“Are you here to help me make the Crossing?” April asked. “Mr. Ferguson made the Crossing a little while ago. And Tom says we all will. We’ll go to the stars today. I don’t know if I want to go to the stars, Jill. Is that what happens today?”
“What happens today is that I’m going to get you out of this place,” Jill said. “It isn’t safe here any more. Give me your hand. Here. Come on, April. Nice April. Pretty April.”
“I’m supposed to stay in the bathroom. Dr. Waldstein is coming right back and he’ll give me an injection so I’ll feel better.”
“I just saw Dr. Waldstein running like a lunatic in the other direction,” Jill said. “Come on. You can trust me. Let’s go for a little walk, April.”
“Where will they send me? To the Nine Suns? To the Green World?”
“You know about them?” Jill asked, surprised.
“I see them every night. I can almost see them now. The Sphere of Light. The Blue Star.”
“That’s right. Maguali-ga will open the gate. Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come. There’s nothing to worry about. Give me your hand, April.”
“Dr. Waldstein—”
“Dr. Waldstein asked me to get you and bring you outside,” Jill said. “I just spoke with him. Tall man, dark hair, white coat? He said, Tell April I won’t have time to come right back, so you get her.”
“He said that?” April smiled. She put her hand in Jill’s and took a step or two out of the bathroom. Come on, April. Come on. That’s right. Jill led her sister across the room, past the dead or unconscious man sitting on the floor, toward the door. Out into the hall, down the corridor. They were almost to the exit when the outside door opened and two people came running in. Barry, for Christ’s sake. And that red-headed woman of his.
“Jill?”
“I found my sister. This is April.”
“Then this is the patient dormitory?” the redhead asked.
“Right. You looking for someone too?”
“My partner. I told you, he was a patient here.”
“Nobody else around in here. No, wait, there’s one guy. In the last room on the left, down the hall. I think he’s drunk, though. Might even be dead. Sitting on the floor, big grin on his face. What’s happening outside?”
“The Inner Host is trying to get everything calm,” Jaspin said. “They’ve fanned out through the crowd, carrying the holy images. It’s almost a riot but they may just be able to quiet things down.”
“And the Senhor? The Senhora?”
“In their bus, far as I know.”
Jill said, “The Senhor ought to come out. That’s the only way to quiet things.”
“I’m going down the hall,” the redheaded woman said.
Jill told Jaspin, “You ought to go to the Senhor, ask him to speak to the crowd. Otherwise you know it’s all going to turn berserk, and then what happens to the pilgrimage? Go talk to him, Barry. He’ll listen to you.”
“He won’t listen to anyone. You know that.” From down the hall the woman called, “Can you come here, Barry? I found Ed, but I don’t think he’s alive.”
“He made the Crossing,” April said, like someone talking in her sleep.
“I better go,” Jaspin said. “What are you going to do?”
“Take April, find a safe place, wait for everything to settle down.”
“Isn’t this a safe place right here?”
“Not when ten thousand people decide to come in out of the rain all at once. Old rickety building like this, they’ll knock it right over.
The redheaded woman was returning, now. “He is dead,” she said. “I wonder what happened. Poor Ed. He was a bastard, but still—dead?—”
“Come on, April,” Jill said. “We got to get out of here.”
She led her sister around Jaspin and out on the dormitory porch. The scene in front of her was wilder than ever. Cars were stacking up like flood debris. People everywhere, yelling, bewildered, churning around like bees in a hive. No room for anybody to move: they were all butted up one against the next. In the center of everything was the Senhor’s bus. In front of it the eleven members of the Inner Host could be seen, all decked out in their high tumbondé drag and carrying the soggy images of the great gods. They were moving slowly forward, cutting a path through the throng. People were trying to give way before them but it was hard: they had no place to go.
Then Jill saw a stocky little man with a big mop of red hair climb up the side of the Senhor’s bus, do something to the protective screen on one of the windows that somehow disconnected it, and go wriggling inside.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Barry? Barry? Come on out here! It’s important!”
Jaspin poked his head out the door. “What is it?”
“The Senhor,” Jill said. “I just saw some kind of scratcher break into his bus. The Host is out marching the statues around, and nobody’s guarding the Senhor, and somebody just broke into the bus. Come on. We’ve got to do something.”
“Us?”
“Who else? April, you stay here until we get back, you understand? Don’t go anywhere. Not anywhere at all.” Jill beckoned fiercely to Jaspin. “Come on, will you? Come on. ”
4
Tom felt the ecstasy rising and rising and rising. It was as though all the worlds were coming to him at once, the light of a thousand suns illuminating his spirit, Ellullilimiilu and Nine Suns and the Double Kingdom and all the myriad capitals of the Poro and the Zygerone and the Kusereen flooding through him at the same time. It seemed to him that even the awesome ancient godlike Theluvara themselves were warming his soul from their eyrie at the farthest reaches of space.
He had done it. He had initiated the Time of the Crossing at last. He still quivered with the power of the sensation that had engulfed him at the moment when he had felt the soul of that man, that Ed, rising from his body and arching upward, soaring toward its destination in the distant galaxies.
Now, ablaze with joy, Tom wandered like a Blade of the Imperium through the Center, from one deserted building to the next. Two of his followers were with them, two of those who had loaned him their strength when he had lifted that man, that Ed, to his Crossing. But there had been two others when they had done that, the Mexican man and the heavy-set woman, and they had disappeared when all the shouting and excitement began.
I need to find them, Tom thought. I may not be strong enough with just these two to undertake the rest of the Crossings.
The strength that he had received from the other four, when he had sent the man to the stars, had been essential. That he knew. It had taken immense energy to achieve the Crossing. In the instant of the separation of Ferguson’s body and his soul Tom had been able to feel every particle of his own vitality at risk. It had been like the dimming of the lights in a room when too much energy was required at one time. And then the other four, the Mexican and the heavy-set woman and the artificial woman and the priest, had come to his rescue, had sent their own power roaring through the chain of linked hands, and Tom had been able to accomplish the Crossing for Ferguson. There were other Crossings now to do. He had to find the missing two.
Prowling from building to building, he scarcely noticed the rain. He was vaguely aware of the great mob of strangers that had erupted into the Center grounds and was crashing about in the open space between the dormitory and the staff cabins, but that didn’t seem important. Whoever they were, they meant nothing to Tom. In a little while everything would be calm again, and all these frantic strangers would be setting forth on their journeys to the stars.