“Mexico’s right next door to where you lived. I mean really another country. Europe, for instance.”
“How would I have gotten to Europe?” he asked. “Magic carpet?”
“People go to Europe from America, don’t they?”
“From the East Coast, maybe. I think they run some ships back and forth. But not from here. How would you do it from here, with the whole dusted zone in between that you’d have to get across?” Jaspin shook his head. “There was a time when people went all over the world in an afternoon, you know. Australia, Europe, South America, wherever, you just got on a plane and you went.”
“They still have planes. I’ve seen them.”
“Sure, planes. Maybe some of them still fly across oceans, I don’t know. But the politics is all wrong now. With the old countries broken up into all sorts of pieces, Republic of This and Free State of That, fifty visas needed to get from here to there—no, it’s a mess, Lacy. Maybe a mess that’s completely beyond fixing by now.”
“When the gate is open and Chungirá-He-Will-Come has arrived, everything will be put to rights,” Lacy said.
“You really believe that?”
She turned her head sharply toward him. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”
“You don’t entirely, do you, Barry? There’s still something holding back somewhere in you.”
“Maybe.”
“I know there is. But it’s all right. I’ve known people like you before. I was one myself. Cynical, doubting, uncertain—why not? What else would anybody with half a grain of sense be, growing up in a world where you travel half an hour outside the cities and you’re in bandido territory, and everything for a thousand kilometers on the other side of the Rockies is a radioactive mess. But it can all drop away from you, all those doubts, all those wiseacre attitudes, if you just let it happen. You know that.”
“Yes. I do.”
“And we’re at the end of a long bad time, Barry. We’ve come down to the bottom, where there’s hardly any hope left, and suddenly there’s hope. The Senhor has brought it. He tells us the word. The gate will open; the great ones will come among us and make things better for us. That’s what’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen very soon, and then everything will be okay, maybe for the first time ever. Right? Right?”
“You’re a very beautiful woman, Lacy.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“I don’t know. I just thought I’d tell you.”
“You think I am, huh?”
“You have any doubt?”
She laughed. “I’ve heard it before. But I’m never sure. There isn’t a woman alive who thinks she’s really beautiful, no matter what men tell her. I think my hair is very good, my eyes, my nose. But I don’t like my mouth. It spoils everything.”
“You’re wrong.”
“On the other hand I think my body is quite satisfactory.”
“Is it?” he said.
Her eyes were very bright. Jaspin saw the sickle moon reflected in them, and he thought he could even make out the brilliant white point that was Venus. With the arm that was around her shoulders he pulled her toward him; he brought the other arm up and let his hand wander lightly across her breasts. She was wearing a soft green sweater, very thin material, nothing underneath. Yes, he thought, quite satisfactory. He wanted to put his head between her breasts and rest there. Vaguely he wondered where Jill was, what she was doing now. His wife. A farce that was. He hadn’t even seen her in two days. Apparently she had lost interest in the Inner Host, or more likely they had lost interest in her; but there were plenty of others around here to amuse her. He’d been right about her the first time: a drifter, a waif, scruffy, useless. Lacy was a different story: shrewd, wise, a woman who had seen a lot and who understood what she had seen. If in her earlier life she’d been a con artist, a swindler, so what? So what? You were a con artist yourself, Jaspin told himself, remembering his UCLA days when he’d made a career that hadn’t amounted to much more than hastily patching together his lectures out of other people’s ideas. A scholar, you think? No, a phony. You might just as well have been peddling real estate on Betelgeuse Five. But none of that mattered any more. We will soon all be changed, he thought. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. He began to pull her sweater upward. Smiling, Lacy moved his hands away and drew it up herself, and tossed it aside. Her jeans followed a moment later. She seemed almost to glow in the moonlight, skin very pale, curling red hair standing out luminously against it.
“Come on,” she whispered hoarsely.
They moved close together. This felt strange to him, dreamlike, very beautiful and very peculiar both at once. He had never been much of a romantic, especially when it came to this; but somehow it seemed different this time, unique, brand new. Was it the imminence of the coming of the gods? That had to be it. Here on this hillside north of San Francisco under the moon and the stars, Venus shining bright: he knew that the bad time was ending, and he could feel all the raw and pimpled places on his soul beginning to heal. Yes. Yes. Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come. And when I stand forth to face him, I will not be alone.
Indeed we have all been changed, Jaspin thought. In a moment. In the twinkling of an eye.
“You know what?” he said. “I love you.”
“Which means you’re finally learning how to love yourself,” Lacy said. “That’s the first step in loving someone else.” She smiled. “You know what? Me too. I love you, Barry.” That was the last thing that either of them said for quite a while. Then after a time Lacy said, “Wait a minute, okay? Let me get on top. Is that all right with you? Ah. That’s it, Barry. Right. Oh, yes, right. ”
5
“Proximity, that definitely appears to be the key thing,” Elszabet said. “Or at least one of the key things.” She was in her office, early afternoon, looking up at Dan Robinson, who was leaning in a loose-jointed way against the wall by the window. He seemed to be all arms and legs, standing like that. The sky, as much of it as was visible through the tiny north-facing window, was graying up, heavy clouds beginning to move in. She said, “You were right. If what happened to April is any indicator, proximity has to be a significant factor. I’m prepared to concede that now.”
“You are. Well, that’s something.”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’ll be okay,” Robinson said. He had just come from the infirmary. “We’ve got her paxed out, hundred milligrams. Lordy, that girl is big! She had a little surge, is all. Rush of blood to the head, essentially.”
“More like a hot flash, I’d say. You should have seen her. Red as a beet. As a tomato.”
Robinson chuckled. “Some tomato. Exactly what happened, anyway?”
“Well, as you and I discussed, I cooked things up so there’d be an occasion for her to come into my office while Tom was here. The moment she saw him, she started to hyperventilate.”
“Hippopotamus in heat?”
“ Dan. ”
“Just a flash image. Sorry.”
“It wasn’t a sexual thing with her, I’m pretty certain. Even though she was blushing like a girl who’d been goosed on her first date. Tom doesn’t seem to arouse sexual feelings in people, did you notice that?”
“Not in me, at any rate,” Robinson said.
“No, I wouldn’t think so. Not in anyone, apparently. He seems-well, asexual, somehow. He’s very masculine but nevertheless it’s hard to imagine him with a woman, wouldn’t you say? There are men like that. But he stirred some sort of excitement in April, and it was a fast change of breathing, mottled blotches on her cheeks, then this bright red flush.”