Gods Without Men (9 page)

It occurred to her that it was a couple of hours since she last saw Judy. Poor kid. It had been a long drive, and she’d been an angel the whole way. No whining, no are-we-there-yet, even when Mom got them both lost outside Pomona and had to ask directions from a farmer. A real little grown-up, her daughter. A fine young lady. So what time was it now? Quarter of five. Long shadows and late-afternoon light. There had to be several thousand folks down there. Hard to put an exact figure on it. Six or seven, surely. Ten? All the motels for miles around were full, or so she’d heard, but she’d never even considered sleeping indoors. Why would you when you could camp out under the desert stars? Such a treat! Last night Judy had been so sweetly excited as they were putting up the tent. Manny Vargas lit a fire, and a whole crowd of the Cohort people had toasted marshmallows and sung songs. Later, as they lay snuggled up in their sleeping bags, Judy had tried to point out constellations to her, and she realized she couldn’t name so many herself. Yet another thing to add to the personal-improvement list. The Guide always said humans needed to have a better relationship with the higher planes—a more intimate relationship. So star names it would have to be. And memorizing
the rest of the Blessings and writing up her Experience and finishing her poem to the Ascended Masters and—oh, so many things!

After lunch Judy had run off with some of the other kids—a little tribe of them—to explore the various wonders of the convention. Joanie wasn’t worried. They were good people, the saucer crowd, and the kid knew where the tent was. It was hard to tell, but as she looked down, she thought she could detect a shift in the patterns of movement, a general flow toward the main stage. The Command had caused it to be built in front of the Pinnacle Rocks, specifying through the Guide that it should be decorated with white streamers and reflective disks. The disks were on strings, hanging from the pyramid frame, and they channeled energy to the various speakers, plus they spun round and caught the sun in a really neat way. There was still half an hour to go before the Guide was scheduled to give his address, but Joanie guessed it was time to go down and get herself gussied up. After all, she was of the Cohort and would stand behind him as he spoke, dressed in her green sash and tunic. She’d need to freshen up after her climb. She took the lens cap off her Kodak, clicked a couple of pictures (which she was sure wouldn’t come out) and started downhill.

What a day! There was almost too much to take in at once: people selling things, promoting their theories, telling one another about their encounters, all in such an atmosphere of trust and goodwill as—well, it was humbling, you could say that for openers. She wished she could record the scene to show the skeptics back home. This was what real brotherhood looked like, not the phony kind the authorities tried to foist on you. Golly, it made her mad to think of the dirty tricks they used. The public had a right to know what was really going on, and their government, their
own government
, was preventing them from learning some of the most important truths you could imagine. At least out here she could be herself. There was no one like that awful Bob Rasmussen from the office. Always hanging around the typing pool. Here no one was going to mock her or belittle her research. There were secrets that were going to blow everyone’s socks right off when they finally came out. People out here in the desert knew something big was going on.

She wandered down the double line of stalls, marveling at how many
vendors were patiently sitting under sunshades, waiting for customers to come and browse their displays of books and pamphlets and magazines. More organized folks had folding tables. Others had just opened up the trunks of their cars or laid things out on the flatbeds of pickups. One woman was selling statues of an entity she’d encountered in her backyard in Wisconsin, a little pointy-headed guy with slanting black eyes.
LIFE-SIZE
, said the sign on the truck. Well, that would make him about a foot tall, which somehow didn’t seem very likely to Joanie. She was as open-minded as the next person, but in her experience there was nothing small-scale about our alien visitors. Contact was the grandest, most awe-inspiring event in human history. It wasn’t something to get all cutesy about. Still, it was a free country, and maybe this woman saw what she said she saw. Joanie would be the last person to deny someone’s right to explore her own personal truth.

An old couple in homemade clothes were offering free vegetarian food to passersby. The man had straw sandals. Joanie ate a little muffin-type thing, which was apparently made out of beans. As she chewed her snack, she stopped to look at a stall selling books on all manner of tantalizing subjects—number vibration, psychic healing, mineral therapy, astrophysics, mental calisthenics, yoga, the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple, telepathic communication.… Apparently there had been not one but sixteen crucified saviors since the dawn of time, and most of the Bible was copied from ancient Irish druids. The stall’s owner was rhapsodizing to a small crowd about the importance of the Pinnacle Convention. Such powerful energies! He felt as if he’d been transported to another dimension. There was an angel on his shoulder, a being of light and love.

Joanie gave him a big smile. Good for that man! She wasn’t so interested in all the biblical stuff, and at the end of the day some of those other things just boiled down to numbers, which she found hard to care about, not being mathematically minded herself. In some ways, the book guy seemed kind of muddled, but when it came to love, she was right there with him. The convention was a loving place, put together by people who wanted to heal the dreadful wounds in the world. She’d come a long way to be part of it, and so far she hadn’t been disappointed.
It had taken three full days of driving to make it down from Olympia, Washington, staying mindful all the way so her rattly old Buick wouldn’t overheat or get a flat or start leaking oil. She was on a tight budget and greedy mechanics had a way of knowing when a person was desperate, not to mention her being a woman alone. Luckily the car held up, and she managed to find motels that were cheap but not too sleazy, though the one outside Fresno had some rowdy party going on at the end of the block and poor Judy hadn’t gotten much sleep that night.

A little group of Buddhist monks walked past, chanting and banging drums. Most of them were actual Orientals, but a couple were white men, taller than the rest, looking a little self-conscious, she thought, in their orange robes. She hadn’t known you could become a Buddhist monk unless you were brought up to it. Didn’t they choose them as children, just turning up to the parents’ house to take them away? So cruel. On the other hand, she supposed it was probably considered a great blessing by the natives. Halfway along the line of stalls she found Bill Burgess, surrounded as usual by customers browsing his wares and asking him sycophantic questions. Bill was a big cheese in contactee circles. The Guide had invited him to speak from the stage. He’d been on early that morning, which probably wasn’t the best slot, but it was still an honor and Joanie had found him very compelling. His Experience was taken seriously in the movement; there had even been a drawing of it on the cover of
Saucerian
magazine. Late one night he’d been driving along the New Jersey Turnpike when he’d spotted a fuzzy oval-shaped light. He followed it, and eventually it veered off into the distance, but not before it released two pods, which landed in a nearby field. When Bill got out of his car, he’d suddenly felt light-headed, and his skin became hot and tingly, as if he’d stepped into some kind of radiation field. Voices spoke to him from the landing craft and subsequent correspondence with the Guide confirmed that the visitors were indeed Space Brothers, representatives of the High Command, though from a different sector than the ones who’d visited the Guide when he first started channeling from the Pinnacles.

Bill waved to her and she shouldered her way through the throng of admirers to ask if he’d seen Judy. He said she was with the other kids,
playing over by the Mux tower. Relieved, she thanked him and headed back to the tent to change, not without a little tinge of jealousy at all the attention he was getting. Her own Experience wasn’t as dramatic as his, of course. It was more a feeling than an embodied encounter, a beautiful feeling that had descended on her one time when she was out walking in the forest near her home. It was a winter evening and there’d been heavy snow and everything was perfectly still. Suddenly she’d been cloaked in it, enveloped, that was the only word, in the glorious sense that she wasn’t alone in the Universe, that benevolent beings were keeping watch over her and guiding her path. She’d stood still for what might only have been minutes but could easily have been hours. Then she’d made her way home and sat in front of the fire, so overcome she was completely unable to make head or tail of things, until Jake came back from whatever bar he’d been propping up, asking about dinner and wondering aloud how come she still had her boots on and was dripping all over the rug.

It was in a diner, of all places, that she found a clue. Someone had left a dog-eared magazine on the counter and she picked it up and read an article about the Guide and the Space Brothers and the Ashtar Galactic Command. Instinctively, she knew that was the type of consciousness she’d encountered. It seemed like a sign. She wrote off for a subscription to the Guide’s newsletter, and soon enough all the hours she wasn’t typing up invoices in that infernal lumberyard office she was using to find out about the hidden secrets of the Universe. Of course Jake wasn’t happy, but he didn’t have any claim on the moral high ground.

Back at the tent there was no sign of Judy, though her things had been rummaged through, which meant she’d obviously been back. Joanie drank a glass of water and had a little sit-down. When she’d caught her breath, she wet a washcloth and gave herself a quick once-over, face and neck, underarms, between the legs. She changed her underwear and wriggled into her tunic. It was the first time she’d worn her Cohort outfit, and stepping out in it made her self-conscious. It was kind of short. Though she knew she had passable legs, she wasn’t twenty-one anymore, and even in her high-school days she’d never been the sort who liked showing herself off. She shouldn’t have worried; as she made
her way to the stage, people smiled and nodded; one or two men even cast admiring looks in her direction. She patted her hair and straightened her spine. Well, when you came to think of it, she
was
someone special. She’d become a member of the Cohort when it was still known, slightly tongue in cheek, as the Welcoming Committee. You had to send money through the mail and you got back a certificate and a button and a little purple book of rules. Judy was small then, and Jake was still at home. The fights were getting worse, and Joanie was trying to hold the family together, so she missed the first few conventions, despite wanting to go more than anything she could remember since she was a little girl. Finally she’d made it down to San Francisco to hear the Guide speak to a crowded hall about the Mux and the latest messages from the Command. It was the first time she was ever with him in the flesh, and she’d never been near a man with such a strong presence. Afterward she’d chatted to Clark Davis, the First Follower, and he’d invited her to eat dinner with the inner circle, shamelessly squeezing her thigh while the Guide cracked lobster tails and described an electrical computer that Ashtar wanted to incorporate into the Mux. She could barely follow the discussion, but just the same felt so darn happy it lasted her all the way back up to Olympia, kept her going for weeks. Ever since then, she’d considered her life one long preparation for the day the Command considered humanity ready to take up the burdens of full galactic consciousness, the beginning of the post-contact era.

On her way to the stage she passed by the Mux tower and looked around for Judy. A bunch of the other kids were there, including Artie and Karen’s two girls and a little redheaded tyke who surely belonged to Wanda Gilman. They were playing in the capsule, which had been removed from the main structure and opened so people could get a look inside. The kids were lying in the cavity, their little arms and legs not filling out the shape, which of course was made for an adult man. She asked if they’d seen Judy, and they looked solemn.

“She went off with the glow boy,” said a little girl.

“What’s that, honey?”

“She was here and then she went off to play with that boy.”

“I don’t understand. What boy?”

“The glow boy. The little boy from space.”

There was no time to find out what the girl meant. At that moment Manny Vargas came up and hustled her away. The Guide was about to speak; it was time to join the formation. Vargas looked rather wonderful in his sash and tunic. Grecian. Everyone was ready at the foot of the stage, milling around and smoking, all looking thrillingly space-age and exotic.

The Guide appeared from the control-room chamber under the Pinnacle Rocks, making his way up the steps with his wife, Oriana, at his side. He was as impressive as ever, his gray hair swept back from his strong forehead, two muscular forearms emerging from the folds of his silver robe. He looked every inch the Dr. Schmidt of saucer legend, the ex–test pilot and research scientist with the Heidelberg and Oxford degrees. Oriana looked as pale as usual, which was amazing considering she lived out here under the desert sun. Her long hair was held back by a metal band with a jewel set into it, a tiara that made her look like an ancient priestess. She sure was mysterious! She’d conjoined with the Guide ten years previously; according to the stories, she’d just walked out of the desert and announced that she was fated to be his companion. She was supposed to be an expert in languages, and to know several of the desert Indian dialects, as well as Sanskrit and Mayan. Her face was oddly flat, and she had a spooky way of looking about, as if seeing something quite different from what was actually in front of her. She spoke smooth, almost robotic English, with just the hint of an accent. It was obvious that Oriana was extraterrestrial, or at least had some extraterrestrial blood, though Joanie had heard one or two people say cattily that she was just French Canadian.