“I sat in on your course. You were very profound.”
“Repeating the stuff I had found in these books. What’s profound about a glib tongue? What’s profound about a good memory? I sounded profound to you because you didn’t know any better. What was your major at UCLA, anyway?”
“I didn’t have one. I just audited courses.”
“No degree?”
A shrug. “I wanted to learn everything. But there was so much, I didn’t know where to start. So I guess I never started. But now I’ll have a second chance, won’t I?”
“What do you mean?”
There was a strange bright edge on her voice, like thin copper wires scraping together. “To learn. From you. I’ll do the cleaning, the shopping, whatever, all the jobs. And we’ll study together. That’s all right, isn’t it? I’ll help you with your book. I don’t actually have a place to live right now, you know. But I don’t take up a lot of room, and I’m very neat, and—”
It surprised him that he had not seen it coming. He felt his forehead beginning to throb. He imagined that Chungirá-He-Will-Come had reached out with one enormous paw and had closed it around his entire head, and was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing—
“I’m not going to write the book,” Jaspin said. “And I’m not going to stay here in San Diego.”
“You’re not?”
“No. I won’t be here much longer at all.”
He was startled beyond measure by what he had just said. That came as news to him, that he was leaving San Diego.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
He waited a beat for his mouth to supply the answer, and then he heard himself say, “I’m going to go wherever Senhor Papamacer goes. To the Seventh Place, I guess. Following the tumbondé people to the North Pole if I have to.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I suppose I do,” Jaspin said. “I have to do it.”
“To study them?”
“No. To wait for Chungirá-He-Will-Come.”
“You believe in Him, then.” He could hear the capital H.
“I do now. Since today, on that hillside. I saw something, Jill. And it changed me. I felt literally knocked to my knees, the true conversion experience. Maybe conversion’s too pretentious a word, but—” This is preposterous, he thought, a couple of naked people who don’t even know each other, sitting in a tiny bathroom talking nonsense like this. “I’ve never been a religious man,” he said. “Jewish, at least my parents were, but that was just a cultural thing, nobody actually went to synagogue, you understand. But this is different. What I felt today—I want to feel it again. I want to go wherever I stand a chance of feeling it again. It’s the times, Jill, the era, the Zeitgeist, you know? In times of total despair, revelatory religion has always held the answer. And now it’s happened even to me, cynical urban you-name-it Barry Jaspin. I’m going to follow Senhor Papamacer and wait for Maguali-ga to open the gateway for Chungirá-He-Will-Come.” There was fire pumping through his veins. Do I really mean all this, he wondered? Yes. Yes. I actually do. Amazing, he thought. I actually mean what I’m telling her.
“Can I come with you?” she asked timidly, reverently.
3
Charley said, “Now tell me about the one you saw yesterday, the one where the starlight lights up the sky like day.”
“The world of the Eye People, that’s what you mean?” Tom asked.
“Is that it?”
“The Eye People, yes. Of the Great Starcloud.”
“Tell me,” Charley said. “I love to listen to you when you’re seeing this stuff. I think you’re a real prophet, man, you’re something straight out of the Bible.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Tom said.
Softly Charley said, “I wish you’d stop saying that. Do I tell you that I think you’re crazy?”
“I am crazy, Charley. Poor Tom. Poor crazy Tom. Ran away from one madhouse right into another one.”
“A madhouse? Really? An honest-to-Christ nuthatch?”
“Pocatello,” Tom said. “You know where that is? They had me locked up a year and a half.”
Charley smiled. “Plenty of sane men locked up like that, plenty of crazy ones outside. Don’t mean a thing. I try to tell you, I respect you, I admire you. I think you’re phenomenal. And you sit here saying I think you’re crazy. Come on. Tell me about the Eye People, man!”
Charley seemed sincere. He isn’t just making fun of me, Tom thought. It’s because he’s seen the green world himself. I hope he gets to see some of the other ones. He really wants to see. He really wants to know about these worlds. He’s a scratcher, maybe even used to be a bandido, I bet he’s killed twenty people, and yet he wants to know, he’s curious, he’s almost gentle, in his way. I’m lucky to be traveling with him, Tom told himself.
“The Eye People don’t exist yet,” he said. “They’re maybe a million, maybe three million years from now, or maybe it’s a billion, that’s very hard to know. I get confused when these past and future things come in. You understand, all the thought impulses, they float around the universe back and forth, and the speed of thought is much faster than the speed of light, so the visions overtake the light, they pass it right by, you can get a vision out of a place that doesn’t even exist yet, and maybe a million or a billion years from now the light of that sun will finally get to Earth. You follow what I’m saying?”
“Sure,” Charley said doubtfully.
“The Eye People live—or will live—on a planet that has maybe ten thousand stars right close around it, or a hundred thousand, who can even count them, one next to another all jammed together so that from this planet they look like one single wall of light that fills the whole sky. You go out any time of day or night, what you see is this tremendous light blazing away from all sides. You don’t see any one star, just a lot of light. All white, like the sky is white-hot.”
Mujer came over. “Charley?”
“Be with you five minutes.”
“Can you talk to me now, Charley?”
Charley looked up, annoyed. “Okay, go ahead.”
The scratchers were camped a little way east of Sacramento, toward the coastal side of the Valley. There still were some working farms around there, and most of them were very well defended. The scratching was lousy here; Charley and his men were getting hungry; he had sent a bunch of them out scouting that afternoon.
Mujer said, “Stidge and Tamale just came back. They say they found a farm down in the river fork that they think can be taken, and they want to go in as soon as it gets dark.”
“Why you the one telling me, then, and not Stidge?”
“Buffalo said you’d gone off with Tom and didn’t want to be bothered, and Stidge decided not to bother you.”
“But you did?”
Mujer said, “I wanted to talk to you before Stidge and Tamale did. You know, Tamale’s always wrong about everything. And that Stidge, he’s a wild man. I don’t trust them a lot.”
“You think I do?”
“When Stidge says a place can be taken, and Tamale says it too, then I don’t know, Charley, I think maybe we ought to keep away. That’s all. I wanted to tell you before Stidge got to you.”
“Okay, man. I understand what you’re saying.”
“I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise,” Mujer said.