“Oh, yes, Elizabeth. Very relaxed.”
“Elszabet,” she reminded him gently.
“Ah. Of course.”
She leaned close. He was trying to stare down the front of her halter. Good for him, she thought. “Tell me,” she said. “Have you ever had a dream in which you saw nine suns in the sky all at once?”
“Nine suns?” he said blankly. “Nine suns all at once?”
3
Jaspin was late leaving his apartment in San Diego that morning. That wasn’t unusual for him. When he finally got himself into gear he hurried down the freeway to the Chula Vista turnoff, swung inland, took the Otay Valley shunt toward the unmonitored county roads. Twenty minutes later he came to the roadblock set up by the tumbondé people as he was crossing a dry hot plateau.
They had the road completely closed, which was flat-out illegal, but no one in San Diego County was likely to try to tell the tumbondé folks what to do. An energy wall ran across the highway from shoulder to shoulder, and six or seven somber-looking bronze-skinned men with wide cheekbony faces were standing behind it, arms folded. They wore tumbondé costumes: silver jackets, tight black leggings with red piping, wide black sombreros, crescent-moon pendants dangling on their chests. They appeared to be wearing masks, too, but they weren’t; those were simply their faces, aloof, impassive. None of them seemed the least bit interested in the pale gringo in the old battered car. But Jaspin knew the routine. He leaned out and said, “Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come.”
“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” replied one of the tumbondé men.
“Senhor Papamacer teaches. Senhora Aglaibahi is our mother. Rei Ceupassear rules.”
“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga.”
He was doing all right so far. “Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come,” Jaspin said a second time.
“The parking is two kilometer,” said one of the tumbondé men indifferently. “Then you walk five hundred meter. Better you run: is already starting, the procession.”
“Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” Jaspin said, as the barrier winked out. He drove past the unsmiling guards and down the dusty potholed road until he saw small boys waving him toward the parking lot. There were at least a thousand cars there, most of them even older than his own. He found a nook under a huge old oak tree, left the car there, set out at a trot down the road. Though it was not yet noon, the heat was intense. It felt like Arizona heat, no moisture in it at all, a pure furnace. He tried to imagine what it was like to stand around in black pants and a black sombrero under midday sunlight in that heat.
In a few minutes he caught sight of the congregation, milling chaotically on a high knoll just off the road. There were thousands of them, some dressed in full tumbondé gear but most, like him, in ordinary street clothes. They were carrying banners, placards, little images of the great ones. From unseen loudspeakers came a deep, unhurried, relentless drumming. The ground shook. They probably had it wired, Jaspin thought. Electrostatic nodes all over the place, and synchronized pulsation chips. Tumbondé might be primitive and elemental but it didn’t seem to scorn technology.
He found a place at the edge of the crowd. Far ahead, halfway up the hillside, he saw the colossal papier-mache statues of the divinities being carried on poles by sweating brawny men. Jaspin recognized each one: that was Prete Noir the Negus, that one was the thunder-serpent Narbail, that was O Minotauro the bull, that was Rei Ceupassear. And those two, the biggest of all, were the true great ones, Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga, the gods from deepest space. Jaspin shivered in the heat. Crazy as this stuff was, it had undeniable power.
A slender young woman jammed up behind him twisted around to face him and said, “Pardon me. You’re Dr. Jaspin, aren’t you? From UCLA?”
He looked at her as if she had bitten his arm. She was twenty-three, twenty-four, stringy blonde hair, white blouse open to the waist. Her eyes looked a little glazed. The marks of Maguali-ga were painted across her very minimal breasts in purple and orange. Jaspin didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean anything. He had forgotten a lot of people in the last few years.
Gruffly he said, “Sorry. Wrong guy.”
“I was sure you were him. I audited his course in ninety-nine. I thought it was really profound.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her, smiling vacantly, and moved away, elbowing through. She made the sign of Rei Ceupassear at him, as a kind of benediction. Forgiveness. Screw you and your forgiveness, Jaspin thought. Then he was instantly sorry. But he drilled forward, burrowing into the crowd.
This was a low time in Jaspin’s life. Somehow things had begun falling apart for him right about the year that the blonde girl said she had sat in on his classes, and he had not yet figured out why. He was thirty-four. There were days when he felt three times as old as that: heavy leaden days, ass-dragging days, sometimes a month of them in a row. The university had dismissed him, for cause, early in ’02. He hadn’t quite managed to begin his dissertation then—the doctorate that the blonde girl had conferred on him existed only in her imagination. What he had been was an assistant professor in the anthropology department, and he hadn’t realized what a rare privilege it was in those times to have a cushy job in one of the few remaining universities. He realized it now. But what he was now was nothing at all.
“Maguali-ga! Maguali-ga!” they were yelling on all sides. Jaspin took up the cry. “Maguali-ga!” He started to move, letting himself be swept onward, up toward the vast swaying statues shimmering in the heat.
He had been coming to the tumbondé processions for five months now; this was his eighth one. He wasn’t entirely sure why he came. Part of it, he knew, was professional curiosity. He still thought of himself on some level as an anthropologist, and here was anthropology raw and wild, on the hoof, this apocalyptic messianic cult of star-god worshippers that had sprung up in the drab wastelands east of San Diego. Jaspin’s specialty had been contemporary irrationality: he had hoped to write a massive book that would explain the modern world to itself and make some sense out of the madhouse that the good people of the late twenty-first century had handed on to their descendants. Tumbondé was the craziest thing going; Jaspin had been drawn irresistibly toward it, as if by infiltrating it and analyzing it and reporting on it he might somehow be able to rehabilitate his broken academic career. But there was more to his being here than that. He admitted to himself that he felt some kind of hunger, some emptiness of the spirit that he dreamed he might satisfy here. God only knew how, though.
“Chungirá-He-Will-Come!” Jaspin shouted, and forced his way through the crowds.
The excitement all around him was contagious. He could feel his pulse rising and his throat going dry. People were dancing in place, feet rooted, shoulders wriggling, arms flung this way and that. He saw the blonde girl again a dozen meters away, lost in some kind of trance. Maguali-ga the god of the gateway had come to collect her spirit.
There were very few Anglos in the crowd. Tumbondé had emerged out of the Latino-African refugee community that had come crowding into the San Diego area after the Dust War, and most of these people were dark-skinned or outright black. The cult was an international stew, a mix of Brazilian and Guinean stuff with an underlay of something Haitian, and of course it had taken on a Mexican tinge too; you couldn’t have any kind of apocalyptic cult operating this close to the border without very quickly having it acquire a subtle Aztec coloration. But it was more ecstatic in nature than the usual Mexican variety—less death, more transfiguration.
“Maguali-ga!” a tremendous voice roared. “Take me, Maguali-ga!”