first?”
“The language of light is in our blood, Chance,” she said, smiling. “Once illuminated, we are fully aware. The middle part — our mission, our individual purpose — is most of the light, almost twelve light-seconds in length. This information is what makes us different from one another. But even if every light were exactly the same, it would become different because the information in living blood alters each one of us also.”