Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Cardinal Palestrina turned away.

  It’s over now, he thought. There is no Plenum Project; there is no secret weapon. All this effort and constraint had come to nothing. There was the collaborator—Tim—the man cringing by the wall—but Neumann had explained that he was not, in himself, very powerful; that his talent was a crabbed, unsavory magic that opened narrow doors into ugly and marginal places; that his alcoholism and drug addiction had eroded even that.

  And there was Walker… but Walker had been wounded with clumsy neurosurgery, gutted until he was nothing more than a passive psychic bloodhound, a hunting machine. So the Project had ended and probably Neumann’s career with it; there would be censure, an enforced retirement.

  And in the long run, Cardinal Palestrina thought, what else might this mean? A potential advantage in the war irrevocably lost; the alliance with the Americans weakened; years of entrenchment and bloodshed and compromise.

  So this was a disaster. A terrible thing had happened today.

  But Cardinal Palestrina felt the hammering of his own heart, and it was a kind of giddiness—a vicarious triumph: strangely, as if the Devil had taken a beating here today.

  2

  Walker learned from a distressed mage what had happened in the containment cell, and he hurried there looking for Neumann. Approaching down the hallway, he felt it himself—a rupture in the fundamental magics of the DRI, as obvious and as significant as a hole blown in a wall.

  Neumann looked up as he entered. Just seeing Neumann’s eyes, Walker registered the enormity of the escape.

  But I brought them here, he thought. I did my part. It was a contract (though never written or spoken), and, Walker thought fervently, I fulfilled my part of it. Payment due, he thought.

  But Neumann’s expression swept away his certainties.

  He thought for the first time, Maybe it’s too late. Maybe they won’t give it back—what they took from me. What I lost.

  He touched his fingers to the scar running along-side his eye. He was not conscious of the gesture.

  “It’s not the end,” Neumann was saying. He was addressing Palestrina, and there was a pleading note in his voice. “We can start again. Start from first principles.”

  Cardinal Palestrina shook his head. “You’re talking about years. Generations.”

  “Not necessarily!”

  “Our needs,” Palestrina said, “are unfortunately more immediate.”

  “Needs!” Neumann was shouting now. “You never cared about that! Oh, you pretended. Strategic necessity. The global view. You said all the words. But none of that ever mattered, did it? Just this priggish hand-wringing, this Jesuitical nonsense, the fucking moral order—”

  But Palestrina merely turned and left the room.

  Neumann’s hands curled and flexed helplessly. He looked, Walker thought, like a wounded dog.

  “Fucking Papist,” Neumann whispered.

  Walker stepped forward. His mind was whirling. So much had happened and he understood so little of it. Make me whole, he wanted to say; that was the bargain; you promised me that. But he knew from Neumann’s face that it would do no good.

  So he said, simply, “Do you want me to find them?”

  Neumann focused on Walker—a blank, intent I gaze.

  “Yes,” he said. “And kill them?”

  It was all Walker had to offer. It was everything. He understood how fragile the sorcels of entrapment; had been, how long they had taken to devise—more than two decades since the day he had offered three gifts to three children: small potent binding magics. It was an edifice, moreover, which could not be rebuilt … certainly not within Neumann’s lifetime.

  “They’re dangerous,” Neumann said, performing {Walker guessed) this same calculation of loss and revenge … his anger and his hatred revving up like a machine, the machine that had operated this building for so many years. “They know about us here. That could be a problem.” He sighed. “Yes, kill them.” Walker looked at Timothy Fauve, staring now openmouthed from his place against the wall.

  “What about this one?”

  “Begin with him.”

  3

  Tim watched the Gray Man advancing.

  His outrage was instantaneous. Not for this, he thought.

  I didn’t do any of it for this.

  Christ, and how many miles had he traveled to come here since he left that house in Polger Valley two decades ago? How many fucked-up menial jobs and days without food and nights on some raw rained-out interstate hitching Detroit to Chicago to Des Moines to Points fucking West? How many empty bottles, how many insulted veins? How many lame dodges through crippled worlds like (admitting it now) this one? And for what?

  So he could hand over his sisters to be killed? And be killed himself for his trouble? No. Oh, no.

  He looked into the eyes of the Gray Man, his fists bunched. He said, “I trusted you!” Walker didn’t laugh.

  Home! Tim wanted to say. I came home! And you showed me! Kingdoms! Empires! You owe me that!

  As Walker reached for him.

  Tim stood up straight. He felt what Walker was about to do, some presentiment of it, the opening of the world’s walls around him. He looked Walker in the eye, but there was no recognition there; only a shadow.

  Walker touched him. All over now. “Fuck you,” Tim said. “You were never my father.”

  And tumbled away into chaos… only the echo of him left to bounce around these old stone walls.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  1

  We can’t hide,” Laura said. “I’m not even sure we can run.”

  But Michael was more optimistic. “Moving around helps. I think it’ll gain us some time, at least.”

  So they thumbed a ride up the broad highway that ran between Ville Acadienne and the crossroads of the Urban North, startled into silence by the forests and the flights of birds, by the hugeness of this country they had come to. The driver said he was up from the Chickasaw towns, visiting his family there, and they were welcome to ride as far as he was going. So they traveled that night and a part of the next day northward, and when Laura admitted they didn’t have any money—or none that was useful here—the driver bought them all breakfast at a roadside diner. He would have taken them farther but they demurred; he had done enough already.

  They walked for an afternoon. At dusk, they knocked at the door of an old stone farmhouse and asked for shelter for the night. The woman who answered—a pretty woman in a peasant skirt and thick, rimless eyeglasses—said they could have the loft and leftovers, and it was a good thing the weather had warmed up.

  Alone with a naked light bulb and what seemed like a feast of bread and cheese and faintly alcoholic cider, they talked about the future.

  “We have to get back where we can operate,” Laura said. “At least for a while.”

  Michael had thought this over. “Soon,” he said. “But we’re all right here for now.”

  “He’ll come after us,” Laura said.

  “Probably.”

  She looked around. “Well. At least it’s a friendly enough place.” She regarded Michael curiously. “Have you been here before?”

  So Michael told them about the Commonwealth, the way he had dreamed it, the cities and the wilderness, the flying machines and the highways and the railroads. The kind of place it was—how he had dreamed it, and then dreamed it real, and then dreamed his way out of prison with it. He wanted to tell them what it meant to him, but there were no words for it; he could only enumerate its features and hope they understood.

  Maybe they did. He saw the way Laura looked at him, her intensity, and wondered if she hadn’t dreamed of this place herself—faintly, distantly, a door she had never quite managed to open.

  2

  Karen sat back and listened to Michael talk, the roll of his voice now that the prison spells had been lifted. She wondered again whether he hadn’t grown a couple of inches. A trick of the light or perspective, but she could swear he was taller,
and there was something in his voice, a firmness, that was new to her.

  The shadow, at least, of adulthood. And she realized suddenly that Michael must have passed his sixteenth birthday back in the prison of the Novus Ordo.

  It was a disturbing realization.

  After a time Michael went and sat in the broad loft window, surveying the tableland that stretched away into the darkness—standing watch—while Laura and Karen talked in small whispers amidst the hay. Because they had come so far, Karen thought, it was possible to think things that were unthinkable—even to say them. She found herself telling Laura what she had been thinking, about Michael, her failure. “What hurts is that I couldn’t save him. All his life, I would look at him, I would think, I won’t do to him what Daddy did to us … I won’t let him lead that kind of life. But I was fooling myself.” The wheel, she thought. Maybe she had never beaten him but she was as harmful an influence as Daddy had ever been. We bend our children, she thought bleakly; and our children, bent, bend their children; and the wheel turns, and it grinds out broken lives.

  “But,” Laura said, “you did save him.”

  Karen shook her head.

  “I mean it,” Laura said. “The only reason we got this far is because of Michael. His talent, the strength of it. But that’s not a fluke or a mystery. Maybe any of us could have been like him. But we have chains on us… we have all the inhibitions Willis beat into us. I think the only reason Michael’s different is that he isn’t carrying around all that pain. No one ever made him afraid. Maybe you never prepared him for this—well, Christ, who could?—but you never made him afraid of himself. And that’s why they couldn’t cage him.

  “So it comes to something,” Laura persisted. “It does matter. You loved him, and that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s the only thing that matters. You loved him and you made him strong.”

  Maybe, Karen thought. But…

  But she was drifting off to sleep now, leaving behind the loft and the cool air and the silhouette of the barn’s old beam and pulley against a starry sky. She pulled this borrowed woolen blanket over her shoulders and let her thoughts meander.

  I would like to believe that, she thought, what Laura said. It was a nice idea, the world as an upward-turning place, at least the possibility of improvement. But it was equally likely that there was some kind of natural law, a conservation of misery. Pain doesn’t disappear, only gets changed into some other kind of pain.

  If she had saved Michael from fear maybe it was only by taking that fear onto herself. Certainly she was frightened now. And it was not just the obvious fear, but a whole coterie of fears: mother fears, the fact that her son was in danger: and other fears beyond that, including the final and unavoidable one, that Michael had gone beyond her in some important way, that he was lost to her, a grown man, a separate creature, the last ties of blood and affection sundered by all this violence. That there was nothing more she could do to help him.

  Not to matter anymore—surely that would be the worst thing?

  But they had found a moment of peace in this curious place, the America Michael had found, and she allowed herself to sleep at last, lulled by the wind sounds and the rustle of an owl that had nested in the rafters.

  3

  Michael woke in the morning with his cheek pressed into the straw and a faint sunlight prying through the barnboards, and for a moment the only thought he had was that he was here, in the world he had begun to imagine in the old row house in Polger Valley. A safe place. And that feeling of security was so fine that he wrapped it around himself like a blanket and almost fell back asleep.

  And then he remembered.

  He remembered Walker; he remembered the hard stone prison of the Novus Ordo.

  And sat up thinking, How do we run? Where do we run to?

  —the only questions left.

  He did not doubt that they would be pursued, were already being pursued, that their period of grace might amount to days at most. “They’ll kill you,” Tim had said, and Michael firmly believed it.

  But he didn’t want to leave any sooner than he had to. This was a tiny, rural segment of the world he had imagined back in Polger Valley, but it was real— tangible, vast and complex and indefinably familiar. It felt like home.

  “Home” had become a pretty ragged word and Michael was reluctant to use it even in his private thoughts, but it was the word he kept circling back on. Home, a place to live, a place to make a future.

  Maybe.

  Maybe.

  Maybe sometime. Maybe even soon …

  But he gathered up his Blue Jays cap and his spare shirt and hiked out to the highway with his mother and Laura behind him, a cool morning with frost coming off the casaba vines that lined this old stone wall, feeling nothing but the prospect of a warm day and a ride up to the market cities of the North—his mind empty but humming happily in the fresh sunlight— when suddenly a kind of sour electricity filled the air, and a man-sized space before him seemed to darken and then take shape, and it was the Gray Man, it was Walker, as inevitable as time and as real as the stones, standing there staring, his face looking somehow older and angrier now, his eyes wide and childlike as he reached out his big hands toward Michael.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  1

  So he ran.

  He took hold of his mother and his aunt and together they were gone, twisting down the secret corridors of the plenum as fast as he could take them.

  2

  White light and flickering darkness and this ceaseless motion…it was all Karen could do just to follow.

  She felt Michael a step ahead of her and Laura a step behind, links in a chain, and the Gray Man in their wake, a dark presentiment, the shadow of a storm cloud.

  She could not calculate the distance they traveled. There were no words for this kind of distance. The world—these worlds—had become a vapor, a mingled landscape too diffuse for the eye to comprehend. She felt disoriented, bodyless, lost in an indefinite betweenness, a fog of location. She felt stretched to the breaking point.

  She closed her eyes and held on as hard as she could.

  But it was exhausting. It was not only Michael’s effort but her effort and Laura’s. Exhausting, especially, because this was a talent she had not exercised since childhood; without Michael she would not have been able to do it at all. She felt a fatigue that was more than physical, an exhaustion of possibilities—it tugged at her like an anchor.

  It was like that time in the department store, she thought, running after Michael. This same careless plunging into the unknown, down corridors and angles she had never dared imagine, a bursting through forbidden doors. But this time it was Michael who was doing the running, his skill or intuition. Periodically they lingered long enough to glimpse a landscape, some real and strange place, a grove of trees or a crowded lane; and she would think, He’ll find a place… somewhere the Gray Man can’t follow…

  But the Gray Man was relentless behind them— she could feel him—and Karen was growing wearier by the minute. Worse, she began to suspect (and it was a grim, unwelcome intuition) that they were being somehow herded; that Michael’s running had a desperation in it now; that these increasingly dark and half-glimpsed worlds where they paused were not entirely of his own choosing.

  Too much for him, she thought.

  Clinging to his hand as if it were the only real thing in this chaos, she thought, Oh, Michael, I’m sorry—

  Because the fatigue was numbing, the distance was too great to bear.

  She put her head up helplessly and saw a cold moon sailing through a black sky, worlds and worlds away from home.

  And then she stumbled.

  She fell. It was prosaic. She was, momentarily, as embarrassed as she was frightened. Her hand slipped away from Michael’s; and she felt cut off, suddenly alone. But then Michael was with her, urging her up; Laura was lifting her.

  Karen thought, I know this place!

  She had slipped on the cobbled wetness of th
e alley. It was a dark night, wintry night, old gray moon in a black cheerless sky. Beyond the alley mouth she saw sooty Tudor-style houses with white ice bearding the eaves. A cruel wind came in from the sea.

  It’s always cold here, Tim had said.

  It was one of his places, a cloistered industrial town by the sea, and she had been here before—once in her childhood and often in her dreams.

  It might be some part of the Novus Ordo, a port town there, or it might be some analogous but unconnected world. But this was where she had met the Gray Man and this was a place, she felt, where his power must be considerable. It was here that Walker had begun to lay the complex spells that had almost— but for Michael—trapped them.

  Therefore, a dangerous place.

  Michael tugged at her hand. “Hurry,” he said, but she could not; the fall had taken the last of her stamina. She looked at Michael helplessly and understood there was no need to explain; he had felt it in her touch. His eyes widened and then narrowed.

  “Go without me,” she managed.

  Laura put an arm around her. “I’ll stay. Michael, you go on. Maybe you can draw him away—”

  “Just run,” Karen said. “It doesn’t matter, run.”

  But then obviously it was too late, because the Gray Man was there with them, standing in silhouette at the mouth of the alley with the sea wind spitting at his back.

  For a long moment no one moved.

  “Go,” Karen hissed. She felt dizzy with it, her own futility, Michael’s silence: it was like watching him stand dazed between the rails with a train bearing down. And nothing she could do—nothing to save him. “Michael, go,” she said, but it was useless now, because here was the Gray Man reaching out, and she could see the stupid, implacable calculation in his eyes; and his hand, reaching, seemed to glow with dark electricity, strange ultraviolet lightnings.