Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  “Conscience chip,” Ed muttered. “Right, I forgot. All these scientific things they stitch into us. Conscience chips to keep you from drinking. Homing-vector implants in case we run away. The bastards, they stick a sliver of this and a sliver of that in us and they operate us like machines. You be a smart guy, Tom, you get yourself out of here fast, you hear?”

  “They’ve been nice to me so far.”

  “You be a smart guy anyway. You want one of these?”

  “Thanks,” Tom said. “No.”

  “Well, I do. Down the hatch!” Ed pressed the squeeze-tab and put the flask to his mouth. “Ah, that’s what I needed!” He looked a little more cheerful. “So you get visions of other worlds too, huh? God, I’d like to see one of those! Just one. Just to find out what all the fuss is about.”

  “You never have?”

  “Not once,” Ed said. His red-rimmed eyes seemed to blaze suddenly with rage and anguish. “Not even once. You know how much I envy all of you, with your green worlds and your blue ones and your nine suns and all the rest of it? Why don’t I see too? Some goddamn tremendous thing is going on all around me, some weird colossal thing that nobody can understand but that’s plainly of gigantic tremendous importance, and I’m shut clean out of it. And that stinks. You know? It stinks.”

  So that’s it, Tom thought.

  Now he understood where the pain lay inside this man, and what he might be able to do about it, maybe. He wanted to do something about it.

  Tom said, “Give me one of those drinks.”

  “Which one you want?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Bourbon,” Ed said. “Here, have the bourbon.”

  Tom took the squeeze-flask from him, studied it a moment, pressed the tab. The top popped open and he put it to his lips and let the dark liquor roll down his throat. It hit all at once, hard and hot and good. It was a long time since Tom had had a drink, and he sat there relishing it, feeling it go to work in the crevices of his soul. Good, he thought. I can handle this. This is going to work out just fine.

  He turned to Ed. “You got to stop worrying about those space dreams, okay?”

  “Stop worrying, the man says. I’m not worrying. I’m just a little pissed off. Am I a freak or something? Why don’t I see what the others all see?”

  “Easy up,” Tom said. He took a deep breath and put his hand over Ed’s hand and leaned close and said, “You will see. I promise you that. You’ll have the dreams too, Ed, just like everybody else. I know you will. I’m going to show you how, all right? All right?”

  5

  “MONDAY, the eighth of October, 2103,” Jaspin said. He was sitting in the back seat of his car, speaking into the golden gridwork of a hand-held mnemone capsule. “We are well up into Northern California now, camped in open country about fifty miles east of San Francisco Bay. The march is about to take on a new aspect, because Senhor Papamacer has decided to swing due west here and go through Oakland before we resume our northward journey. We have avoided passing through cities up till now, ever since setting out from San Diego. I think the Senhor would actually like to cross the bay and enter San Francisco, which he says is a profound focus of galactic forces. But even he sees that that’s logistically unwise, maybe even impossible, because San Francisco is so small and is accessible only by bridge, except from the south. Trying to bring a mob this size into San Francisco would cause major disruptions both for the city and for us. There would be no place to camp, and the main routes out might become blocked, possibly causing a breakup of the entire march. So we will go no further than Oakland, which is readily accessible by land and has adequate camping space in the hills just east of the city. While we are there, of course, thousands of its citizens will certainly join the march, and perhaps an even larger number will come over from San Francisco to enroll. It’s just as well that there are no more major population centers along the coast between here and Mendocino, because we’re quickly reaching the point where our numbers are becoming unmanageably unwieldy. This is already the greatest mass migration since the end of the Dust War, certainly, and since Senhor Papamacer intends to get at least as far north as Portland before the onset of winter, and maybe even to Seattle, the possibility exists that serious disorders will—”

  “Barry?”

  Jaspin looked up, annoyed at the interruption. Jill stood by the window, thumping on the roof of the car to get his attention.

  “What is it?” It was two or three days now since he had had a chance to bring his journal up to date, and there was plenty of important material he wanted to enter. Whatever she wanted, he thought, couldn’t it have waited another half an hour?

  “Someone to see you.”

  “Tell him five minutes.”

  “Her,” Jill said.

  “What?”

  “A woman. Red frizzy hair, looks sort of trampy in a high-class way. Says she’s from San Francisco.”

  “I’m trying to dictate my notes,” Jaspin said. “I don’t know any redheads from San Francisco. What does she want with me?”

  “Nothing. She wants an audience with the Senhor. Got as far as Bacalhau, Bacalhau says she should talk to you. I think you’re now the high muckamuck in charge of excitable Anglo broads around here.”

  “Christ,” Jaspin said. “Okay, five minutes, tell her. Just let me finish this. Where is she now?”

  “At the Maguali-ga altar,” Jill said.

  “Five minutes,” he said again.

  But his concentration was broken. In his journal entry he had wanted to discuss the way the racial makeup of the tumbondé procession was changing as the march went along—the original San Diego County group of followers of Senhor Papamacer, heavily South American and African in ethnic origin, having been diluted now by hordes of Chicanos from the Salinas Valley farming communities out back of Monterey; and now up here in the north there had been an Anglo influx too, rural whites, causing some alterations in the general tone of the whole event. The newcomers had no real idea of the underlying Dionysiac flavor of tumbondé, the pagan frenzy and fervor; all they seemed to hear was the promise of wealth and immortal life when Chungirá-He-Will-Come finally came waltzing through that gateway at the North Pole, and they wanted to be in on that number, oh, yes, Lord. Already that was creating disorder in the march, and it was going to get worse, especially if Senhor Papamacer continued to reign in absentia, as he had been doing for days, from the seclusion of the lead bus. But getting his observations on all these matters down on the mnemone capsule would have to be postponed now. Jaspin realized he should have gone off by himself for an hour or two to do his dictation, but too late for that now. He turned off the capsule and got out of his car.

  It was a hot muggy afternoon. Heat had plagued them all the way up the center of the state, and there was still no sign of the rainy season. They said that up here it sometimes began raining in October, but apparently not this October. The low rounded hills of this unspectacular countryside were tawny with the dry summer grass. Everything here was shriveled and parched and golden-brown while it waited for winter.

  From hill to hill, all across the saddle of this valley, all you could see was tumbondé: pilgrims everywhere, a surging sea of them. In the center of the whole circus were the buses in which the Senhor, the Senhora, the Inner Host, and the holy images were traveling. Nearby was the big patch of consecrated ground with the altars and the blood-hut and the Well of Sacrifice and everything all set up, just as though this were the original communion hill back of San Diego. Wherever they went, they set up all that stuff. And then beyond the central holy zone there was a horde of patchwork tents, thousands upon thousands of pilgrims, innumerable smoky campfires, children yelling, cats and dogs running around, every imaginable sort of ramshackle vehicle parked in random chaotic clusters. Jaspin had never seen so many people together in one place. And the numbers grew from day to day. How big would the army of tumbondé be, he wondered, a month from now? Two months from now? He wondered also, som
etimes, what was going to happen when they reached the Canadian border—the Republic of British Columbia’s border, actually. And what was going to happen if they kept on going north and north and north for month after month, and winter closed in on them, and Chungirá-He-Will-Come did not make an appearance? There will be no more winter, Senhor Papamacer had promised, once Maguali-ga opens the gateway. But Senhor Papamacer had spent all his life in Rio, in Tijuana, in San Diego. What the hell did he know about winter, anyway?

  Screw it, Jaspin thought. The gods would provide. And if not, not. Mine not to reason why. I lived by reason all those years and what good was it ever to me? Chungirá-He-Will-Come, he will come. Yes. Yes.

  The woman was easy to find. She was standing by the Maguali-ga altar, just as Jill had said: staring at the nine globes of colored glass as if she expected the bulgy-eyed god to materialize before her eyes at any second. She was shorter than Jaspin was expecting—somehow he had thought she would be tall, he didn’t know why—and not quite as flashy, either. But she was very attractive. Jill had said she was trampy in a high-class way. Jaspin knew tramps and he knew high class, and this one wasn’t really either. She looked shrewd, she looked energetic, she looked like she’d been around some. An enterprising woman, he figured.

  “You wanted to see me?” he asked. “I’m Barry Jaspin. The Senhor’s liaison aide.”

  “Lacy Meyers,” she said. “I’ve just come over from San Francisco. I need to see Senhor Papamacer.”

  “Need?”

  “Want,” she said. “Want very much.”

  “That’s going to be very difficult,” Jaspin told her. He realized that somehow he was standing closer to her than was really necessary, but he didn’t move back. Quite an attractive woman, in fact. About thirty, maybe a little more, the red hair close to her head in a caplike coif of tight ringlets, her eyes a deep lustrous green. Delicate tapering nose, fine cheekbones, the mouth maybe a little coarse. “Is this for a media interview?” he asked.

  “No, an audience. I want to be received into his presence.” She was wound up tight: one poke and she’d explode. “He may be the most important human being who has ever lived, do you know? Certainly he is to me. I just want to kneel before him and tell him what he means to me.”

  “So do all these people you see here, Ms. Meyers. You understand that the Senhor’s burdens are very great, and that although he would make himself available to all his people if that were possible, it isn’t—”

  The green eyes flashed. “Just for a minute! Half a minute!”

  He wanted to help her. It was completely impossible, he knew. But even so, he found himself wondering whether he might be able to find a way. Because you find her attractive, is that it? If she were plain, or old, or a man, would you even consider it?

  He said, “Why is it so urgent?”

  “Because he’s opened my eyes. Because I’ve gone through my whole life not believing in any goddamned thing except how to make life softer for Lacy Meyers, and all of a sudden he’s made me see that there’s something really holy in this universe, that there are true gods who guide our destinies, that it isn’t all just a dumb joke, that—that—I don’t really need to tell you, do I, what a religious conversion is like? You must have been through it too, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Jaspin nodded. “I think we actually have a lot in common.”

  “I know we do. I saw it right away.”

  “And you’ve been following the path of tumbondé even up here in the Bay Area? I didn’t think it had—”

  “I didn’t know anything about tumbondé until a couple of weeks ago, when you people started getting up into this part of the state. But I’ve known about the gods all summer. I had a vision in July, a dream, a red sun and a blue one, and a block of white stone, and a creature with golden horns reaching out toward me—”

  “Chungirá-He-Will-Come,” Jaspin said.

  “Yes. Only I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know what the hell it was. But the dream kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back, and each time I saw it more clearly, the creature moved around and seemed to say things to me, and sometimes there were others like him in the dream, and then there were other dreams—I saw the nine suns of Maguali-ga, I saw the blue light of—what’s the name, Rei Ceupassear?—I saw all sorts of things. I tell you, I thought I was going nuts. That the whole world was going nuts, because I know everybody else was having these visions too. But I didn’t know what to make of it. Nobody did. Until I read about Senhor Papamacer. And I saw the pictures he had—the pictures of the gods—”

  “The computer-generated ones, the holographic repros.”

  “Yes. And then it all fell into place for me. The truth of it, that the gods were coming to Earth, that they were going to bring the jubilee, that the millennium was coming. And I saw that Senhor Papamacer must truly be their prophet. And I knew that I was going to come over here and join the pilgrimage to the Seventh Place and be part of what was going to come. But I want to thank the Senhor personally. I want to go down on my knees to him. I’ve been looking for some sort of god all my life, you know? And absolutely sure I could never find one. And now—now—”

  Jaspin saw Jill coming toward them. Worried, maybe, that he might be getting something on with this woman? Flattering that she even gave a damn, she who came in every night reeking of Bacalhau’s sweet greasy hair-oils, with Bacalhau’s sweat mingling with her own. Screwing her way right through the Inner Host and back again, and he could hardly remember the last time she’d been willing to make love with him, his wife Jill. Jealous, now? Jill? Not very likely.

  What the hell, even if she was, Jill had no right to complain. He’d been damned miserable all month long on Jill’s account. If he happened to find some woman attractive now, and she happened to feel the same way about him—

  Lacy was saying, “The ironic thing, all this space stuff, is that a couple years ago I was actually involved in a fraud, a scam that involved promising to send people off to other stars. It was like we were selling them real estate that didn’t exist, the old underwater development bit: give us your money, we’ll put you on the express to Betelgeuse Five. A man named Ed Ferguson, a real shifty operator, he was running it, and I was working the marks for him. Well, they caught him, they were going to send him in for Rehab Two, but he had a good lawyer—”

  Jill walked up next to Jaspin. “He being of any help to you?” she said to Lacy.

  “I was just telling Mr. Jaspin, the irony of it, that I used to work with a man who was running a crooked thing involving journeys to other stars. Before any of these visions from the stars began reaching Earth. He would have gone to jail, but he got himself sent to one of those mindpick places instead, up near Mendocino, where they’re supposed to be turning him into a decent human being. Some chance.”

  “My sister April’s in the same place,” Jill said. “Nepenthe, it’s called. Near Mendocino.”

  “Your sister?” Jaspin said. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  Lacy laughed. “It’s a really small world, isn’t it? I bet your sister and Ed are having a terrific wild affair up there right this minute. Ed always had an eye for the women.”

  “He won’t have an eye for April,” said Jill. “She’s fat as a pig. Always has been. And very weird in the head, too. I’m sure your friend Ed can do a lot better than April.” To Jaspin she said, “When you’re finished here, Barry, go over to the Host bus, huh? They’re setting up for the Seven Galaxies rite tonight and Lagosta wants you to help out plugging in the polyphase generator.”

  “Okay,” Jaspin said. “Five minutes.”

  “Nice meeting you, Ms.—uh—” Jill said, and drifted away.

  “Not very friendly, is she?” Lacy said.

  “Downright rude and nasty,” said Jaspin. “Getting religion has made her go sour somehow. She’s my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “So to speak. More or less. One day the Senhor decided we ought to be married
. Spur of the moment, married us on the spot, month or so ago. It’s for the rituals, the initiations, some of it: you have to be part of a couple. It isn’t what you’d call a happy marriage.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  Jaspin shrugged. “It won’t matter, once the gate is open, will it? But until then—until then—”

  “It can be rough, yeah.”

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve got to go help set up for tonight. But I want to tell you, I’ll try to arrange an audience with the Senhor for you. Won’t be easy, because he’s been pretty scarce the last few weeks. But maybe I can get you in. That isn’t just bull. If I can do it I will. Because I know what it feels like, being a standard shabby twenty-second-century human being just faking your way through life and suddenly being lifted up and shown that there’s something worth living for besides your own crappy comfort. Like I say, we have a lot in common. I’ll try to get you what you’ve asked me for.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said.

  She offered him her hand. He took it and held it perhaps a moment too long. He debated pulling her toward him, just on an impulse, and kissing her. He didn’t do that. But there was no mistaking the warmth in her eyes and the gratitude. And the possibilities. Especially the possibilities.

  * * *

  Six

  I know more than Apollo

  For oft when he lies sleeping

  I behold the stars at mortal wars

  And the wounded welkin weeping.

  The moon embraces her shepherd

  And the queen of love her warrior,

  While the first doth horn the star of morn

  And the next the heavenly farrier.

  While I do sing, “Any food, any feeding.

  Feeding, drink, or clothing?

  Come, dame or maid,

  Be not afraid,

  Poor Tom will injure nothing.”