The Visitor (11 page)

He did not ask those questions now. He merely went to the meeting as he always went to the meeting, with his own needs uppermost in his mind. The room in which he was received was hotter than before, the smells were more offensive than usual. The drink he was offered was, at best, noisome, as it had been during his last several visits. As the general explained his feelings, the Hetman seemed almost preoccupied—perhaps as a chess player might be who is already ten moves ahead and knows it no longer matters what his opponent does.

“You need to call upon power,” said the Hetman in a peremptory tone, when the general had finished. “The great achievement you seek will require great power.”

“What power?” the general asked, somewhat confused. “The Rebel Angels?”

The Hetman shrugged, a rippling gesture peculiar to himself. “If that is your preferred source of power, then that is the power you should call upon. In anticipation of your need, I have researched a spell you can use. I am afraid I must charge you for it, for it is what we call a lapsing spell. Such enchantments are rare; they are usable only a few times before becoming impotent. This one is still new and strong, but it will only work two or three times.”

The general looked over the parchment, moving uncomfortably as he did so. There were things written there…nothing he hadn't done before, of course, but still…“Charge me?” he murmured at last. “What charge?”

“In addition to the item specified in the spell, only a little
of your blood. For magical potions of my own that require the blood of a powerful man.”

The general looked at the spell, and at the Hetman, and he thought of the spell he had used twenty years before, and of how this spell was both different from and similar to that one, and he thought what sorcerers could do to a person if they had a sample of his blood, so it was said, and he consulted his ambition and thought again. After all, he and the Hetman had a long association. He knew so little of trust that he felt sure he could trust the Hetman.

“Very well,” he murmured. “Oh, very well.”

It was the twisted and dwarfish servant who took the blood, nicking the vein with a dirty blade to let it flow into a glass vial. This was done in an outer room, and the Hetman did not even say good-bye. The same servant said he would be on hand when the spell was wrought, to provide assistance and take away the item that was promised as payment. His name, he said, was Gnang.

The general took some time to obtain the ingredients for the rite, making sure that the blame for the acquisitions fell on others. He picked up the final and most important ingredient the very night that the sacrifice was made. The work was done in a deep passageway that threaded through the monstrous chimney, at the end of a dogleg passage opening through a secret door to the roof garden, a door that antedated the garden by many years. On either side of the deep passage the sheer walls of the chimneys rose; above it the scant smoke of the midnight roiled and writhed like living creatures; within it stood the necessary materials and devices, including a great iron brazier with a fire that was already burning when the general arrived with his burden. Gnang stood at one side, simply waiting.

The general set his burden down and busied himself with knives and vials and bottles, contemplating immortality as he threw certain things onto the greasy fire, as he chewed and swallowed this and that, as he turned toward the north to spill other substances upon the puddled surface around him, each thing done, chewed, swallowed, spilled, burned in ac
cordance with the formula that Gnang prompted into his ready ear.

The thin cry of the victim scraped like a fingernail against an inner door of hell. Gowl did not respond to it. He merely uttered the final words amid the reek of burning flesh and spilled blood. Gnang picked up the item he had come for and disappeared into one of the narrow channels within the chimney. Smoke began to billow from several huge flues. At first Gowl was so preoccupied by the intricacies of the spell that he wondered at this. It was too early for the bakers to have arrived to fire up their huge ovens. It was too late for the laundry, far below in the cellars of the place, to be stoking its boilers, but there was smoke, nonetheless, first from half a dozen, then a dozen, then a dozen more of the black and twisted flues.

Gradually, the smoke turned from gray to black under the light of the late moon, and as he realized this was not mere chimney smoke, he turned to put his back against the wall. Something huge and dark emerged from a chimney pot that was not by any means large enough to have held it.

“General Gowl,” whispered a voice from amid the smoke where floated a pair of red, burning eyes.

The general bethought himself of an old story concerning a woman of flame who had appeared here in Bastion when it was first discovered. Perhaps this was she. The eyes had a certain familiarity. Taking a shuddering breath, he steadied himself against a parapet and whispered a response. “I am General Gowl.”

“A man who should live forever in the memory of his people,” whispered the voice. “A mighty man.”

The general straightened, saying more loudly, “I have always tried to be strong for my people.”

A sound came from the dark mass which might have been laughter. “Of course you have. However, tonight I do not speak to strength. I speak to ambition. You want to be immortal, General Gowl.”

He started to demur, but then caught himself. One did not demur with angels, and who else could this be but one of the Rebel Angels? “Yes, I want to be immortal,” he admitted.

“It might be arranged,” said the voice, the smoke roiling around it like a garment blown by the wind. “On certain terms.”

“Which would be…?” the general asked, keeping his voice level with some difficulty.

“Merely to serve us.”

“But I do…do serve you.”

“Who do you think we are, General? Who does your religion tell you we are? We will give you a clue.” Again that sound that might be laughter. “We have been with the Spared Ones since the Happening itself.”

The general grinned fiercely, his teeth showing. “You are the Rebel Angels! Those who came to our aid! Those who rebelled against the old God who would not save our people!”

The smoke boiled from the chimney; the eyes held steady within it; the voice purred: “You may so address us. Do you know why the glory you yearn for has so far eluded you?”

The general stopped, stunned. “Has it? It has? I thought I had had a share of it, but I wanted…I wanted more…”

The figure swirled, the voice whispered. “A man cannot want too much glory. You would have had more if you had completed the great task. Your earliest heroes were devoted to that task. In the time before the Happening, and in the time before that time, men spoke of the task. Power and vengeance are better than peace. Where is your vengeance, Gowl?”

He cried out, stung, “Against whom? All who have opposed me are dead! Who do I avenge against?”

“All those, out there, who do not accept the beliefs of the Spared. All those heretics who do not worship as you do. You have avenged yourself only against your own people, Gowl, which is like cutting off your own fingers. You must take vengeance against those outside, who refuse to follow your ways.” A long pause before the keening whisper insinuated itself deeply into his mind, “You must begin a holy war against those who do not follow you and thus, who do not follow
us
.”

“Everyone?” the general asked, almost witlessly. “Everyone out there?”

“Are they Spared?”

“We say…we say if they were, they would be in here. But some say they are not here because they do not know about us.” Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav said such things, from time to time, muddying the doctrine, in the general's opinion. It was easier to have black and white, not some peculiar shade of gray.

“Then they must be given the choice, of coming in here or…”

“Or death,” whispered the general. “Or death.”

“You are our beloved follower,” whispered the familiar voice, the eyes gleaming like coals. The shadowy mass constricted and poured into the chimney once more, down, and away, perhaps into the limestone caverns and caves that pierced all the lands of Bastion like holes in a cheese. The general looked around himself. The brazier still smoked greasily, and the spell required that it be left untouched. He returned to his rooms, and though other men might have been unable to sleep considering what had been done to bring about the recent vision, Gowl fell immediately into slumber.

When he arose the next day, he had a very clear memory of what had been said on the roof. He was impatient with his wife, who came to him having paroxysms over one of the children. He told her to return to her own rooms, and to stay there. Then he sat at his desk for several hours making detailed plans. Soon he would tell his colleagues of the great future that awaited them.

S
ince the Bitch's changes of course always average out to zero, the engineers have chosen the site farthest away from where the Bitch will land. It's the last site started, Omega site, and it happens to be not quite thirty miles from here. Neils has heard all about it, and he's told us about the millennium's worth of power it will hold, and the millennium's worth of irradiated food, the gametes of people and animals in deep freeze plus state-of-the-art embryonic and suspendedanimation labs. Not that life really is suspended, but the techniques are pretty good. Since the “sleepwalking” disaster on the first Mars trip, the cryobiologists have made giant strides on sleep techniques.

Omega site redoubt is designed to hold a couple of hundred scientist volunteers, youngish people who will live in the redoubt up to a thousand years. Their function is to preserve knowledge and aid survivor societies. They aren't a reproductive population. There'll be far fewer women than men because there are still far fewer young women in the sciences, and reproduction is only an ancillary concern. The real purpose is to avoid another Dark Ages, so Omega site will be a repository for all kinds of information, high tech and low, everything from how to talk to the colonists on the moon to ways of smelting iron or making a plowshare without machines. When survivors need to know how to build a
generator or manufacture transistors, the redoubt will have the information. Or, if the Bitch turns out not to be a total bitch after all, survivors will have access to their cultural heritage.

So, two hundred people between twenty-four and thirty-four are being picked for Omega site, engineers, scientists, technologists, information specialists. Each of the two hundred is expected to spend ninety-six years of each century asleep and four years awake with three others. That is, theoretically. The consequences of repeated cold storage are far from certain. The best guess is that the survival chances inside the redoubt are roughly equivalent to the chances outside, that is, from one in a hundred to one in a thousand. Nobody is giving odds, either way.

 

It turns out that some of the Omegans—those of proven fertility and without problematic DNA—are being given the privilege of providing genetic material for storage at the redoubt. They told me I'd been picked to be one of the two hundred. I told them, no. They said, think about it.

“Don't refuse them,” Jerry said, when I told them about being picked as a sleeper. He knows nothing about the plan to store gametes, and I didn't mention it to him. I told him I couldn't accept because it would mean leaving the children.

“I think you ought to put your trust where your heart is.” He spoke in his uplifted voice, still calm, still smiling. It made me want to hit him.

“And what's that supposed to mean?”

“You've always trusted science. You ought to be faithful to what you've always trusted.”

His face glowed when he said this, as it did when he was particularly moved. For the last several years, Jerry has been much moved by “spiritual” things. Though it's a word Jerry and his friends use quite comfortably, I've never been able to define it. It means non-material things, certainly, but also, non-intellectual, non-measurable, non-factual things. For his friend Marie, it's a belief in angels, but her husband thinks it's the feeling he gets when he sits naked in a hot
spring, watching the stars. Some of Jerry's more recent friends are into Bible study, with special emphasis on revelations and predictions of the last days. Jerry's own take on spirituality is to run on “positive communications.” He spends an hour every evening talking with God, coming away from the conversation with all kinds of good thoughts and good intentions he can draw power from later. He sometimes quotes what he says to God but never what God replies. “It doesn't come in words,” he says.

Not all Jerry's friends think alike, but every one of them shares a belief in divine—or at least supernatural—intervention in the minutia of everyday human life. They believe in miracles, in angels, in a god who watches everything every individual man does, and sometimes reaches down and stirs his own creation. Some of them are very angry people, but others have warm, kindly and nurturing Ned Flanders sort of personalities. I always feel stifled when they're around, which seems bitchy and ungrateful of me, but it's like being smothered in nice. Still, they aren't my worry; Jerry is. I can accept whatever he believes, for him, but I can't accept being shut out. When he told me to go into the redoubt, that was the ultimate shutout.

“If I go into that redoubt, I'll be separated from the children. We belong together!”

He took my hands firmly in his own. “Nell, my dear, do listen. You and I both know that this is the end of the world. My friends and I regard it as something that's been foretold for ages. I'm not even slightly frightened because I trust in the Lord to get me and the children through the last days. I have absolute faith in that. You don't have that kind of faith.”

I admit to being horrified at the indulgent calm of his voice, his unrestrained acceptance of death and devastation. “Oh, Jerry, don't go off on this now, for God's sake…”

He patted me as he might have patted a fractious pet. “Exactly. For God's sake. I trust we'll be taken care of if we live. If we die, it will be painlessly, fearlessly, and our afterlife will be wonderful. The children will believe me when I reassure them, because I believe it. They'll be calm because I
am calm. Frankly, I'd rather they'd face the last days with me than with you. Science is cold comfort compared to finding enlightenment.”

That was what he called it. I had called it “acting weird.”

“And that's what you teach the children?”

He looked over my head at nothing. “When the children were old enough, I would have. As it is now, I won't have to.”

Would have. Won't have to. I'd halfway accepted his indifference to his own survival, but his indifference to the children's survival hadn't penetrated until then. I should have thought of it when Michy asked me one bedtime whether she was a good girl, because “Daddy says when the asseroid comes, all the bad people will get roun-ned up and go down to hell.” I told her Daddy was wrong; only cruel and vicious men create hells, a merciful God does not, and besides, she was the best little girl in the world.

So then, with the invitation to be one of the sleepers in Omega site still hanging there, I didn't know whether to scream or laugh or just run for my life. He took advantage of my being speechless.

“I believe that destruction will come, yes. But, the children and I will not feel it. I'm sure of that, Nell. Positive. And since I'm positive, I think you should relieve your mind of worry and do what your own spirit tells you to do.”

“What will you feel?” I demanded, still fighting against his placid certainty.

“The children and I will feel only peace, and rapture,” he intoned, like a reading from scripture, an expression of satisfaction on his face that I hadn't seen for years. “I'm sure of that. It's true, the ungodly will meet their horrible fate, we'll see that, but it won't touch us.”

Something in his voice, some hint of particular satisfaction struck a sudden insight from me, like a flint hitting steel. I swallowed and said, as casually as I could, “And you want me in the redoubt rather than with you because it will be easier for the children if they don't have to watch Mommy being hauled off to hell?”

He flushed and looked sheepish, and I knew I'd hit it on
the nose. First I wanted to go into hysterics, then I felt a kind of sick fury pushing me to hit him or throw up, or both. Well, well. And he had been thinking this for some time. His recent warm affection hadn't been love, it had been piety. He was among the elect, poor little Nell was damned, and she wasn't worth trying to convert so he'd pity her until the end. Strange to believe you know someone, believe someone loves you, and then find out you don't know them and their emotions toward you are…well, what? Vengefulness? Born from what cause? Envy? Had all this started when I'd had that fleeting moment of journal cover eminence, five years ago? Or that article published the year later? Both were nice, but neither was important, and he knew that! Or maybe he didn't.

I tried to see myself through his eyes, a woman who had had undeserved success. It was a ten-second equivalent to a bad divorce. His look of satisfaction was a vault door closing with the time lock set on forever.

 

The only way I can handle what I wrote about above is to repress it. Pretend it hasn't happened. There is no further argument. There is no further discussion. Jerry goes right on conversing with God, and I'm going into the redoubt.

I am doing one sort of crazy thing. I have a friend who's an expert in surveillance, and he's agreed to put a camera and mike in the shelter at my house. It will transmit data to the Omega redoubt. If Jerry and my children are visited by angels, I honest to God want to see it happen.