Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

  So he doesn’t care, she thought, that we hate him for it. He wants the hate. He would be rewarded for it: by the Gray Man, or the faceless magicians who had confined them here. She wondered what reward they’d promised him. But it hardly mattered. The kingdoms of the Earth. A paperweight.

  She thought: Tim became the thing Willis always feared. So, ultimately, it was Willis’s fault… this was the harvest of his frightened love.

  But the question followed: Have I done any better?

  All she had ever wanted was to protect Michael. And that was all Willis ever wanted, she thought, to protect us—he claimed so. But it wasn’t enough. He had admitted that. It’s not worth jack shit. He tried to protect us with fear, she thought, and I tried to protect Michael with ignorance. And here we are. It doesn’t get worse than this. I wounded him, she thought bleakly, as badly as Willis wounded Tim. And here we are.

  It goes on, she thought, the wheel turning, and it never gets better, and maybe that was the most frightening thing of all, that for all her wanting and all her trying she was not, in the end, any better than Willis Fauve.

  2

  Cardinal Palestrina moved quietly with Carl Neumann beside him to the open door of the cell. “They’ll hear us,” he said.

  “They can’t,” Neumann said, and his voice boomed down the corridor. “They can’t hear or see us out here. It’s part of the spell. Look: you can look at them. Go on, Your Eminence.”

  Cardinal Palestrina stepped reluctantly forward.

  He felt like a voyeur, a Peeping Tom. There was no visible barrier, no reassuring glass, only empty air between himself and these three people. And magic. But magic was so intangible. They were asleep.

  There were reed mats on the floor for them and blankets to help fend off the subterranean chill, for this was one of the Institute’s lowest levels. The two middle-aged women and the teenaged boy slept with troubled expressions. Understandably, Cardinal Palestrina thought. They had been through so much. Kidnapped, held against their will…

  He said, “Have you spoken with them?”

  Neumann shook his head. “Only briefly to the boy, when he arrived. We’re using the brother to break them in—get them accustomed to captivity.”

  “Ah, the brother. They talk to him?”

  “Grudgingly. He’s their only contact.”

  “The child,” Cardinal Palestrina said.

  “Yes. He’s the important one.”

  “He doesn’t look like much.”

  “It doesn’t show,” Neumann said.

  An ordinary boy, oddly dressed. Hard to imagine him stepping across worlds. Cardinal Palestrina, who had considered himself credulous—and a model of faith—had discovered since his journey to America that his pedestrian mind balked at miracles.

  Harder still to imagine this child as an effective weapon against the Islamic armies. He told Neumann so.

  Neumann said, “But the potential is enormous. You have to understand—it’s the purity of him. The others are all haltered in some way. Half-things. Compromised by their circumstances, or their genes, or their fear…or like Walker, hobbled by clumsy surgery. By comparison, the boy is a distilled essence.

  3

  “Soon,” Tim said, “they’ll be moving you out of here.”

  It should have been good news. Karen hated this room, its narrowness, the unsheltered corner toilet—and the pervasive numbness she felt here, the prison magic. But surely, she thought, they would not be moved to a better place. Not unless it was equally imprisoning, or they had been rendered somehow harmless. She did not relish the future. The magic worked on her like a sedative or a powerful tranquilizer; otherwise she might have been too frightened even to think.

  Tim said, “It won’t be so bad.”

  He was dressed in clean clothes, a little old-fashioned-looking, an odd cut, tweedy and Victorian. Probably that was what people here wore. There was something maddening about the way he looked—his cocked head and carefully inexpressive eyes, this attitude of patience. As if he were the one enduring some hardship.

  Simple and potent. He can transport himself into the Arabic heartlands. Or carry our armies there.” “Surely not willingly?”

  “When we’re done with him,” Neumann said.

  The surgery. Cardinal Palestrina thought, The cauterization of his soul. The subtle cutting.

  He said, “And the one who’s collaborating—the brother—did you do that to him? Cut him in that way?”

  “No,” Neumann said calmly. “No, not Tim… we didn’t have to.”

  Laura, across the room, stood up in the clothes she had been wearing for three days and said, “What did^ they offer you? That’s what I keep asking myself. Why would you do a thing like this?”

  Tim looked offended. Offended but patient. He said, “Why does anybody do anything? Maybe I didn’t have a choice. Think about it. Maybe the reasons are obvious. I was serious, you know, what I said about this place. It is home. For me, anyway. And it could be home for you, if you would give it a chance. Home,” he said earnestly, “is an important thing.”

  “The kingdoms of the Earth,” Karen said, surprising herself.

  He turned to face her, startled.

  “A paperweight,” she said. “I remember.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But you do. That’s what they offered you.” Sedated, distant even from herself, she was able to say this. It had been on her mind. “That’s what they offered you. A place to rule. A kingdom. You relished that.” She shook her head. “Bigger than Daddy. Oh, Timmy, you were always so literal-minded. You took everything so seriously.”

  Incredibly, he was blushing. He drew himself up and said, “You make it sound like a fairy tale. But hey, it is a fairy tale. We’re leading fairy tale lives. That should be obvious by now.”

  Laura said, “You believed them? These people— the people who put us here—you think they care about what happens to you?”

  “They do. They have to.” It was his vanity at stake now. “You’ll see. You just don’t know them. You—”

  “I know they’re capable of this.” This room, she meant; their imprisonment. “They don’t care about you!” Scornful now. Chiding him. “It was only Michael they ever wanted.”

  “You pretend to know,” Tim said. “You don’t know a fucking thing.”

  He was not patient anymore.

  “And now they have him,” Laura pressed, “and what do you matter? You’re nothing. Last year’s | model.”

  “All of us,” Tim said hotly, “they want all of us. He’s no different. Why is he special? He’s just like the rest of us.”

  He waved dismissively at Michael, who was sitting in a chair, impassive, watching. Michael had been impassive for most of the last three days. The spell, Karen thought. It had this effect on all of them.

  But now he stood up. He looked at Tim across the room and Karen noticed for the first time that they were approximately the same size: Michael was as tall as his uncle. For a moment he seemed somehow taller.

  Tim—startled for the second time today—fixed his gaze on his nephew.

  Michael glared back.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “I am different.” And what was that flashing on Tim’s face now? Karen wondered. Was it fear? Was that possible? The air filled with sudden electricity.

  4

  Cardinal Palestrina was with Neumann in his office when the homunculus burst through the door. The creature leaped onto Neumann’s desk and whispered something in his ear. With a mixture of fascination and loathing, Palestrina watched the creature’s apelike features contort. But this was nothing like a smile.

  Cardinal Palestrina had been finalizing the report he would present to the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. He had decided—reluctantly—that his finding would be positive; that he would suggest a joint European-American research effort involving the otherworldly child; that the strategic possibilities outweighed the ethi
cal considerations. He would present his report to the consulate tomorrow and it would be forwarded by Marconi to the Vatican. Everything else would follow. Neumann would have his money, his prestige; in time, his ghostly armies.

  But Carl Neumann stood up suddenly and his fists were clenched and his lips were taut; and Cardinal Palestrina thought, What is this? My God—what now?

  “Something unforeseen,” Neumann said tightly, “is happening at the cell.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Tim was wrong, Michael thought. It is me they want. He had thought about this over the last few days— tentatively, ploddingly, under the blanketing influence of the prison magic. And he had come to some conclusions.

  If they want me, he thought, it’s because I’m different.

  Laura had said as much, standing on the windy bluffs above Turquoise Beach. It’s more than I could lever do, she had said.

  And he remembered the way he used to feel, the electricity raging up out of the earth, the vortex of time and place and possibility, and the way he had held it in his hands.

  They want that, he thought.

  But it was a new thing—this power. They had anticipated it, but maybe they didn’t understand it.

  And he let that idea lie fallow for a time.

  Later he thought, How do you build a cage for an animal you’ve never seen?

  It was an interesting question.

  Well, you build according to what you know. Michael’s grandparents—his natural grandparents—had once escaped a place like this. Tim had said so and there was no reason to disbelieve him, at least about this. So this room must be a bigger, stronger cage; they must have fortified their spells and their magic. But, still, wasn’t that like building a wolf trap when you set out to trap a tiger? He thought, Hey, they don’t know me.

  But it begged the question: How strong am I really?

  He was new to his talent. It was not something he had much practiced. He felt the imprisoning magics around him like physical bonds, and he experimented, one night, fighting against them, exerting a counter-force.

  But it was fruitless. Nothing yielded. He was alone and empty and all the countless doors of time and possibility had been brutally slammed shut.

  So maybe he wasn’t such a tiger after all.

  He put all this out of his mind for a time. He slept, and when he woke he tried not to think about anything at all.

  It was easy enough. The confining spells made it easy.

  But then another thought drifted into his mind, not a thought so much as a daydream: it was the world he had envisioned at the Fauves’ house in Polger Valley, and often since then.

  Thinking about it made him feel better. It was a place, Michael felt certain, without prisons like this one.

  He allowed himself to dream about it.

  He drifted on the edge of sleep. It was a place and a daydream both. It was everything he felt when Laura talked longingly about “a better world.” Maybe it was the kind of place she had been looking for when she found Turquoise Beach, a world she had reached for but could not grasp. And Michael discovered that he knew things about this world. He knew about the highways stretching from the watery French villes of the South up to the big northern cities of Tecumseh and New Amsterdam and Montreal. He knew about the rail lines running west across the prairies, the grain towns and Indian towns and cold switching-yard towns like Brebeuf and Riel. He knew about the Russian towns of the Northwest coast, where people still trapped for furs in winter. He knew about the Incan and Spanish cities of the Southwest, their freeways and temples and bright clothes and odd, raucous holidays. He knew that all this was called simply America and that it was not a country so much as a loose confederation, a kind of commonwealth. He knew that borders didn’t matter much in this world. He knew that you could travel from Quebec to Coquitlam or Shelekhov to Cuernavaca without showing a passport. He knew that the market streets were rich with common goods, that any able-bodied individual could find a job in the cities, that the harvest had been bountiful this year.

  But he knew this world best by its landscapes: geographies teased out of the air, as faint and unmistakable as the smell of rain. Salt marshes still in calm, empty southern noons; icy northern midnights bathed in radiant aurora glow. He had occupied these places in his dreams, walked these streets in his sleep. There was an affinity—an attraction. He thought, A homing instinct.

  He knew all this as effortlessly as he knew his own name. He knew, moreover, that he could make himself a life in this place… that it was a place you could live without the quotidian threat of nuclear annihilation or imminent war, the daily roulette of robbery and violence.

  A place where the Novus Ordo couldn’t reach him.

  A place where he would not be a freak.

  And oddly it was this daydream—and not any struggling against his bonds—that made him feel suddenly freer, that opened his horizons for a tantalizing moment. He blinked and thought, This is what makes me different: this is what they didn’t expect.

  But then the walls and the ceilings closed around him and he was back in this room, which was only a room, and which contained him.

  He stood up when he heard Tim talking about him. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I am different.” And he understood by the expression on Tim’s face that he had said something important.

  Tim recovered fast. He drew back and stood up straight and made his face a bland mask of endurance. “I didn’t mean to insult you, Michael. Sure, you’re important. But so is Laura and so is your mother. And so am I.”

  Michael moved back toward Laura. Instinctively, he reached for her hand. She looked at him quizzically. But they touched and there was a flash—brief but significant—of real power.

  Now, Michael thought. Now, while they’re unprepared, or never.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  It was not an argument, just a flat declaration of fact, but he surprised himself by saying it. Laura’s eyes widened and then she looked at him and made a tiny nod.

  He reached for his mother’s hand. Tim said, “I don’t think that’s realistic. I don’t think you’ve considered your position here.” Michael said, “But I have.” There was a kind of circuit going now, the three of them touching. He felt Laura’s wounded vanity, his mother’s passivity and resignation. And under that— buried but potent—these small, faint surges of power. Gather that, he thought. Put it together. A better world. Those forests and those cities. It was only a step away.

  And Tim, sensing something now, said, “Hey—oh, Christ, wait a minute—”

  No more waiting, Michael thought. The room filled with a curious odor, hot motor oil and charred metal, like some huge machine gone into terminal overload. Far away, Michael thought he heard a savage and barely human howl of pain.

  And the prison magic loosened a little around him.

  Tim said, “God damn you, stop it!” Karen reached out toward Tim with her free hand. She understood now what was happening; it was obvious. Tim backed off a step. Karen said, “Come with us.” Adding, “It’s going to be dangerous for you here.”

  But we don’t have time for this, Michael thought.

  He wasn’t sure he could sustain the critical effort. An alarm bell was clattering in the corridor; he saw shadowy figures beyond the doorway.

  Tim shook his head. “No!”

  “They might kill you. They could do that.”

  Tim said defiantly, “Listen, they’ll kill you! They won’t let this happen! They’ll send him after you and this time they’ll let him fucking have you!”

  The Gray Man, Michael thought.

  “Timmy,” Karen said, “it’s not a game. You should have learned that a long time ago.”

  But Tim only shook his head, and Michael thought, He looks like Willis … it was odd, but you would swear they were blood relations. That anger. That fear …

  Karen shook her head no.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  And Michael thought,
Now! But hesitated in spite of himself and felt the moment slipping away, a sudden recoiling.

  I can’t do this!

  It was the voice of the frightened ten-year-old and Michael was paralyzed by it.

  I can’t do this! They’re too strong for me! I want somebody to come get me—I want to go home—

  But there was no home. He knew that now. Only his mother in this cell, his father living in bliss and ignorance by the side of a very distant lake. And Tim, of course, had lied; the Novus Ordo was nothing like a home.

  The clangor of alarms. Feet in the hallway.

  Laura’s hand tensed against Michael’s.

  And he had then what he identified—a moment of lucidity among this shrilling noise—as a genuinely adult thought: that home is not a place after all but a thing you make, a territory you stake out. It was an act of will: a thing you did.

  Karen sensed his hesitation, shot him a fearful look.

  Laura whispered, “It’s out there, Michael… please, I know it is.” Home.

  He held the word inside him. Those forests and those cities. Home, he thought…

  And then the walls gave way, and there was only time and possibility and a great and simultaneous motion; and Michael closed his eyes against the brightness and opened them on a high blue sky very far away.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  1

  Cardinal Palestrina followed Carl Neumann into the empty cell.

  Its emptiness was shocking and he could see that shock in Neumann’s face, a numbed incomprehension. Neumann seemed to radiate loss, a grief as profound as if a child had died here. Timothy Fauve, the collaborator, stood motionless in a corner, stealing glances at Neumann the way an exposed field mouse might regard a passing hawk. For long moments no one spoke.

  Finally it was Neumann who broke the silence, with an action rather than a word. In a single motion he turned to the homunculus, which had followed him down these long corridors into the room, and kicked the unfortunate creature squarely in the ribs. It traveled some feet across the floor and came to rest limply against a wall. It looked dead.