The Border

by Robert McCammon

  “We’re back on I-70, gents,” Hannah announced. Her voice was a little shaky, after hearing these things spoken from the boy’s mouth. “She thanks you for the gas, let’s just hope our tires hold out.”

  “Is there a God?” Jefferson asked quietly, his gaze fixed on Ethan. “You know…I’ve traded on Him for years. I’ve done…some pretty bad things, in the name of God. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t been struck dead by lightning or something before now, but I just kept going. And it’s like…I was testing God, maybe, because He let me keep going. So tell me if you can…is there a God?”

  Ethan didn’t reply. How to explain to them that his knowledge was limited too, and there were things he was not allowed to know? They were waiting for an answer, and they thought he must’ve seen the face of the entity they called God, and maybe they believed he was what they called an ‘angel,’ in their understanding of the mysteries. He gathered his thoughts, and he said, “I can tell you that there is intelligence and direction in the cosmos. As I have seen, much is left to the will of the civilization…even to the individual, to rise or fall. Is your God the same as that known by the Cyphers and the Gorgons, or by any of the—can I tell you—billions of other civilizations ‘out there,’ as you put it? Each has its own mythology and meaning, its own structure of values. The entity you know as ‘God’ I would think would have as many names as there are languages, hearts, and minds. Understand me…I don’t have all your answers. I would likely present to you more questions, and some might be beyond the scope of your intellect to grasp. No offense meant,” he added.

  “But,” Ethan continued, “I am here. I was summoned here by a power I can barely grasp myself. I was created by that power. I was given a duty and directives. My intent—and the intent of my being summoned here—is to stop this war and save your world. I am not given precise instructions as to how to achieve that, but I am given what you might call a waypoint…White Mansion Mountain. It’s up to me—and a test of your willingness to fight for survival—to reach that waypoint and proceed from there.”

  “A test?” Dave said. “You mean all this…the war and all of it…could have been just a test to see if we were worthy to keep on living or not? That doesn’t sound much like God’s love, does it? And even if you can stop the war…what about the world? Our world. It’s fucked up, man! All the people that we knew and loved, dead! All those Gray Men out there, and who knows how many millions around the world! It’ll never go back to what it was!”

  Ethan nodded. His mouth was tight-lipped. The silver eyes fixed on Dave.

  “One thing I’ve learned in my long existence,” said the peacekeeper, “is patience. Trust that the intelligence that summoned me here and allowed the journey has a purpose. I do. If you believe anything, now is not the time to let it go.” He directed his gaze to Jefferson. “This body and its systems need rest. Is there anything else?”

  “No,” Jefferson answered. “That’s all.” He returned to his seat and found himself staring at nothing, but thinking of the progress of his life and what it had meant. He couldn’t crack up now, that was for sure, and weighing too much of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in his past might crack him, so he would put those things aside, try to blank them out, and go on as any man must…from where he was.

  Silence ruled on Number 712.

  The bus went on into the fitful dark. Rain fell again, but not hard enough to overpower the wiper. Mile after mile, the distance rolled away.

  Olivia slept, and dreamed of sitting with JayDee on the balcony of her apartment. JayDee took her hand, and he leaned his head close and said quietly There’s a way out of this, Olivia. There must be a way to fix things, to make things right.

  Do you believe that, John? her dream-self asked. Do you really believe? He squeezed her hand and smiled, and his blue eyes glinted with not a dirty yellow sky but one that was clear and clean, and something about his face seemed much younger than she remembered.

  Oh my Olivia, he said gently, you may rely on it.

  TWENTY-SIX.

  THE SUN WAS COMING UP, A SLASH OF RED TO THE EAST BEYOND the Rockies.

  Number 712 was sitting on the interstate at the exit to Utah State Highway 191 south. Hannah had pulled them over after another gas stop short of the Utah line. It had been an isolated station with an uncracked diesel tank, and unlike the last stop they’d had the luxury of time to fuel the bus to its capacity. Hannah had told Dave she was tired and needed sleep, and it would be best to continue on 191 at dawn. He didn’t argue, because he needed sleep too, but he’d gotten very little of it. Ethan had awakened after about an hour and told Dave he could rest soundly, that the trackers weren’t close enough to be alarmed and he’d let everyone know if that changed.

  Olivia had slept, and so had Nikki and Jefferson. Dave had drowsed for awhile and then jerked himself awake as if he were about to fall into a bottomless pit. He figured another hundred miles, give or take, to the White Mansion. Then who knew if there was even a road up the thing. Highway 191 was a four-lane and looked totally deserted from where he sat, not a single abandoned car or truck on it as far as he could see. The morning light reddening the sky showed a vista of what used to be called a western paradise, a land of low scrub and crimson rocks, distant mesas and mountains rising in the distance, arches and cathedrals of stone standing as they had for eons. It could be the surface of another planet, torn and shaped by ancient cataclysms. What a creation Earth was, Dave thought. He’d never stopped to think much about it before this war had begun, because making a living got in the way of philosophical appreciation, and he was never inclined to that, but Earth was an amazing world. From warm seas to frozen tundra, from lush grasslands and pine forests to the red rock mountains that rose from the plains along Highway 191, it was an incredibly diverse creation. And all the life it held…stunning, when you really considered it. Maybe when you lost something, Dave thought, it became that much more valuable. The life forms that would die or be malformed under this alien poison…probably in the thousands. So even if Ethan could stop the war, which Dave couldn’t imagine even as powerful an entity as Ethan being able to do, what would be Earth’s future? It looked to him like continued wrack and ruin. The world was never going to be able to recover from this.

  He realized that Ethan was awake and was staring silently out a window. If the alien was reading his thoughts, there was no response.

  He doesn’t know either, Dave thought. Do you? he asked, but still there was no reply. You may be a hell of a lot more powerful than us and know secrets of the universe and all kinds of shit that would knock us to our knees…but you’re not sure of anything either, are you? You’re just groping in the dark, like any ordinary human. Like this with the mountain…you don’t know what’s there because if this is a test for humanity you’re being tested too. Is that what Life really is, Ethan? A test designed by some alien we think of as God? That would be a fine laugh on the race of mankind, wouldn’t it? All the centuries of struggle and misery and everything people have had to go through, and at the end they find out whether the teacher gives them a passing grade or not?

  “Centuries also,” Ethan suddenly said, “of invention, perseverance, and in many cases genius. Your race seems to always find a way to push through obstacles. That’s why you’re still here.”

  “What?” Jefferson had awakened and was squinting in the morning light. “What are you talking about?”

  Ethan said, “Dave and I are having a conversation.”

  “Oh,” said the preacherman, and he looked puzzled, but he didn’t ask anything else.

  The others began to awaken. This morning Ethan noted that Olivia was hollow-eyed and haggard. She was still mourning John Douglas, could not accept the fact that he was gone. She was also mourning the loss of the human boy known as Ethan Gaines, and maybe she’d let herself feel motherly and protective of him, so that loss was doubly painful. He could not pretend that any part of the boy was left in this shell. What could he say to soothe
her that she would understand? Nothing, so she must be allowed to grieve her way to finality.

  When everyone was awake, they took turns going outside the bus to relieve themselves, which Ethan had already of course observed through the boy. It was an interesting process, but in his experience all species had the need for elimination. Almost all: the half-flesh, half-robotic soldiers of what the humans called the Cyphers did not, they absorbed and recycled any wastes from the nutrition that fueled them, and he knew of three more civilizations that were machine-based, but on the whole all shared this need. He participated in it when his time came.

  Afterward a jug of water was passed around, which Ethan in his true form did not need but knew it was vital to keep the body going. Dave opened up a couple of cans of pork ’n beans, a jar of peanut butter, and some stale crackers, and that was their breakfast.

  The sun had climbed toward eight o’clock, but yellow-tinged clouds were closing in and the light was dimming. Ethan tried to speak to Nikki, to console her however he could, but she turned her face away from him, and he realized it was useless. She, too, had to work through her grief—what seemed in her mind to be a world of grief—and he was helpless to give her any comfort. He took his seat, knowing that everyone on the bus needed him and counted on him, but he was a strange intruder to them nonetheless and they were all, as Nikki had put it so truthfully, “creeped out.”

  At last Dave regarded the deserted stretch of Highway 191 again, and he said, “Hannah, let’s move on.”

  She started the engine and guided the bus off I-70 onto the road to the White Mansion.

  “Ethan?” Jefferson said. “The trackers still there?”

  “The Cypher tracker is nearly overhead. The Gorgon ship is…” He paused to get a correct reading on it, calculating distances from its harmonic signature. “Seventy-two miles to the east, at an altitude of…I would say…between forty-seven and forty-eight thousand feet. It’s keeping its distance, but also keeping its tracker on you.”

  Jefferson nodded but said nothing else. Ethan knew he was as worried about this as everyone else, but he detected a subtle change in an element of Jericho’s thoughts. The man now was not entirely focused on himself, but had opened the cavern of his soul a little bit to allow in concern for the others and the mission ahead. Still…the man had known selfishness all his life, it was part of his being, and he used it as both sword and shield.

  Number 712 rumbled on, across a landscape of surreal beauty with its red rock cliffs and formations of stone that seemed fashioned by an alien hand. Mesas and mountains loomed in the misty distance, across a plain of gray-stubbled vegetation. Ethan took it all in with as much interest as any tourist. He’d been aware of Dave’s ruminations on the planet but had lingered there only briefly. If these people knew what he had observed of worlds across the cosmos, they would be amazed by the variety but also frightened, because the physics of this planet did not hold true on others. Some of the civilizations had evolved into pure cerebral energy, others were animalish and still fighting from the mud of their beginnings. Some had found their way to interstellar travel and use of the dimensional portals, others lived in caves. There were great cities and noble rulers, there were harsh prison-states, and males and females who existed as leeches on the societies they commanded. It was out there, a billionfold. And the languages and mathematics, clothing styles and entertainments, fields of study and commerce, rites of passage and customs, mythologies and rituals, sexual practices, births and deaths…beyond counting.

  Yet for all this, he was alone.

  He was rarely summoned to intervene, but always for a cause that involved the death of a world by conquest. Sometimes the greater power that had created him did not summon him, but the vast network of information that he was tuned to told him civilizations were being destroyed by others either greedy, envious, or in a religious fervor. He understood that he was not called to intervene in the politics and progress of a world, but rather to keep a world from being destroyed by an external force. The Gorgons and Cyphers, their real names impossible for the humans to speak or understand, had been at war over unpopulated planets for eons. They had fought each other across space, over dead pieces of rock and worlds of ice and flame, but in all that time this Earth was the first populated world they had contested. Their self-proclaimed border between what they considered their territories passed directly through the planet.

  It could not be allowed, that this world should be destroyed. And why? Was it so important, in the view of the greater power that the peacekeeper obeyed? He had wondered about this but had received no answer. In its silence, the greater power could be very cryptic at times, and also unsettling even to Ethan’s steady nature. He didn’t understand it, but he was not expected to. The ways and plans of the greater power were unknown to him; he was a small part of a massive undertaking that left even his thought processes numbed. He did what he was called to do, though it was left to him to decide the course of action. A test, as Dave had put it? A test of both himself and the will of the inhabitants of this world? He couldn’t say. There was some element of curiosity in the greater power as to how civilizations progressed, he knew that, but even to him, there were many mysteries that would never be revealed.

  He kept watch on the trackers. The Cypher tracker remained at the edge of the atmosphere. The Gorgon warship kept its distance of around seventy miles. He had the feeling of many Gorgon eyes and Cypher sensors directed at the bus, as it moved slowly along the highway between cliffs banded with a dozen shades of red. They feared him, but they must have him. They would choose the time and place.

  From a pocket of his jeans, Dave drew the many-times-folded and dirty Utah map torn from the road atlas. There were several mountains in the area to which they were headed; they’d have to figure out which one was the White Mansion, because he doubted very much that it would be marked with any kind of sign.

  It was a slow progress southward. Hannah was afraid to push the engine or the tires too hard, but at least they were good for fuel. The land flattened out and then rose again toward a mountain range. What appeared to be rugged badlands stretched out on both sides. They passed the black hulks of a tractor-trailer truck and two cars that had collided in what must have been a terrible fireball, but otherwise the highway was empty.

  Just after ten o’clock they passed through the center of the town of Monticello, which appeared to be deserted. Highway 191 became Main Street. Dave had given the map plenty of study and knew they had to get into the Manti-La-Sal National Forest, which was off to the west of Monticello. A smaller road, 101, was their way in. A weather-beaten sign in front of the post office at the corner of 191 and West 200 directed them to turn there for the National Forest. In another few minutes West 200 became Abajo Drive, which became 101 and began to climb toward the forested foothills.

  Much of the forest had turned brown and died. Pine and birch trees stood bony and bare. Through them, as they continued to climb, Olivia caught sight to their left of a looming mountain with a peak of white stone. All the surrounding mountains were covered with a brown blanket of dead forests. “You see that?” she asked Dave, and pointed.

  “I see it. Maybe ten miles away. I don’t know exactly how the hell to get there, but that looks promising. Ethan, is that the mountain?”

  “I think it is,” Ethan answered. “It must be.”

  “He can sense a spaceship seventy-two miles away and a tracker in outer space but he doesn’t know if that’s the right mountain or not, right in front of him,” Jefferson said. “Great.”

  “The tracker is not in outer space,” Ethan corrected him. “As for the mountain, I only know what’s on Dave’s map.”

  “There might not be a road,” Hannah said. The engine was straining as 101 steepened. “Looks pretty rugged over that way.”

  “We’ll keep going until we can’t go any further,” Dave told her. “Then we’ll figure something else out.”

  The road crested and the mountain wa
s in full view. It might have been majestic but for many thousands of dead trees. It was definitely the only peak of white stone in sight. Then the road descended for a stretch, with diseased forests on either side, before it began to climb once more and took a turn to the left.

  “She’s chuggin’,” Hannah said, but everyone could already feel the bus shuddering as it fought its way up. Again Highway 101 crested, with another swing to the south, and began a long winding journey down among the foothills from which the white-peaked mountain rose. Hannah was trying to put as light a foot on the brakes as possible, but she couldn’t allow the bus to get out of control descending this road. “I might be burnin’ the brakes up,” she worried. “They’re soggy enough already, and she’s pullin’ to the right.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Dave said. He was alert for the smell of burning brakes, though; it would be a long way down if they gave out.

  In about four miles or so 101 straightened out again and ran south parallel to the mountain in question. Everyone on the bus was looking for a way up, but there were only thousands of acres of brown trees unbroken by another road.

  “I don’t see a way to get any closer,” Hannah said. “From here it’d be one hell of a walk.”

  “Keep going,” Dave urged. “Could be a road up on the other side.”

  Another two miles passed. A more narrow road branched off from 101 to the right, and Dave told Hannah to take that one. They began climbing again, though moving more to the northwest and away from the white rock peak. Dave said, “I’m not sure this is the way but let’s stick it out for awhile.”

  They had traveled for over twenty minutes, seemingly going in the wrong direction, when Hannah caught sight of a dirt road that went off to the left on a more southwesterly course. It was surrounded by dead forest and was likely very hard to see when the trees were full. She slowed the bus and stopped near the road’s entrance. “What say?” she asked. “You want to try this? Might lead to a dead end, but it could take us a lot closer.”