“I’ll show you some of mine,” she said.
5
The roadway looped like a great gray snake across the water, rising high above the water here, leveling off there, passing through a tunnel at one point, jumping up and becoming two huge suspension bridges later on. At the far end of it, white and glistening in the afternoon light, was San Francisco, tightly huddled on its little piece of the planet. Cool, cool air came flowing through the van’s open windows.
“This bridge,” Charley said, “it goes way back. They built it in the middle ages, and look at it still holding together. Through all the earthquakes and who knows what sort of other stuff, and it’s still holding together.”
“The Golden Gate Bridge,” Buffalo said. “Incredible!”
“Nah, not the Golden Gate,” Charley said. “That’s the Golden Gate, over there on the side, going up north. This one’s the Bay Bridge. That right, Tom?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’ve never been in San Francisco before.”
Stidge laughed. “You been in the Eleventh Zorch Galaxy, but you never been in Frisco. That’s pretty good.”
“I never been here neither,” Buffalo said. “What of it?”
“Well, we’re here now,” said Charley. “Pretty city. Prettiest damn city there is. I was a kid, I lived here six years. I bet it hasn’t changed a whole lot. Somehow this place, it never changes.”
“Even when there’s earthquakes?” Buffalo asked.
“The earthquakes, they don’t matter none,” Charley told him. “They mess things up, the town gets put right back the way it used to be. I was ten years old they got clobbered. Six months you couldn’t tell the difference.”
“You were here for the Big One?” Mujer asked.
“Nah,” Charley said. “Big One, that was a hundred years ago. They had that one, 2006. Big One Two, they called it. Big One One, they had that in 1906, the fire and everything, burned down the whole goddamn place. Then a hundred years after that they were getting ready for the anniversary celebration, you know, parades and speeches? Son of a bitch, Big One Two, two days before the anniversary, knocked everything down again. That’s the kind of city this is.”
“You weren’t here for that,” Mujer said.
“That was ninety-seven years ago,” said Charley. “I guess I missed that one. Then they had the Little Big One, thirty years later, forty, I don’t know. That was before my time, too. The earthquake I was here for, that one didn’t get a name. Wasn’t that big, but big enough. Knocked everything off the shelves, broke windows, scared the shit out of me. I was ten years old. House across the street came right off its foundations, sitting there with one wall down looking like a doll’s house, all the rooms showing. That was more than an ordinary earthquake, they said, but not as big as a Big One. The Big One, it don’t come more than once every hundred years or so.”
“They about due, then,” Tamale said from the back of the van.
“Yeah,” said Choke. “Tomorrow afternoon, I hear. Half past three in the afternoon.”
“Hot shit,” Buffalo said. “That’s just what I want, my first day in San Francisco. Start off with a real bang.”
“What we do,” said Mujer, “we get in the van just before it starts. We turn the engine on. Then we sit there floating on the air cushion until the ground stops moving, huh? We’ll be okay. And then when it all stops, we get out and go looking around in the broken houses and fill up the van with whatever we like and we drive away north somewhere.”
“Sure,” Charley said. “You know what they do with looters, they get an earthquake? They string ’em up by their balls. That’s the rule here, always was, always will be.”
“And if they don’t got no balls?” Choke asked. “Not everybody got balls, Charley.”
“They put some on you in the sex-change ward of the hospital,” said Charley. ” Then they string you up by them. This town, they don’t fool around with looters none. Hey, Tom, you ever seen a prettier city than that?”
Tom shrugged. He was far away.
“Hey, Tom? Where are you now, Tom?”
“Eleventh Zorch Galaxy,” said Stidge.
“Hush it,” Charley snapped. To Tom he said, “Tell us what you see, man.”
Things were stirring and surging in Tom’s mind. He was seeing the city called Meliluiilii on the world called Luiiliimeli, under the giant torrid blue star known as Ellullimiilu. That was one of the Thikkumuuru worlds of the Twelfth Polyarchy, Luuiiliimelli. High kings had reigned there for seven hundred thousand grand cycles of the Potentastium. “They have earthquakes there all day long,” Tom said. “It doesn’t trouble them at all. The ground is like molten, it boils and heaves like a cauldron, but the city just drifts above it.”
“Where’s that?” Charley asked. “Which planet?”
“Meliluiilii, on Luiiliimeli,” Tom said. “It’s one of the Pivot Worlds, the great ones that shape the Design. The sunlight on Luiiliimeli’s so strong it hits you like a hammer. Blue sunlight, a hammer that burns. We’d melt in a flash. But the Luiiliimeli people, they’re not even slightly like us. So they don’t mind it any. It’s not a planet for humans, it’s a planet for them. This is the only planet for humans, the one we’re on right now. The people on Luiiliimeli are like shining ghosts and the city, it’s only a floating bubble. That’s all, only a bubble.”
“Listen to him,” Charley said. “You think San Francisco is pretty? Loollymoolly, it’s like a gigantic gorgeous bubble. I can almost see it floating there and shining when I listen to him talk about it. Fan tas tic.”
Tom said, “All the cities are beautiful everywhere in the galaxy. There is no such thing as an ugly city, not anywhere. That one, now, that’s Shaxtharx, the Irikiqui capital. That’s on the big world in the Sapiil system, the empire of the Nine Suns. Everything is built out of a spiderweb material there, ten times strong as steel. It shimmers and bounces, and when there’s an earthquake—they have earthquakes there often, very often, the gravity of the Nine Suns is always pulling the planet in all sorts of different directions—when there’s an earthquake, you know, the city becomes even more beautiful, the way it moves. Almost like a tapestry, showing all the different colors of the suns. At earthquake time the Sapiil people come from all around to watch Shaxtharx shaking.”
“You been there, huh?” Buffalo asked.
“No, not me. But I see it, you understand me? The visions come. I see all the worlds, and someday maybe I’ll make the Crossing.” Tom’s eyes were shining. “You can’t go across in the flesh. You’d die like a gnat in a furnace, any of those worlds. The only world for humans, it’s this world, you follow what I’m saying? But when the Time of the Crossing comes we will be able to drop our bodies and go over into their bodies.”
“That was something, those cities he was telling us about,” Buffalo said. “But he can’t keep from running off at the mouth, can he? We drop our bodies, we go over into their bodies. Just like that. You know what he’s talking about, Charley? You, Mujer? Drop our bodies, go over into their bodies.”
“Just as is said in the Bible,” Tom went on. “In Corinthians, it’s said. That we shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. That’s the Crossing they’re talking about, when we go over to the other worlds. Not to heaven: that’s not what they mean. They mean we will go over to Luiiliimeli, some of us, and take on their very forms, and some of us will go to the Sapiil worlds and some to the Zygerone, or to the Poro, or will become Kusereen, even—we’ll be scattered through the universe, which is the divine plan, the dispersion of the Spirit—”