Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It was about this time Walker showed up.

  Walker had appeared without warning, and it was like stepping into a dream, Tim thought, like something out of his childhood. Because he had known Walker once long ago. Walker had been his friend for a while. Walker had given him things and shown him things. But then Tim had grown wary of Walker and spent all these years on the road, avoiding him, because when you came right down to it he was frightened—scared of what Walker might want from him. And now here was Walker right in this shabby room with him, an old man but still a commanding presence, radiating calm and reassurance. Tim stared at him and Walker said—these precise words—“I never forgot you.” And it was like being welcomed home.

  “Everyone else forgot you,” Walker said. “Except me.”

  Tim, who had gone three long days since spoon or food, began to weep.

  Walker took him to the Novus Ordo and Walker got him dried out and straightened out and respectable. You don’t need the bottle or the needle, Walker said, and through some magic Tim could not fathom it was suddenly so: that longing was taken away. Just utterly vanished. And he was grateful—filled with a wholehearted gratitude he had never experienced before. It was better than the spoon.

  Walker showed him everything that could be his. His inheritance, Walker said. “It’s what you were made for.” Imagine a land, Walker said, a green land spreading out for miles, farms and cities and blue skies, and you stand on a hilltop, surveying it, and it’s yours —it belongs to you.

  An inheritance of lands and powers.

  The kingdoms of the Earth.

  “If you want it,” Walker said. “If you do a little work for us.”

  Even now, in this hotel room in San Francisco, the memory was as bright and polished as a gemstone. My place, Tim thought, my home, that’s what he promised me. And maybe, Tim thought, that was Walker’s atonement for the accident on the beach. To find me and to make me well. It made sense. Anybody could have an accident. But—

  “Sometimes,” Tim said, “I think we should just tell them the truth.”

  “I share that feeling,” Walker said. “But you know they wouldn’t understand.”

  “They don’t trust you. Not… the way I trust you.”

  “Fortunately,” Walker said, “it’s not me they have to trust.”

  “All we want,” Tim said, “is to take them home. Isn’t that right? They would recognize it if they went there.”

  “I’m sure they would,” Walker said—fading a little now, satisfied, turning down some hidden angle out of the world. “I’m sure they will.”

  “I’ll talk to them tomorrow,” Tim said. “I’ll do a better job.”

  The Gray Man smiled and disappeared.

  Tim—alone now—was reassured. He was doing the right thing. Or, if not the right thing, then the only thing. When you thought about it, he had very few options.

  He feared Walker but he trusted him, too. And that was reasonable. It was that kind of relationship. A relationship of trust.

  After all, Walker was the closest thing to a father Tim had ever possessed.

  3

  Michael lay awake for a long time in the leaden silence of the hotel room, no sound but the faint breathing of his mother and Laura in the darkness.

  He liked the darkness and he liked being awake in it. In all these strange rooms—from Turquoise Beach to Polger Valley and all the way back to San Francisco —the one familiar thing had been the darkness. It was the next-best thing to home.

  Home, he thought. A word Tim had used more than once.

  Michael wasn’t sure now what it meant.

  Home was a dark hotel room out along some desert highway.

  Or home was that distant world he sometimes envisioned—the “better world” he had talked to Aunt Laura about. He thought of it now, oceans and forests the way America must have been a hundred years ago; but vital, too, with crowded cities and markets. Roads and farms and big, delicate flying machines. He wondered if there was a city called San Francisco in that world, and, thinking of it, realized there was: but it was not as large as this one and the people in it spoke mostly Spanish and Nahuatl. Was that home?

  Maybe.

  What home was probably not was the suburban house in Toronto where he’d grown up. It was already a memory. A fading memory—it might have been a million miles away.

  But Tim had talked about another home.

  He called it the Novus Ordo. Michael said the words to himself, softly, in the darkness.

  It’s where we came from. It’s where we were made.

  Like Made in Japan, or Made in Hong Kong. Maybe, Michael thought—drifting now—maybe it’s stamped on us somewhere. A birthmark or a tattoo. “Made in the Novus Ordo.”

  Maybe not such a bad place after all.

  He felt it faintly down a distant corridor of possibilities—a door.

  Doors and angles, Michael thought sleepily. It was only a sideways step from here. He could feel it and he could see it. It was cold, a cold place. He saw an old, dark industrial city—not San Francisco but someplace back East—tarry under a gray sky. He saw flames boiling out of factory towers; he saw a dark river winding away to the south.

  It was not an appealing place. But Tim had said as much. It was not exclusively good or bad. It wasn’t Utopia.

  But it was home.

  The word echoed in his mind until it lost all meaning. Home, he thought, is where you belong. Where there’s a place for you. Where you’re understood. Where you can talk.

  Home was no place he had ever been.

  Unless Tim had found it for him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the morning, Karen rode down an elevator with Michael and Laura to the coffee shop, where Tim was waiting. A foggy morning. The fog pressed in at the plate-glass window and the far side of the street was lost in layers of cloud.

  Tim said, “The question is, what do you really want? Why come looking for me in the first place?”

  “To find out what we are,” Laura said, “and to do something about the Gray Man.”

  It was past the breakfast rush and the room was nearly deserted. A man with a bucket and a mop did slow ballroom turns across the tiled floor. Karen sat with Michael in the central curve of a vinylette booth, content for now to let her sister do the talking.

  Tim said, “Well, you have part of that. You know what you are and you know where you came from. As for the Gray Man—I guarantee you can’t deal with him without help.”

  “Your help?”

  “The help of the people who created him.” “The people you were talking about—the Novus Ordo.”

  “Exactly,” Tim said. “You want us to go there.”

  Laura shot a glance at Karen, who nodded to acknowledge it.

  Tim said, “It would be the wise thing. Maybe the only thing. How many choices do you have?”

  Laura said, “But we have to take your word on all this.”

  Tim drew back. His expression was cautious. “I’m not sure I like what you’re implying.”

  “It’s been a long time, that’s all. Last time either of us saw you, you were Micheal’s age. You remember that? A bad-tempered teenager in a leather jacket. You had a tremendous chip on your shoulder.”

  He managed to look insulted. “You mean you don’t trust me.”

  “I mean trust is a lot to expect. You’re standing in the street one day and suddenly it’s hi, sis, how are you? But it’s been twenty years, Timmy. People change. Who is this guy, what does he want from us? I think it’s a natural question.”

  Tim shook his head. He looked sad, Karen thought, but there was also a suggestion—very faint— of the contempt he used to express so freely.

  He said, “This isn’t new, is it? You come up to the edge and then you shy away. It’s the way you’ve been living. Both of you. Well, it’s easy to make excuses. But it won’t solve your problems.”

  Laura blinked. “Why would you say that? You don’t know anything about us
.”

  “Maybe I was only fifteen, but hey, I had eyes. I have a memory.”

  “Just look at it from our point of view,” Laura said. “Try to do that.”

  He seemed to bite back an answer. “I am trying; I’m just not sure what you want.”

  The waitress brought coffee in a steaming carafe. Karen watched Michael offer his cup and wondered when he had started drinking coffee. Maybe it began with puberty, like shaving.

  She tried to focus her attention on the conversation but couldn’t. What could be safer than a hotel coffee shop? But she felt uneasy here, exposed…

  Laura said, “I would at least like to know what we’re walking into.”

  “It’s an old city,” Tim said patiently. “It’s called Washington and it’s on the Potomac but it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the city you know by that name. It’s winter and the climate is colder than ours, so you can expect snow. There’s a building called the Defense Research Institute. It’s a government installation. There are people there who want to talk to you.”

  “They can help us?”

  “I was given to understand that they can show us a way to travel without leaving traces—basically, a way to leave Walker behind.”

  “Have they done you this favor?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “So we’re taking their word for it.”

  Tim assumed a long-suffering expression. “They can’t hold us there. There’s no punishment, there’s only the reward. Obviously they don’t want to give it away too soon.”

  “They want us that badly?”

  “For their work. Nothing terrible. It’s our cooperation they need.”

  A thought crossed Karen’s mind. “How do we know he’s not working for them?”

  Laura and Tim turned to regard her. She reddened but pressed on: “I mean the Gray Man. He could be working for them. He’s the punishment.”

  Laura considered this, nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe. How about it, Tim?”

  “You’re being paranoid,” he said. “How often do I have to say this? These are reasonable people we’re talking about. Not monsters.”

  Karen finished her coffee. Tim put down money for lunch and a huge, excessive tip. He said, “I’ve told you everything I know. What it comes down to is, I’m going back soon and I think you should go with me.”

  It was like an ultimatum. Karen heard it in his voice. It was a demand or a plea, or some bullying combination of the two. He had not changed.

  There was a silence.

  “I’ll go,” Laura said suddenly.

  Karen gawked at her. Tim seemed equally taken aback.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  More looks.

  “Well,” she demanded, “why not? The sooner, the • better, right? But,” she added, “only one of us. One of us will go. I’ll go. And if everything looks all right I’ll come back and bring the others.” She looked intently at her brother. “Is that all right with you?”

  There was an even lengthier silence. Tim looked at Laura, at Karen, finally at Michael. Inspecting us, Karen thought, for sincerity.

  But why this distrust? What was he afraid of? Tim said, “I think you’re being unreasonably cautious. But all right—it’s a beginning.”

  Karen said, “You don’t have to.” Laura said, “I know.”

  They had gone back to the hotel room. Michael was in the shower; Karen was alone with her sister.

  Karen said, “It’s dangerous. I don’t feel good about it.”

  “Well, Christ, I don’t either. But I’m not a big enough prize to keep. I think Tim is duty-bound to bring me back. So I get a little tour, and maybe it’s fraudulent, maybe it’s designed to lure us there… but maybe I can learn something anyhow.”

  Karen said, “We’re assuming he’s a liar. That he might be working for the Gray Man.”

  “It’s at least possible. There was that connection between them. I never understood it.”

  “But then it’s too dangerous. You can’t go.”

  Laura sighed and put her head back. “What choice do we have? Run and keep running? I don’t want to do that. I’m finished with that. Anyway, it was never me he was after. Walker left me pretty much alone in Turquoise Beach. I’m not the prize.”

  That was true, Karen thought, but also frightening—the implications were frightening. “So who is the prize?”

  “Not you or me,” Laura said. “I think… ultimately, I think it’s Michael they want.” Please, no, Karen thought.

  But maybe Tim was not lying, maybe it was all the truth, maybe everything was okay.

  Karen lay in bed and wanted to believe it.

  Maybe it’s true, she thought, maybe there really is a place we can call home. Not the kind of Utopia Laura had set out to find in her town at the end of the continent, not Paradise, maybe not even an especially good place—but home, a real and true home where they belonged.

  That would be good.

  But she thought of her dream, which was not a dream, of the ravine behind the house on Constantinople and the darkness of a cobbled alley in an old smoky sea town. She thought of the lonely factories and warehouses and the black obsidian buildings. She thought of the snow that had begun to fall.

  It was the kind of world Tim would have willed himself into. Karen had listened to her sister’s speculations about this talent they shared. It was a talent as wide or as narrow as the imagination itself. Which is to say, the soul. She recalled Tim as a child and guessed that he had opened doors into a dozen or more of these sullen, haltered, chilly Earths. Maybe it was the only kind of door he could open… out of all the web of possibilities, nothing but these dark alleys and cold cities.

  Drifting at last to sleep, she remembered what Laura had said: It’s Michael they want. The words echoed in her head.

  Not my son, she thought. Please not Michael. And she thought of the Gray Man all those years ago, of the gifts he had given them, the gifts they had accepted, the gifts which had languished in a closed drawer for three decades.

  The kingdoms of the Earth. What did it mean? The fairest in the land. A riddle.

  Your firstborn son. She trembled, sleeping.

  Laura, in the opposite bed, thought similar thoughts.

  Walker’s gift for her had been a mirror. The same mirror she had found in the desk back in Polger Valley… the mirror she could see clearly now in her mind’s eye. It was a cheap pink plastic mirror and the chromed glass had corroded over the years. But it was obvious what Walker meant by it. It was his way of saying, You are vain. Your curse is vanity.

  And it was true. She felt that now. It was what her life amounted to. Drugs were a mirror she had gazed into for a time. Turquoise Beach was a mirror, a magic mirror that cast up only pleasant reflections. Emmett was a mirror, and she had watched herself in his eyes.

  And it all amounted to shit, Laura thought bitterly, and it had left her here, lonely and stranded on this shoal of time.

  So, she thought, it has to be me. The logic was obvious. That was why she had offered to go with Tim. It was a good idea, but it was also a gesture: let me take this risk on behalf of someone else. For the first time, please, God, let me really care.

  But she was frightened.

  But that was all right. It was normal to be frightened. She was staring down the hard truths now, final confrontations, ultimate secrets.

  She thought, I’ll never sleep. I’m too wired to sleep.

  But sleep crept up on her without warning.

  She slept, and Karen slept, and the night rolled on, and when they woke the sun was shining and Michael’s bed was empty.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The capital city of the Novus Ordo was dark and wintry and Michael wasn’t dressed for it.

  He had put on two shirts, heavy denim pants, and a Blue Jays baseball cap pulled down to cover the tips of his ears. But it wasn’t enough. Wind came down these narrow streets like a knife and the snow infiltrated his sneakers.

  The
street was empty. He wondered whether there was a curfew in effect or it was just the weather. But it must be late here, too. These buildings were old and black and lit with sodium lamps at odd, uncertain intervals. Once in a while a bulky-looking automobile would chuff past, or a carriage behind a team of dray horses. The snow came down with a dry, sifting sound; Michael shivered.

  But he was close. He could feel it. A few more of these long, narrow blocks and then right and then left again. He could not say where the knowledge came from, but it was immediate and sure; he had arrived here with it fixed in his mind.

  But the weather was bad enough so that he would be in very rough shape if he tried to walk. So he stood in the meager shelter of a Gothic storefront—the sign said watches, clockworks, repairs—and tried to flag down a ride.

  Two cars passed by. The third stopped for him.

  It was a huge gray vehicle with a black cylinder, a gas tank or maybe a steam chamber, projecting from under the hood. The right-hand door cracked open and Michael jumped inside.

  The plush interior of the car was not much warmer than the street, but at least it was out of the wind. Michael looked gratefully at the driver. The driver was a middle-aged guy wearing Russian-looking furs and heavy gloves. They regarded each other a wary minute before the driver did something elaborate with the gearshift and the car rolled forward once more.