“Look there,” said Charley. “The road to San Francisco turns off there.”
The van swung toward the north. Floating, floating, floating toward the sea on a cushion of air. My chariot, Tom thought. I am led in splendor into the white city beside the bay. A chariot of air, not like that which came for Elijah, which was a chariot of fire, and horses of fire. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. “There is a kind of chariot on the Fifth Zygerone World,” Tom said, “that is made of water, I mean the water of that world, which isn’t like the water we have here. The Fifth Zygerone people travel in those chariots like gods.”
“Listen to him,” Stidge said from the back of the van. “The fucking looney. What do you keep him for, Charley?”
“Shut it, Stidge,” said Charley.
Tom stared at the sky and it became the white sky of the Fifth Zygerone World, a gleaming shield of brilliant radiance, almost like the sky of the Eye People’s world except not so total, not so solid a brightness. The two huge suns stood high in the vault of the heavens, the yellow one and the white, with a rippling mantle streaming red between them and around them. And the Fifth Zygerone people were floating back and forth between their palaces and their temples, because it was the holiday known as the Day of the Unknowing when all the past year’s pain was thrown into the sea.
“Can you see them?” Tom whispered. “Like teardrops, those chariots are, big enough to hold a whole family, the blood-parents and the water-parents both. And all the Fifth Zygerone people float through the sky like princes and masters.”
His mind teemed with worlds. He saw everything, down to the words on the pages in their books; and he could understand those words even when the books were not books, the words were not words. It had always been like this for him; but the visions became sharper and sharper every year, the detail richer, more profound.
Charley said, “You just keep driving, Mujer. Don’t stop nohow for anything. And don’t say nothing.”
“The Fifth Zygerone are the great ones, the masters. You can see them now, can’t you, getting out of their chariots? They have heads like suns and arms sprouting all around their waists, a dozen and a half of them, like whips—those are the ones. They came to this star eleven hundred million years ago in the time of the Veltish Overlordry, when their old sun started to puff up and turn red and huge. Their old sun ate its worlds, one by one, but the Zygerone were gone by then to their new planets. The Fifth World is the great one, but there are nineteen altogether. The Zygerone are the masters of the Poro, you know, which is astonishing when you think about it, because the Poro are so great that if one of their least servants came to Earth, one of their merest bondsmen, he would be a king over us all. But to the Zygerone the Poro are nothing. And yet there is a race that is master over the Zygerone too. I’ve told you that, haven’t I? The Kusereen, they are, and they rule over whole galaxies, dozens of them, hundreds, the true Imperium.” Tom laughed. His head was thrown back, his eyes were closed. “Do you think, Charley, that the Kusereen yield to a master too? And so on up and up and up? Sometimes I think there is a far galaxy where the Theluvara kings still reign, and every half billion years the Kusereen Overlord goes before them and bows his knee at their throne. Except the Kusereen don’t have knees, really. They’re like rivers, each one, a shining river that holds itself together like a ribbon of ice. But then who are the kings the Theluvara kings give allegiance to? And there is also God in majesty at the summit of creation, triumphant over all things living and dead and yet to come. Don’t forget Him.”
“You ever hear crazy?” Stidge said. “That’s crazy for you. That’s the real thing.”
“I like it better than his songs,” said Mujer. “The songs give me a pain. This stuff, it’s like watching a laser show, except it’s in words. But he tells it real good, don’t he?”
“He sees it like it’s real to him, yeah,” said Buffalo.
Charley said, “He sees it that way because it is real.”
“I hear you right, man?” Mujer said.
“You hear me right, yeah. He sees worlds. He looks out across stars. He reads the Book of Suns and the Book of Moons.”
“Oh, hey,” Stidge said. “Hey, listen to Charley, now!”
“Shut your hole,” said Charley. “I know what I’m saying, Stidge. You shut it or you’ll walk the rest of the way to Frisco, man.”
“Frisco,” Buffalo said. “It ain’t far now. Man, am I going to have some fun in Frisco!”
Charley said, speaking softly to Tom alone, “You don’t pay any mind, Tom. You just go on telling us.”
But it was over. All Tom saw now was the road to San Francisco, hardly any traffic, heat shimmering on the pavement and big tumbleweed balls rolling across the highway, fetching up against the old barbed-wire fencing. The Fifth Zygerone World was gone. That was all right. It would be back, or one of the others. He had no fear of that. That was the one thing he did not fear, that the visions might suddenly desert him. What he did fear was that when it came time for the people of the Earth to embrace the worlds of the Imperium he would be left behind, he would not be able to make the Crossing. There was a prophecy to that effect. It was an old story, wasn’t it? Moses dying at the entrance to the Promised Land? I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither, said the Lord. Tears began to stream down Tom’s cheeks. He sat there quietly weeping, watching the road unroll. The van moved silently toward San Francisco, floating, floating, on and on and on.
“San Francisco, forty-five minutes,” said Buffalo. “My oh my oh my!”
2
The tumbondé man said, “You wait here, we call you when Senhor Papamacer he ready to talk to you. You don’t go out of this room, you understand that?”
Jaspin nodded.
“You understand that?” the tumbondé man said again.
“Yes,” said Jaspin hoarsely. “I understand. I’ll wait here until Senhor Papamacer is ready for me.”
He couldn’t believe this place. It was like a shack, four, five rooms falling apart, falling down; it was like the sort of stuff you would expect to find in Tijuana, except Tijuana hadn’t been this run-down in fifty years. This, the headquarters of a cult that had the allegiance of thousands, that was winning new converts by the hundreds every day? This shack?
The house was in the southeast corner of National City somewhere right down next to Chula Vista, on a low flat sandy hilltop behind the old freeway. It looked about two hundred years old and probably it was: early twentieth century at the latest, patched and mended a thousand times, not the slightest thing modern about it. No protection screen, no glow-windows, no utilities disk on the roof, not even the usual ionization rods that everybody had, the totem poles that were thought to keep away whatever gusts of hard radiation might blow from the east. For all Jaspin could tell, the place had no electricity either, no telephone, maybe not even any indoor plumbing. He hadn’t expected anything remotely as primitive as this. “Man, you be ready today, you come hear the word Senhor Papamacer has for you,” they had told him. “We come get you, man, we take you to the house of the god.” This? House of the god? Not even any sign of that, really, none of the tumbondé imagery visible from the front. It was only when you walked up the cracked and weedy wooden steps and around to the side entrance that you got a peek into the carport, where the papier-mâché statues of the divinities were stored, leaning casually against the beaver-board wall like discarded props from some laser-show horror program, old tossed-aside monsters. At a quick glance Jaspin had spotted the familiar forms of Narbail, O Minotauro, Rei Ceupassear. Maybe they kept the big Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga ones in some safer place. But in this neighborhood, where Senhor Papamacer was like a king, who would dare to mess around with the statues of the gods?