Charley said, “You know it all by heart?”
“A lot of it,” said Tom. “I was a preacher for a time.”
“Whereabouts was that?”
“Up there,” Tom said, jerking his thumb over his right shoulder. “Idaho. Washington State, some.”
“You’ve been around.”
“Some.”
“You ever been really east?”
Tom looked at him. “You mean, New York, Chicago, like that?”
“Like that, yeah.”
“How?” Tom said. “Fly?”
“Yeah,” said Mujer, laughing. “Fly! On a broomstick!”
“They once did,” Tamale said. “Coast to coast. You get on a plane in San Francisco, it take you to New York, three hours. My father told me that.”
“Three hours,” said Stidge. “Shit. That’s just shit.”
“Three hours,” Tamale repeated. “Who you calling shit?” He had his knife out. “You calling my father shit? Go on, call it again. Call my mother something too, Stidge. Go on. Go on.”
“Quit it,” Charley said. “We came here to scratch. Let’s do some scratching. Stidge, you’re a pain in the ass.”
“You think I’m gonna believe that? Three hours and you’re in New York?”
“My father said it,” Tamale muttered.
“A different world then,” said Charley. “Before the Dust War it was all different. Maybe it was five hours, huh, Tamale?”
“Three.”
Tom felt all this talk pressing on his skull like a brain tumor. Three hours, five, what did it matter? That world was gone. He walked away from them.
He sensed that a vision was coming on.
Good. Good. Let it come. Let them bicker, let them cut themselves up if that was what they wanted. He dwelled in other, finer worlds. He walked up a little way, around the raw jagged upended block of pavement, past a mass of rusty iron gridwork, and sat down on the curb of a sand-choked street with his back against an enormous palm tree that looked as though it meant still to be here when California and everything man had built in California had been swept away by time.
The vision came rushing on, and it was a big one, it was the entire deal all at once.
Sometimes he got it all, not just one alien world but the great stupendous multitude of them coming one on top of another. At times like that he felt himself to be the focus of the cosmos. Whole galactic empires surged through his soul. He had the full vision of the myriad realms beyond realms that lay out there beyond mankind’s comprehension.
Come to me! Ah, yes, come, come!
Before his astounded bugging eyes came the grandest procession he had ever seen, a sequence of worlds upon worlds. It was like a torrent, a wild flood. The green world and the empire of the Nine Suns and the Double Kingdom first, and then the Poro worlds and the worlds of the Zygerone who were the masters of the Poro, and rising above them the figure of a Kusereen overlord from the race that ruled who knew how many galaxies, including those of the Zygerone and the Poro. He saw quivering transparent life-forms too strange to be nightmares. He saw whirling disks of light stretching to the core of the universe. Through him raced libraries of data, the lists of emperors and kings, gods and demons, the texts of bibles sacred to unknown religions, the music of an opera that took eleven galactic years to perform. He held on the palm of his hand a jewelled sphere no larger than a speck of dust in which were recorded the names and histories of the million monarchs of the nine thousand dynasties of Sapiil. He saw black towers taller than mountains rising in an unbroken row to the horizon. He had full perception in all directions in time as well as space. He saw the fifty demigods of the Theluvara Age that had been three billion years ago when even the Kusereen were young, and he saw the Eye People of the Great Starcloud yet to come, and the ones who called themselves the Last, though he knew they were not. My God, he thought, my God, my God, I am as nothing and You have brought all this wonder upon me. I Tom your servant. If I could only tell them the things You show me. If I could only. How can I serve You who created all this, and so much more besides? What need do You have of me? Is it to tell them? Then I will tell them. I will show them. I will make Thy wonders manifest in their eyes. My God, my God, my God! And still the vision went on, and on and on, worlds without end.
Then it was gone, winking out with a snap, and he lay sprawled in a ruined street in a deserted town, stupefied, gasping for breath. His clothing was drenched with sweat. Charley’s worried face hovered before him.
“Tom? Tom? Can you talk, Tom?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“We thought you had a stroke.”
“It was the big one,” he said. “I saw it all. I saw the power and the glory. Oh, poor Tom, poor poor Tom! It was the big one, and never will it come again!”
“Let me help you up,” Charley said. “We’re ready to move on. Can you stand? There. There. Easy. You had another vision, huh? You see the green world?”
Tom nodded. “I saw it, yeah. I saw everything,” he said. ” Everything .”
Two
1
There was unexpected trouble with Nick Double Rainbow that morning, something close to a three-alarm psychotic break coming out of nowhere and more than a little violent acting-out, ugly stuff and difficult to deal with. Which was why Elszabet was late getting to the monthly staff meeting. All the others were there already—the psychiatrists, Bill Waldstein and Dan Robinson; Dante Corelli, the head of physical therapy; and Naresh Patel, the neurolinguistics man, deployed around the big redwood-burl conference table in their various relaxation modes—when she finally entered the room a little past eleven.
Dante was staring into the pumping whorls of golden light coming from a little Patternmaster in her hand. Bill Waldstein was leaning back contemplating the flask of wine sitting in front of him. Patel looked to be lost in meditation. Dan Robinson was fingering his pocket keyboard, jamming inaudible music into the recorder circuit for playback later. They all straightened up as Elszabet took her place at the head of the table.
“Finally!” Dante said stagily, overplaying it as if Elszabet were two years late for the meeting, minimum.
“Elszabet’s just been showing us that she knows how to be passive-aggressive too,” said Bill Waldstein.
“Screw you,” Elszabet told him casually. “Thirteen big minutes late.”
“Twenty,” said Patel, without appearing to break his deep trance.
“Twenty. So shoot me. You want to pass some of that wine over here, please, Dr. Waldstein?”
“Before lunch, Dr. Lewis?”
“It hasn’t been a wonderful morning,” she said. “I will thank all of you to recalibrate for a lower bullshit quotient, okay? Thank you. I love you all.” She took the wine from Waldstein, but drank only the tiniest sip. It tasted sharp, full of little needles. Her jaw was aching. She wondered if her face was going to swell. “We’ve got Double Rainbow cooled out on fifty milligrams of pax,” Elszabet said tiredly. “Bill, will you check in on him after lunch and consult with me afterward? He decided he was Sitting Bull on the warpath. Smashed up I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars of equipment and took a swing at Teddy Lansford that knocked him halfway across the room, and I think he would have made a lot more trouble than that if Alleluia hadn’t miraculously come floating into the cabin and corraled him. She’s amazingly strong, you know. Thank God she wasn’t the one who psychoed out.”