To Jaspin’s astonishment he realized the voice was his own.
All right. All right. Just go with it, he told himself. He felt suddenly Brentwood, sure, jumping around with the pagan shvartzers on a sizzling hillside in the middle of July—well, why the hell not? Go with it, kid.
He was close enough now to see the leaders of the procession, rising awesomely above all the rest in their stiltlike platform shoes: there was Senhor Papamacer, there was Senhora Aglaibahi beside him, and surrounding them were the eleven members of the Inner Host. A kind of golden nimbus of sunlight flickered around all thirteen of them. Jaspin wondered how they worked that trick; for trick it surely must be. Their own explanation was simply that they were magnets for cosmic energy.
“The force it comes from the seven galaxies,” Senhor Papamacer had told the Times reporter. “It is the great light that bears the power of salvation. Once it shined on Egypt, and then on Tibet, and then on the place of the gods in Yucatan; and it has been on Jerusalem and in the sacred shrine of the Andes, and now it is here, which is the sixth of the Seven Places. Soon it will move to the Seventh Place, which is the North Pole, when Maguali-ga will open the gateway and Chungirá He-Will-Come will break through to our world, bringing the wealth of the stars for those who love him. And that will be the time of the ending, which will be the new beginning.” That time, Senhor Papamacer had said, was not far off.
Jaspin heard the bleating of tethered goats over all the other sounds. He heard the low mournful voice of the sacrificial white bull that he knew was in the hut at the top of the hill.
Now he saw the masked dancers, cutting through the mob, seven of them representing the seven benevolent galaxies. Their faces were hidden by glittering metallic shields and their bodies, which were bare, bore ornaments in the shape of suns and moons and planets. On their heads were red metal domes bright as mirrors, from which blinding shafts of reflected sunlight bounced like spears. They carried gourd rattles and castanets, and they were chanting fiercely:
An invocation. He fell in behind them, chanting, flinging his arms around. To his left, a plump woman in green robes was saying over and over in Spanish “Forgive our sins forgive our sins” and on the other side of him a leathery-looking black man bare to the waist was muttering in thick French, “The sun rises in the east, the sun sets in Guinea. The sun rises in the east, the sun sets in Guinea.” The drums were louder and faster, now. Up the hill. Up. Animals were screeching in terror and pain somewhere: the sacrifices were beginning.
Jaspin found himself standing on the lip of a huge ditch. It was full almost to the brim with the most amazing assortment of things: jewelry, coins, dolls, entertainment cubes, family photographs, clothing, toys, electronic gadgets, weapons, tools, packages of food. He knew what to do. This was the Well of Sacrifice: you had to rid yourself of something that was precious to you, by way of recognizing that you would not need such things once the gods came from the stars bringing incalculable wealth to all the suffering people of Earth. You must make a gift to the Earth, said Senhor Papamacer, if you wish the Earth to draw gifts from the stars. It didn’t matter if what you threw into the ditch wasn’t generally considered precious; it had to be precious to you. Jaspin had an offering ready—his wristwatch, probably the last valuable thing except for his books that he had not yet pawned, a sleek IBM job with nine function nodes. It was worth at least a thousand.
This is lunacy, he thought.
“To Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” he said, and hurled the shining watch far out into the cluttered ditch.
Then he was swept on, upward, to the place of communion. The blood of goats and sheep was flowing there; they had not yet sacrificed the bull. Jaspin, trembling and shivering, found himself face to face with Senhora Aglaibahi, the virgin mother, the goddess on Earth. She seemed about three meters tall; her black hair was dusted with mirror-dust, her eyes were outlined in fiery scarlet, her bare heavy dark-tipped breasts glistened with the markings of Maguali-ga. She touched her fingertip to his arm and he felt a little sting, as though she had stuck him with a needle or tapped him with a shocker. He lurched on past her, past the even more gigantic form of Senhor Papamacer, past the papier-mâché figures of the gods Narbail and Prete Noir and O Minotauro and the star-rover Rei Ceupassear, and onward around a bare charred place that was sacred to Chungirá-He-Will-Come and Maguali-ga.
Somewhere on the far side of that he felt himself growing dizzy and beginning to lose consciousness. The heat, he thought, the excitement, the mobs, the hysteria. He tottered, nearly fell, struggled to stay upright, fearing that he would be trampled if he let himself go down. He found a tree at the summit of the hill and clung to it as wave after wave of astounding vertigo came over him. It seemed to him that he was breaking free of the land, that he was being hurled by some enormous centrifugal power into the far reaches of the universe.
As he soared through space he saw Chungirá-He-Will-Come.
The god of the gateway was a great bizarre golden figure with curving ram’s-horns, the strangest being that Jaspin had ever seen, rising out of a block of pure shining alabaster that covered it—him—to the waist. Over its—his—left shoulder was an immense sun, dark red, filling half the purplish sky; it seemed to be swelling and pulsing, blowing up like an enormous balloon. There was a second sun over the god’s right shoulder, a blue one, fluctuating in sudden violent bursts of light. Between the two suns streamed a bridge of brilliantly glowing matter, like a fiery arch in the heavens.
“My time is soon,” said Chungirá-He-Will-Come. “You will enter into my embrace, child. And all will be well.”
Then the figure vanished. The red star and the blue one could no longer be seen. Jaspin clutched at the air but he was unable to bring back what he had just beheld. The wondrous moment was over.
He began to shake. He had never experienced anything remotely like this before. It stunned him; it was devastating; he could not move, he could not breathe. For an instant he had been touched by a god. There was no explanation for it and he would not seek one. Just this once he had broken through into something that passed all his understanding, something that was so very much bigger than Barry Jaspin that he could lose himself utterly in it. Good Christ, he thought, can it really be that there are titanic space-beings out there, that the tumbondé people have a pipeline across half the universe to God knows where, that these creatures are watching over our world from a jillion light years away, that they are coming to us to govern us and change our lives? It has to be just a hallucination—doesn’t it? The heat, the crowds, maybe a drug the Senhora slipped into me?
He opened his eyes. He was lying under a tree, and the thin blonde girl was bending over him. Her blouse was still open, but the Maguali-ga markings on her breasts were smeared and blurred, and her skin was shining with sweat.
“I saw you pass out,” she said. “I was afraid you’d get hurt. Can I help you up? You look so strange, Dr. Jaspin!”
He didn’t bother to deny that he was Jaspin. In a voice strangled with awe he said, “I can’t believe it. I absolutely can’t believe it. I saw him. I could have reached out and put my hand on him. Not that I would have dared.”
“Saw whom, Dr. Jaspin?”
“You didn’t? See him?”
“You mean Senhor Papamacer?”
“I mean Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” said Jaspin. “Looking at me from a planet of some other galaxy. Christ Almighty, it was the real thing! I never doubted it.” He felt shrouded in a numinous aura; he felt himself exalted by the divine touch. Some part of him, he knew, was Chungirá-He-Will-Come, and always would be. But in another moment it all started to flee and fade; and a moment after that he was no one but miserable, screwed-up Barry Jaspin again, lying sweaty and exhausted on a torrid hillside with thousands of people shouting and chanting and passing out all around him, and frightened animals bleating, and drums shaking the ground like nine-point-five Richter. He sat up and looked at the blonde girl and saw the awe and wonder reflected in her face. It was as if she too had seen Chungirá-He-Will-Come in his eyes, for that little moment before the ecstasy faded. And without warning the most terrible sadness he had ever known came over him, and he began to cry, dry racking tears and uncontrollable sobs.