“Why?”
She looked at him serenely. Her eyes crinkled with some inner mirth. “In the sense. You mean. Darling. I do not. Know. But I do not. Question Him. Or question. Moving. With this moment.”
In the antiseptic light her bloodless face shone both strange and familiar, each pore sharp and clean.
Hufman’s voice intruded: “As nearly as I can determine, she is kept alive by the telltale stimulus. Somehow the synaptic breakdown is being offset. Perhaps the tell-tale is providing control functions for her heart and lungs, taking the place of the damaged tissue. I don’t believe that can last long, however.”
Alexandria gazed at him steadily. Her smile was thin and pale. “He is here. With me. Doctor. That is all. That matters.”
Nigel took her hand, squatting beside the heavy wheelchair, and studied her, frowning. Conflicting emotions played on his face.
There was a knock on the gray metal door.
Hufman glanced at Nigel uncertainly. Nigel was lost in his own thoughts. Hufman hesitated and then opened the door.
Shirley stood firmly in the doorway. Behind her were a half a dozen New Sons clad in dhotis and jackets. A man in a business suit shouldered his way to the front of them.
“We’ve come for her, Doctor,” Shirley said. Her voice carried a hard, brittle edge. “We know her wishes. She wants out, she told me. And we have a lawyer to deal with your hospital.”
FIFTEEN
Imagine thin sheets of metal standing vertically, separated by millimeters. In the stark light they become lines of metallic white. In slow motion a projectile, spinning, the color of smoke, strikes the first sheet. The thin metal crumples. The sheet is rammed back into the second layer, silently, as the film goes on. Though it moves with ponderous slowness you can do nothing. The second sheet folds. At the point of impact the bullet is splattering, turning to liquid. But it goes on. The third silvery line is compressed into the fourth, the lines form a family of parabolas, shock waves focused at the head of the tumbling, melting bullet. And you cannot stop it. Each sheet presses on the next. Each act—
Nigel saw this dream, lived through it each night, yet could do nothing. Events compressed. Each moment of those days impinged on the next, carrying him forward in a stream of instants.
—At the hospital. Hufman objecting between clenched teeth. The lawyer smooth, voice resonant with certainty. Nigel had no legal rights over Alexandria; he was not her husband. And Alexandria said she wished to leave. The law, thin sheets compressing, was clear. She wished to live—or die—among the New Sons. They understood. They wished her to walk with Him.
—The wheelchair. Winking its update metric lights, purring, ignored. The New Sons in dhotis wheeling her from the ambulance toward the Baptist church. The old man, the Immanence. His face a leadened silver, lit by arc lamps ringing the church. He cupped his hands and nodded to Shirley. Alexandria was between them, the focus of a swelling crowd. Shirley spoke reverently to the stooped, gnarled Immanence. In the moving shadows Nigel thought he caught a glance from those yellow eyes. A look of weighing, judging, assessing. The old man gestured. There was a subtle shifting in the crowd. The tide of bodies that opened before Alexandria’s wheelchair now lapped around behind her. Sealing her off. Shirley on the edge, the Immanence, sagging face aglow, at the center. Toward the church. An excited babble, a murmur. And the liquid crowd swirled between Nigel and the others. Cut him off. Slowly him. Shirley, he cried out. Alexandria! Shirley had mounted the steps into the church. She turned, looking back over the tossing sea of faces. She called out something, something about love, and then was gone. Into the shadows. Following the winking wheelchair.
—On 3D.
She was the same—calm, compact, radiating an inner sureness. The snowballing of interest around her had not touched that core. The eyes were set back, away from the questions put to her by her interrogators; viewing, studying. Nigel watched her in their darkened apartment, lit only by the glowing 3D. He saw Shirley in the background crowd. Her face was rapt, like those around her. Three individual Immanences of the New Sons escorted Alexandria down a ceremonial ramp. They were each tall and stately men, sunken cheeks, palms turned outward in ritual gesture; ascetic; lean. They were very careful of her, their first confirmed miracle. The program paused to run a fax of Hufman, angry, jaw muscles clenching. He admitted under direct questioning that Alexandria had died. Was certified. Abandoned. And then rose.
“Did she have an explanation?” the interviewer asked. Hufman’s weary face faded from the screen, to be replaced by Alexandria’s.
She smiled, shook her head, no. And something shifted far back in her eyes.
—At the church they would not let him in. To Nigel all doors were barred.
When his story reached the 3D people they interviewed him, paid attention, promised results. But when the interview was broadcast Nigel came through as a bitter, hostile man. Had he really said these things? he wondered, watching himself. Or were they adroitly rearranging his words? He could not remember. The metallic lines compressed, converged.
—At JPL, alone with Evers and Lubkin. Outside sunlight glinted on trucks as they hauled in new equipment. The facility was being beefed up.
Lubkin: We heard about Alexandria’s recovering, Nigel. That’s great news. We were kind of wondering if, well…
Evers: J-27 transmits on two channels, Walmsley. Using a circuit you logged into the board. We’ve got Ichino working on the main signal, but we’re afraid to tamper with this other one. Whatever’s receiving it—
Nigel: It’s my telltale. You know that, don’t you? Evers: Yes. We just wanted to give you the chance to admit it.
Lubkin: You’re receiving J-27? Directly?
Nigel: No. It’s found some way to sidestep me. Evers: We’ll cut it off then.
So he had to tell them about Alexandria. And beg them to allow the transmissions through JPL. Otherwise she would die.
Stony-jawed, Evers nodded. He would let the beeping thread of life go on. They would even monitor it, eavesdrop, try to decipher what they could. The code was a dense thicket of complexity.
After Nigel had left Evers’s office he could remember little of whatever else was said. Events had become so constricted, so compressed, that he confused people and moments. But he could recall Evers’s calculating bland expression, the pursed lips, the hint of forces finding a new balance.
SIXTEEN
He sat on the dusty hillside and watched the people streaming into the V of the canyon. Most of them had made the two-hour ride from Mexico City, carrying box lunches. There were bunches from Asia, though, carefully shepherded by guides. And Europeans, identifiable by their brown standard-issue trousers and wooly shirts, severely cut. Separate rivulets which emptied into the canyon.
A flight of birds entered the canyon from the south, fluttering higher as they came. Probably disturbed by the hum of the vast crowd, Nigel thought. He licked his lips. The morning air already shimmered, far warmer than it had been in Kansas two days before. Or had that been Toronto? He had difficulty keeping the days straight. Each of Alexandria’s appearances drew a larger crowd; these, he’d been told, had encamped days in advance.
A hundred meters away men labored to frame up more bleachers. It was pointless; people were sitting on the jutting rock ledges already in immense numbers, far more than last-minute measures could accommodate.
The hills swarmed with life, the ripplings of the throng like cilia on an immense cell. On the narrow floor of the valley the impassioned performed: tumblers, self-flagellators, psi acrobats, chanters with their hollow booming sound, dancers. The annular rings turned. Brimming loving flying dying. Fling. Shout. Moan. Stamp.
At last, the excited babble came. At the head of the canyon a white dot blossomed. Alexandria in her wheel-chair, wrapped in glittering robes. She occupied a platform among the banked rock shelves. Four Immanences flanked her.
“To fullness!” chanted the crowd. “Oneness!” In the sky a winged dot burned orange at one end. Against the pale desert blue a cloud formed. A white sculpture for the occasion: an immense alabaster woman. Wings. Hand raised in greeting, blessing, forgiveness. Alexandria.
Words from an Immanence. Music. Trumpets blared and echoed from the stones. Stamp. Sing. Running living leaping soaring. Salvation in the shimmering, enchanting heat.
He knew the litany well. It washed over him without effect. He was numb from following her. He knew he should leave but he could not give up when he could still stay close, still see her in the distance. A white dot. The walking, talking dead. Come and see. Have your hopes raised. Regain your faith. Joyful singing love forever.
And yet, and yet…he envied her. And loved her.
