The Visitor (8 page)

It seems I'm not alone in taking precautions. My colleagues from around the country, those few who are in on the discovery, are also building shelters or making plans to take their wives and children to visit high places at the time of impact, if there is an impact. The Andes, maybe, or the Himalayas. Actually, my family is already high enough and far enough inland to avoid tidal waves. There's a huge fault line running north and south through Yellowstone, so I worry more about earthquakes. And, of course, if we're in the path of a direct hit, forget it.

Also, I'm troubled by this purple smell that comes and goes. I'm one of those people whose senses are all linked together, synesthetes, people whose minds apply color to things like letters or numbers or smells. I do it in various ways; I sometimes taste things I hear; I sometimes hear things I see; and I smell in all the hues of the rainbow, and then some, and lately I've had spells of smelling a deep, bluish purple odor no matter where I happen to be. Not a bad smell exactly, just slightly stifling. I've never smelled it before.

The thing keeps coming, big and black and already near the orbit of Saturn, which just happens to be in the way. We'll know the effect in a few days.

 

Well, it seems Saturn wasn't enough in the way to swallow the thing, but it was close enough to swerve it around and away from Earth, into an orbit that will take it out of the system without ever coming any nearer than the back side of Jupiter.

This has changed everything! The various observatories that had been keeping their mouths tight shut are opening them wide and the science popularizers are already having a field day. Naturally, certain senators and congressmen, the headline grabbers, are starting a witch hunt, demanding to know why they hadn't been informed. Neils says we star watchers will no doubt be summoned to appear before congressional committees. All we'll be able to say is that everyone was informed as soon as we had anything to tell them and we still don't have much. We still can't tell what it is or even how big it is, since it seems to have some kind of smoky field around it, sort of like a black comet, throwing off matter into its tail which is no longer directly behind it and is therefore slightly visible to us.

 

I'm not alone in being frustrated at being unable to provide data and answer questions without saying
approximately
or
perhaps
or
it seems.
By this time, of course, everyone knows it had been headed directly at us. There isn't any widespread hysteria about that; on the whole the discussions are scholarly and rather self-congratulatory. Other things are grabbing the headlines just now, all of them totally foreseeable. Doomsday sects have decided this thing is the Second Coming. A nihilist bunch claims to have a lethal virus they'll release if their terrorist comrades aren't let out of prison before their god arrives on the comet. In the space of a few days, there have been half a dozen plane hijackings, people trying to go to Antarctica or Nepal.

And of course, as Neils points out with irritating frequency, there are still fifty-six separate wars taking place on this planet, mostly between religious or ethnic or cultural tribes who have to rub shoulders with other religions, ethnicities, or cultures they don't like, can't tolerate, and feel a
traditional hatred for. There is no longer anywhere on earth for refugees to go. Earth is fully populated, but people still can't get that through their heads.

At supper last week, Michy asked what an
asseroid
was, and I explained.

Jerry said to me, “That's what you were really worried about, weren't you. Well, observe the power of prayer. It moved.”

“It didn't move,” I said indignantly. “Saturn moved it, as we had thought it might.” I was grumpy, but then, I'd been living on nerves and black coffee for weeks. “Besides, you didn't even know it was there, so you couldn't have prayed it away.”

“We didn't pray it away. We prayed for safety and peace and good will among men, and…”

“Jerry, who is this ‘we' you keep talking about?”

He looked at me as though I'd just crawled out of a hole. “The International Prayer Crusade, of course. www.inter-pray.edu. Where've you been? We have members all over the world, millions of us by now.” He looked fondly at Michy and rumpled her hair, which she hated. “Each day we're given a topic of prayer over the net, and a time on the following day that will be simultaneous for all of us, and we all pray for that thing, at that time, all joining together with one voice.”

“What do you pray for?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“We ask that God intervene in man's affairs. We ask that peace be enforced, that wars cease. We ask that…”

“You really mean that, Jer? You want God to reach down and solve our problems?”

He frowned into his plate. “We pray for people who need to be converted, people who are willfully blind and intellectually arrogant.”

He turned from Michy to give me the full blast of his admonitory gaze. He meant me! The heat of that glare was enough to raise blisters, and the idea of forest fires popped into my head. All those fires in recent decades that have started from a spark, a lightning flash, a cigarette butt, and
then gone on to burn everything and everyone in their paths because the forests were too thick, too heavily populated with trees and brush because we had fought the fires that had kept the forests balanced. Now here were millions of Jerries, all praying for God to reach down and take charge of an earth that was vastly overpopulated because we had fought the diseases that had kept it balanced! Did he know what he was asking for? Good Lord!

The next morning, Saturday, he left his computer to go answer the phone, and the flashing monitor screen attracted my attention. He'd called up that day's prayer time for the IPC, in our time zone, ten
A.M
. The topic was another call for divine intervention.

 

Saturday is my day to do the laundry. I still hang things outside when the weather is nice, because I love the smell of sun-dried sheets. So, I had the first load ready, pegging them to the lines out back, and all of a sudden the purple smell filled my nose, the same hue I'd been smelling at odd times for weeks now.

It was ten oh five by the kitchen clock when I went inside, prayer time. Maybe it was the power of suggestion, but I swear I smelled it. Not like wood smoke or leaf smoke in autumn. More like incense smoke, with its own faint fragrance, something resinous and unfamiliar, with this background odor hanging in it, powerful and purple, rising from millions of people asking God to reach down and solve all the world's problems.

I told myself it's just more of the millennial fever we've been through recently. It will go on a while, and then it will fade. The purple smell won't kill me; the prayers won't hurt anything. Maybe Jerry's new enthusiasm will turn out to be, as others have been, a passing phase.

W
hen Arnole vanished, Ayward stopped protesting the move to Faience, but that didn't prevent his drinking too much on moving day and spending the afternoon arguing with Rashel. Dismé and Aunt Gayla exchanged glances and decided to explore the grounds. When discord threatened to become overt, it was better to be at a distance.

The stone-floored loggia looked westward into thick forest. Graveled garden walks led beside grass-tangled gardens star-eyed with tiny tulips and blue squill. The entrance drive to the arboretum went over carved stone bridges where chuckling waters ran icy and clear from the snowmelt of Mount P'Jardas. When the shade grew chilly, they moved south into sunlight, toward the serpentine bottle wall, which Dismé avoided, though Gayla went along the wall, reading labels aloud.

“Meggie Ovelon Voliant. I remember her. A great tall woman with red hair. Hello, Meggie. It's a beautiful day, isn't it? Jerome Clarent. There were some Clarents living down the street from Genna and me when we were in Newland. I wonder if Jerome was the son…Hello, here's Cynth Fragas-Turnaway. Fragas was a minor family, not one of the big Turnaways…”

And then, “Oh, look. All that argument between Ayward and Rashel, and the movers have already put our bottles here!”

And indeed, there was a new section of wall containing Father's and Gayla's families' bottles as well as Rashel's…Not Roger's, however. Not Mother's.

Gayla chirruped, “Mother Gazane, I know you'll enjoy this place! Cousin Fram Deshôll! Isn't it lovely today…Oh, Nephew Val, this is a beautiful place!”

Dismé heard the words like a knell, hastening to lead Gayla south to the great yew maze, every aisle of it sentried by white marble statues standing in neatly clipped niches. Fearful of becoming lost, Gayla urged that they not go far inside, so they wandered northward again, across an extent of tufted grass to the dilapidated barns, stables, and storage sheds that occupied the northwest corner of the museum land.

Everything except the museum and house was overgrown and unkempt and—so Dismé thought—quite marvelous. Arnole would have loved it. When they finally returned to the Director's House, Rashel and Ayward weren't speaking, though the house was more or less orderly and full of dinner smells. Rashel left immediately for the museum, and Ayward settled into his chair to wax sarcastic about the place and its manifold “conceits.”

Conceits or not, Dismé liked them. Her walk had made her unusually happy, a worrisome pleasure, for with Arnole so recently gone, should she be happy? Since the Regime did everything it could to inculcate guilt, a task in which Rashel was an expert confederate, Dismé had more acquaintance with regret than she did with joy. Even asking “why” usually brought rue as an answer.

Arnole had said, when she had complained about never getting proper answers, “Ah, Dismé, how many interesting questions are there? An infinite number? Here inside the Regime, however, we are told that all the answers are in the Dicta, which has many words but little pith, so the permissible number of answers is quite small.”

“That's exactly right,” she said angrily. “No matter who I ask, they answer out of the Dicta! Even when it doesn't fit.”

“Doing such is not a new thing. In the former world,
there were people who said all truth was contained in this or that holy book, this or that holy image, these or those holy beliefs. No matter how complicated their world became, no matter how much it changed, the only answers permitted were those that grew ever more tortuous and convoluted.”

“Until?”

“Until, some say, God turned his back on them for their failure to use the minds they had been given.”

“Is that why the angels rebelled? Because God gave up on us?”

“I have often thought so. What should happen, of course, is that people should stop trying to answer with plockutta.”

“Plockutta?”

“In ancient times the mages of Tabitu printed approved spells and prayers on cloth flags. The mages believed every time the flag fluttered in the wind, making a sound like
plockutta, plockutta
, the spell or prayer was communicated to the powers that be. Plockutta, of course, is only the sound of a rag in the wind, as are many of the answers we are given.”

Though Rashel talked plockutta most of the time, Dismé did not make the mistake of considering her a fool. It was safer if Dismé went on playing the fool, the spinster aunt, the perpetual adolescent, roles she had played convincingly for years. This despite the fact she knew some part of her was stronger and more savage than such roles allowed. Sometimes she dreamed of this part, this Roarer, pacing back and forth in its inner lair, or she heard the echoes of its bellowing when she was frightened. At times of ultimate frustration, she imagined herself throwing Rashel's bloodied carcass into Roarer's den, assuming she could find its den, for when Roarer came from hiding, it rushed through her consciousness with a great thunder of drums or wind, leaving no way to track it to its lair.

Despite her fears, problems and disappointments were easier to bear at Caigo Faience than they had been in Apocanew. In Faience, beauty surrounded her. She had a pleasant
room instead of the unfinished attic she'd had in Apocanew, and even on the first night the aromas from the kitchen made her salivate. The food turned out to be as good as it smelled, and except for Rashel—who remained at the museum until late—they had their supper with the staff so they could get acquainted.

The housekeeper was dignified, white-haired Mrs. Stemfall, with her pocketful of keys; the coachman was hawk-handsome dark-haired Michael Pigeon; the maid was broom-thin, sniffly Joan Uphand, and the cook, Molly, Joan's mother, was a stouter version of the same. It was Dismé's birthday, her twenty-fifth, which no one had remembered but herself, but she did not mind. She had long felt it was better not to have a birthday than to be reminded one had spent another year meeting no one's expectations. Lacking remembrances from others, she gave herself a gift. Very early next morning, before anyone else was up, she would go out into the grounds by herself and see the dawn in all its glory.

She went to bed full of anticipation and slept the night through without waking. When she emerged from the house shortly before dawn, however, she encountered a wandering, melancholy smell totally incompatible with her plan. The spring morning should smell of mist, mint, and damp soil, as it had the day before, but a smell of lonely autumn was wafting about instead, a redolence of fading gold, wet leaves, and campfire smoke. She followed her nose to the riding field, where tents had sprouted overnight like so many mushrooms, where horses stood in a roped off paddock, knee deep in tufty grass, and men gathered around breakfast fires as they hailed one another in hearty, vulgar voices.

Ayward had already left for the city when Dismé came in for breakfast. Rashel, about to leave, directed her to stay indoors, out of the way of the workmen who had arrived to clean up the grounds. Though Dismé felt Roarer raise its head and growl in its throat, she merely nodded, fully intending to return to the ferment outside. All day she de
lighted in the bustle of men stumping about in muttering bunches, in or on or behind barrows of brush going out, wagons of stones coming in; sledges of rotted bridge timbers out, whole bridge timbers in; broken roof tiles out, bright new roof tiles in. Her earliest impressions of Faience were of clamor and transformation: the chink of chisel on stone as one day's gap in a tumbled wall became the next day's barrier; the slither of spilling gravel as a morning's wandering, weedy path turned into a neatly edged and surfaced one by evening; the bark of axes and the sibilant, cracking rustle of falling trees as fountaining copses frilled all over with mouse-ear leaves vanished overnight, leaving not even the stumps to mark where they had been. The continuing metamorphosis seemed natural, part of the place itself, exhilarating as being in a balloon, with everything changing moment by moment, and nothing to hang onto but the sky.

Which was how she thought sorcery must have been, changeful and marvelous. Oh, how the Regime longed for the restoration of that Art! Even though magic had destroyed their former world, they wanted it.

“Oh, yes, they want it,” Arnole had commented. “But since they are deathly afraid of it, and terrified that the wrong person may find it first, they insist upon controlling the search so minutely that they will never find it.”

This had been a new thought. “Why, Arnole?”

“Ah, Dismé. Well.” He had looked at the sky for inspiration, as he often did. “I've heard you drumming on pots and pans and boxes and what not.”

“Father said I inherited twiddling from him.”

“Well then, let us suppose you want to discover drumming. Sit here and twiddle me something.”

Dismé sat down at the table and began to tap out a rhythm with both hands.

“Stop,” said Arnole. “Have you filled out a Regime application to explore the rhythm you are using?”

Her mouth dropped open.

He cocked his head to the left. “Have you researched
through all the documents at the College of Sorcery to establish that that particular rhythm is, so far as we know, harmless?” He glared at her straight on. “Do you have an appointment to discuss this exploration with the appropriate committee of the Ephemeral Arts Department?” He cocked his head to the right. “When you have received permission from them, you will need to explain why you wish to tap out this particular rhythm rather than some other rhythm.”

“Oh, for the love of Plip, Arnole! It's just drumming!”

“Exactly,” he said, wide-eyed and with a dramatic shiver. “But I am afraid of drumming. Drumming may incite people's emotions. Drumming could stir people into pathological behavior or overt sexuality. Someone might be attacked. I am afraid of drumming.”

She frowned. “And the Regime is afraid of magic?”

“The Regime is very, very much afraid of magic. It has reason to be afraid.”

“And what reason is that?” she had asked in a whisper.

He had looked around, being sure they were alone, and his voice dropped to match her own. “They fear it first because it could be used against them. They fear it more because they believe some of their fellows have actually found it, and it has turned out to be a dreadful thing. I hear rumors to that effect.” He had put a finger to his lips, giving her a look.

“Dreadful?” she asked incredulously. “How?”

“The rumor is that human sacrifice is part of any spell they cast.”

This had accorded so ill with Dismé's beliefs that she had tried to unhear it. She still refused to believe it. The sorcery she felt deep in her bones could not…would not require anything of the kind! If the true Art were found, it would be like the change and clamor of spring! Nothing cumbersome, nothing burdensome. Weightless. Anchorless. Free flying.

The landscaping commotion went on long enough that Dismé was quite giddy with it. Then, without warning, on the morning of eightday, Spring-span five, it was done.
She arrived at the riding field to find the last few horses drawing their wagons through the rusty back gates. Only one of the younger workmen was still there, cleaning up the campground. He greeted her by name, winked at her, and gave her a little sack of well rooted but unsprouted bulbs he and his fellows had come upon while digging out weeds.

The wink acknowledged the existence of her private garden, which she could not have kept secret from the men who helped her make it. In order to clip the hedges, the men had gone in and out of the maze by means of ropes laid on the ground and chalk marks to indicate which lanes had been finished. Dismé, however, had figured out the secret code of the maze itself: the statues of angels that stood along the aisles had a code of signals. They pointed the way past every turn and dead end into the very heart of the place, and there stood Dismé's garden, planted around a particularly enigmatic and wonderful six-armed and six-winged being carved from glassy black stone with golden lights in it, as though it were sprinkled inside with stars.

The black statue was unlike any of the other statues, and if one applied the statuary code to this being, it seemed to be saying at least half a dozen things at once! Come here and go there simultaneously, quickly! Though Dismé had not given up trying to understand its message, she accepted that mystery was appropriate for the heart of the maze, including the fact that each time she saw the statue it seemed to be a different size or in a different position. That puzzle was as nothing, however, compared to the conundrum of the following wind or the disappearing gifts. Each time she went through the maze, a little wind came after her, redistributing the soft bark of the aisles to hide her footprints. Every time she made a gift to the enigmatic black figure—a flower, a spray of leaves, or a mountain bluebird feather—it had vanished by the time Dismé returned.

When she carried the bulbs into her garden, she thought the black being was larger than when she had last seen it. As she knelt on the moist earth to plant the bulbs, she spoke to
the being of the marvelous turmoil that had gone on, of the eventual emergence of the beauty that was implicit in every part of Faience. Though the carving did not answer, Dismé went away feeling soothed, as she often had after a conversation with Arnole.

 

The only cloud over Faience was caused by Rashel's conflict with Ayward. Some years before, Ayward had founded the Inclusionist School of The Art, an academic faction that believed the ancient magic could be found even in simplest things from pre-Happening times, things that actually were what they seemed to be—a bowl, a spoon, a painting, a table. Inclusionists preferred accessibility, clarity, and utilitarianism to the arcane, mystical, and difficult study that Selectivists espoused. Rashel, shortly after marrying Ayward, became a Selectivist, as though to spite him, and though Ayward had greater scholarship among the old books, Rashel had more prestige within the Regime.