Tintagel (3 page)

At that time, vanishings were quite uncommon, at least insofar as the general public was concerned. This sort of thing only happened to "other people," but not here. Not in healthy Palo Alto. The disease only struck those more emotionally unbalanced than the rest of the citizenry. The crazed and the troubled in mental institutions were the first to go. But no one paid any attention to them. They just weren't in their beds when morning came, their radios having played all night.

But then the bacterium that caused the Syndrome began working its way up the ladder of emotional instability as the disease mutated or spread.

And Charlie Gilbert wandered the streets for the best part of the night, confused. Then, embarrassed and apologetic, he rushed to the nearest video to summon the aid of Lanier, whom he knew to be immune to the disease. He knew that Lanier could succumb and not succumb at the same time. Lanier, like everyone else, suffered from the disease, but could prevent himself from vanishing. Or he could succumb—vanish from the very earth—and return at will. And no one but a Stalker could do this.

Francis Lanier had, just moments before Charlie Gilbert's call, returned from fighting Seminoles in central Florida ca. 1870 in an odd phasing of Rachmaninoff's
Prelude in G
, rescuing a bitter industrialist bent on self-destruction. After a chase through steaming everglades and a decent burst from his Malachi machine pistol that fired rounds of anesthetic needles, the man returned to Lanier's workroom quite unconscious, but safe. But this was not until the man, in his flight of manic despair, had managed to secure sixteen blood-matted Indian scalps. The Defense Department expressed its gratitude to Lanier in an eloquent communiqué, which he summarily trashed. Killing Indians to the tune of Rachmaninoff was not Lanier's idea of a good time.

Tired as he was, and soaking wet from the Florida swamps, the plight of Christy Cooper seemed to rally his interest and strength.

By the time Charlie had found his way to Lanier's Bel Air home, he had calmed down somewhat. Lanier left him nursing a quart of the best Scotch he owned, and assured his friend that the best would be done. He only hoped that it wouldn't have anything to do with angry Seminole Indians.

Ben-Haim.
Orchestral Suite: From Israel
. Second movement. It was an unusual work, quite nationalistic, very beautiful, and nearly forgotten. It was from the middle of the last century and was just the thing that one could easily lose oneself in, if one were in the proper mood, romantically speaking. Lanier grinned to himself as he entered the workroom alone: only a person in love—
deeply
in love—could lose herself so well in such a piece of music.

Lanier dimmed the lights. He sat on the floor in a half-lotus position at the center of a circled area that was tiled in the form of a Tibetian mandala—lines, circles, and stars, pointing to an illuminated center that itself was a five-pointed star. Lanier began his inward concentration.

In the other room, Charlie Gilbert drank himself silly, as the console silently transmitted the crystalline sonic-wafer of Paul Ben-Haim's work into the transceiver implanted in Lanier's right earlobe. Lanier didn't want Charlie himself to succumb to the Syndrome, knowing full well what grief, anxiety, and twelve-year-old Scotch could do. So he played the piece silently. He concentrated on emptying his mind of all thoughts, all images, letting it fill with the muted tones of the second movement of the orchestral suite.

Even through the soundproofed walls, Charlie felt the sudden collapse of air as Francis Lanier vanished. He swallowed a double shot in one easy motion, thinking of Christy—wherever she was.

What experts there were at the time said that Liu Shan's Syndrome was many things, but no one had a firm grasp on what it actually did to the nervous system. For it seemed that the Syndrome affected more than just the body.

The eighteen hundred known Stalkers privately insisted to the government authorities that the answer would lie in a total rethinking of Western man's attitude toward science.

Even though for thousands of years sages and wise men of the East had been saying it, it wasn't until the Unified Field Theory, once begun by Einstein himself, was validated in the previous century that a simple fact had become known. Reality was nothing more than a certain series of vibrations to which every person on the planet was attuned. Everything is energy, there is no such thing as matter: it all reveals itself in frequencies of vibrations only the most sensitive can see or feel.

And the mystics—the
walis
, the
sadgurus
—say our world is literally crisscrossed with other worlds beyond our normal perceptions, some of which we enter when we sleep, some of which we enter when we die. There are higher worlds of higher beings, lower worlds of lower beings. Only the saints of the world religions have had access to them.

Until now. Until one day in the highlands of China, a man named Liu Shan, a renegade popularly associated with the People's Democratic Revolutionary Front, developed an airborne bacterium that had a lifespan of twenty days, which would merely heighten the neurosis of anyone who inhaled or ingested any of the culture. He and some colleagues of his, it is said, in an attempt to undermine the government of Peking, turned the bacterium loose, to blow first over southeastern Asia, then to Japan, home of the world's largest suicide rate. Then on to America, and eventually Europe. It would die down before reaching the western stretches of the Gobi Desert. The People's Democratic Revolutionary Front would survive, unaffected, to create a new China, and a new world. Or so it is said.

Everyone—including Lanier, Charlie Gilbert, and Christy Cooper—became quite familiar with Liu Shan's infamous disease. And they soon realized its implications when they tried to recall a classic blues song, or an old Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys favorite. These were now outlawed because old-style country western and blues appealed to the strongest, deepest emotions. The Syndrome fed off those pits of despair. For what happened came as much as a surprise to the revolutionary Chinese as it did to the health authorities world over: the bacterium mutated horribly into a more powerful strain when it mixed and breeded rather plentifully with the industrial air-pollutants over southern Japan. No one could foresee the consequences of such an accident.

In Kyoto, only a few days after the disease was flown into the upper troposphere in Chinese "weather" balloons, the Syndrome manifested itself as thousands of individuals, watching a particularly sad and musical show of local historic significance on their television sets, simply vanished from the face of the earth.

The experts testify that the disease brings on a slight giddy feeling; nervousness that produces a blurring or unfocusing of the eyes. Next comes a humming in the brain. But most importantly, when one is listening to music, the sadness or despair one is feeling—if it is the kind of music that calls for melancholy—wells into a great pit of unhappiness. The mind drifts. It begins to let the music create fantasies. And the disease, coupled with the vibrations of the music and the elements of emotional strain, thrusts the listener literally out of this world and into whatever individual heaven or hell of romantic despair the mind devises.

And in Kyoto, Japan, this meant
thousands
. Vanished.

Yet, not everyone succumbed immediately. Those who were more stabilized never did. But the disease fed off emotional states, even heightened them whenever music was listened to. And all minds are full of simple fantasies. Some of them tell of sadness. Others of love. There are those of hatred and revenge, and those of patient heroism and sacrifice.

All of this was made more terrifying in the fact that these "worlds" were just as real as anything the Syndrome's victims left behind. They were full of people or demons, and anyone could kill or be killed in them and no one in the real world would know the difference.

So when Charlie came to Lanier for help, all of these things were present in his mind. Lanier, because he was a Stalker, a
rescuer
, knew them to a greater degree than Charlie.

Thinking of Christy Cooper and listening to Ben-Haim's
Orchestral Suite: From Israel
, Francis Lanier left the real world and found himself suddenly beside a large pond in a garden of incredible proportions. He focused on the music itself.

To a Stalker, the minds of individuals who have succumbed to the disease cast out slight vibrations, mostly of terror or confusion, and as such act like beacons which can be traced. The longer a person stayed in a world of his or her creation, the less the vibrations were pronounced—the harder they were to locate.

But Christy's despair was quite strong. She was somewhere very near.

Lanier looked around. Nowhere on the earth could there ever have existed such profound beauty. Plants and flowers of all colors and descriptions surrounded him with a pleasant freshness that a field or a meadow in the springtime might bring. Rhododendrons, leafy ferns, snapdragons, lupine, phlox, daisies. But above him was the most startling feature of them all. Instead of clouds, there floated in the sky large, flat pieces of earth! Each one of them contained a hanging garden, like the one on which Lanier had traced Christy.

Lanier walked over to a slight rise in the earth just beyond the pond beside which he had just appeared. Francis Lanier always disguised himself as a priest, wearing a long coat, feeling that the sight of a priest would be inoffensive or, at best, innocuous, to the eyes of a lost and wandering victim of Liu Shan's Syndrome. He hoped now that Christy, in her misery, would not be distraught at his presence.

He listened to the beautiful music that penetrated everything around him. She was near.

He walked through some small bushes and leaped back abruptly: the garden ended and Lanier faced empty space. This garden was just one of many floating inexplicibly in the sky, almost like clouds. And beneath the hovering cup of the garden was nothing. There was only an infinity of blue sky, above and beneath him, and everywhere he could look were the drifting gardens.

He pulled back with a sudden rush of vertigo. He listened to the music, feeling out the vibrations that had coalesced into this unbelievable universe. The pond was about thirty meters across, and at the farthest end was a small waterfall. It was beside the waterfall, clouded in a slight mist, where he found Christy, weeping.

Lanier knew that Christy's mother had just recently died, and the tenor of the music suggested that her grief was also part of her despair. He had to be careful. The bench on which she sat was also very close to the edge of the garden, and the music was sadly beautiful.

She looked up tearfully at him as he approached, seeing only a priest. Not recognizing Lanier—so deep in her melancholy was she—she could only speak of her sadness to him. The disease had distorted her perceptions. To her, it was all like a dream.

Cherry blossoms drifted about them in the breeze like a gentle, crimson snowfall. The sun canted thin shafts of light through the feathered edges of stately bamboo above them. Lanier could feel her unhappiness. The vibrations of the music, its sonorities, gave everything about them an uncanny sense of reality, like those dreams when one is utterly convinced that one isn't dreaming.…

The cherry blossoms gave off the right fragrance, the right colors. This
was
real. He caught a petal between his fingers as they fell about the two of them. It was as soft as a moth's wing and cool to the touch.

He gently lifted her up off the marble bench where he had found her and spoke softly to her. She seemed as delicate and as sad as the flower blossoms that dangled in her hair.

He urged her to drink from the small vial of light-colored liquid he had pulled from his medicine pouch on his belt. She didn't resist. Then they walked slowly through the tendrils of lime-green creepers as she relaxed. Lanier imagined the worst possible scenario for this Eden: the music reaches its lowest depths of despair and the lover throws herself off the edge of the floating garden. He had to be careful, always. He could control himself, but his patients often had minds of their own—and hearts of their own.

Suddenly, Christy collapsed beside him. He caught her as the garden began to fade. The tall palms vanished. The cherry orchard drifted away.

The next thing Christy knew was that she was on the floor of Francis Lanier's workroom, in the center of the mandala, and Lanier was slapping her wrists. She came wide awake, no longer suffering from the disease's spell.

When Charlie heard the commotion through the door, he knocked into the doorway—all two hundred and ten pounds of him—his corduroy jacket considerably dribbled with precious Scotch. He was supremely drunk.

Seeing Christy unharmed, he grinned hugely, his red hair surrounding his face like a halo.

"Hi," he giggled, slightly embarrassed. "Where ya been?" And promptly fell flat on his face.

Chapter Three

The Lament for Beowulf

Howard Hanson

Lighting up the first of the day's endless progression of cigarettes, the President said to her early-bird aide, "Ransom told me last night at Senator Paulson's reception that filter masks will be required when we hit Chicago for the Women's Caucus." She peered from eyes hardly awake at Ken Collins. "Is that true?"

She inhaled fiercely, illuminated in an aura of smoke. The corners of her quick, brown eyes still flaked with sleep, and the ropey imprint of bedsheets laced her skin where she slept soundly on the single twin bed that was, by her own decree, never made in the morning.

"Yes, Katie," Collins said, looking perhaps too wide awake at that early hour. The sun hadn't even risen, but Katie Babcock perversely admired Ken's sense of efficiency and rudeness. She privately thought he detested being under the country's first female President, but the job called for intelligence and craft, and the shelving of personal obsessions in order that the required dirty work got done. Ken Collins was her best man.