Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The spell broke as Michael’s attention shifted. He gasped for air, realized that he had been on the verge of a terrible capitulation.

  He felt the Gray Man’s irritation radiate up from the shore like a brutal heat. In a gesture that was almost casual, Walker waved his hand at the little girl, and the little girl fell backward out of time: a motion Michael could only barely perceive, out and away into some chaos of possibility. The girl had vanished silently from the beach.

  Michael hesitated a second, stunned by what he had seen. It was an act of murder as casual as the swatting of a fly.

  He glanced back one more time at the Gray Man —at Walker—then turned to race down the grassy slope of the promontory, past these old whitewashed houses and their winter gardens, Emmett’s guitar banging out crazy discords against his hip.

  Far away, he heard a woman’s voice calling a name.

  His mother seemed paralyzed by the news. His aunt reacted more swiftly. She bolted the door and instructed Michael to pack his things. “I’ll tell Emmett to lock up downstairs.” And moved off toward the bedroom.

  “Aunt Laura?”

  She paused to look back.

  Michael said, “Who is he?”

  Her frown deepened. “We don’t really know. I think… maybe we have to find out.” “We’re leaving in the morning?” “Yes.”

  “Where are we going?”

  His mother broke the silence. Her eyes looked bruised; her voice was faint.

  “A long way,” she said. “Back home.”

  Interlude

  NOVUS ORDO

  1

  Cardinal Simon Palestrina—of the Vatican Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and now de facto a legate to the Court of the Novus Ordo— wrapped his cloak against the October wind and grimly regarded the approaching coast of the New World.

  The bleakness of the coast was mirrored in the Cardinal’s face. The severity of his expression, the pallor of his cheeks, had won him a reputation as a dour, almost Jesuitical scholar. In fact he was a Manichean Brother, and his countenance derived more from the periodic attacks of gastritis that had marked his entry into middle age than any surmised ecclesiastical purity. His friends were of course aware of it… but Cardinal Palestrina had very few friends. He suffers best, Palestrina often thought, who suffers alone.

  For similar reasons, he had kept his own counsel through the course of this long transatlantic journey. In a sane world he would have made the trip by dirigible. The airships had been improved immensely since the days of the Teutonic tragedies. But the Curia was shamefully underbudgeted, even in light of events in the Mediterranean. Vatican conservatism, Palestrina thought dolefully; fear of potential allies … it could lose us this war.

  Clutching the rail, he chastised himself with a vision of the Islamic hordes overrunning civilized Europe. A muezzin calling from the cathedral at Orvieto, ulemas hacking off the limbs of honest Christians. And here I stand, he thought, delayed a month on the tarry Madonna of Avignon.

  It was not even a new ship. The rigging was ancient, the sails of much-mended hemp; the coal-oil engine belowdecks did more to pollute the immediate environment than to expedite the voyage. Cardinal Palestrina had spent his first week out from Genoa in a condition of relentless, rolling nausea. I will go home, he thought, and there will be wild Moslems in the basilica of St. Peter’s, and I will seek out Fr. Oswaldo of the Funding Subcommittee in whatever dungeon they have clapped him in, and I will say, I told you so.

  He relished this fantasy as the Madonna of Avignon entered the windy harbor of Philadelphia.

  The city appeared to be everything Cardinal Palestrina had been led to expect of the Americans. The harbor stank. It smelled of dead fish and marshland. Every summer the yellow fever bred in this miasma and ravaged the city. The piers were old, the pilings layered with the dung of the harbor gulls. The distant towers of the city itself rose huge and black, sooty monuments to the industrial supremacy of the Novus Ordo, the New Order of the Americas. How desperately they had striven to emulate the festering valleys of the Rhine and the Rhone, how thoroughly they had succeeded.

  Cardinal Palestrina, allowing the other passengers to crowd past him onto the dock, felt a pang of nostalgia for Rome. An old-fashioned city, obviously— it was older by several proud millennia than anything the Americans had built. He thought of the Vatican Garden, the Leonine Wall; he thought of the street sweepers crossing the Giardino della Pigna like an army, leaving the cobbles wet and gleaming in the morning sun…

  A marvel. At least when the wind was not running from the Tiber.

  But this was not an authentic nostalgia, he told himself, merely a reluctance. He did not relish his work here. He was a scholar, not an Inquisitor. He was only truly at home in the company of books. He had written a hagiography of St. Eustace that the Curia Romana declared “blemishless,” and so he had been deemed trustworthy, bright but essentially incorruptible—or at least doctrinaire—and therefore suitable to carry out an act of ticklish ecclesiastical calculation. Perhaps more important, his English was very good. But the questions at hand were questions of means and ends, heresy and power, war and peace… above all, he thought, good and evil. And the dark powers were dauntingly active nowadays.

  The thought was unwelcome. A spasm shot through his belly.

  Sighing, Cardinal Palestrina clasped a handkerchief to his nose and descended into the New World.

  He was met at the docks by a man named Carl Neumann, who drove an automobile.

  The automobile was significant. The Jihadic Wars had interrupted oil traffic through the Persian Gulf; gasoline was prohibitively expensive. The Americans (Palestrina used the archaic term privately) possessed their own oilfields, of course. And their endless border crises with the Aztecs often involved mineral rights. Still, even here, an automobile was a rare indulgence.

  Especially an automobile like this, large and low, immensely heavy—a kind of land boat. Palestrina, impressed in spite of himself, stowed his two small black bags in the auto’s capacious trunk and climbed in beside Neumann. The smell of upholstery was sharp and oppressive.

  Neumann said, “We’re pleased you could make the trip, Your Eminence.”

  Palestrina understood instantly that Neumann was one of those government functionaries who would refer to himself constantly in the plural. Neumann wore a blue tailored suit, a narrow black tie, a fedora. They shook hands; Neumann engaged the engine. Periodically, as they worked their way south through a crush of horse-drawn trucks and cabriolets, Neumann glanced over at Cardinal Palestrina’s black robes. Palestrina supposed this was the Waldensian legacy the Secretariat had warned him about: this mixture of curiosity and disdain. Annoying but, in its own way, useful. It would keep him on guard. It would remind him that he had entered a foreign country.

  Not that he was likely to forget. Within the hour they had won through to a paved road leading south from the city; the forest closed around them. The Great Forest of the New World, Palestrina thought. It was legendary. Savages had lived here once. The automobile sped between endless aisles of trees. The clouds opened to show a gaudy sunset; the night came on quickly. The shadows behind the automobile seemed suddenly very dense, and Palestrina thought about wood sprites, elementals. But those were wholly European terrors—he had read that somewhere. In the New World the dangers were mainly secular.

  Neumann spoke into the silence: “I’ll be your liaison for the duration of your stay here, Your Eminence. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to having me around.”

  He smiled. Palestrina did not.

  Neumann went on, “I can’t help but wonder about your name. Are you related to, uh, the famous Palestrina?”

  “You mean the Palestrina who wrote the Marcellus Mass?” “That’s right.”

  “Are you a historian, Mr. Neumann?”

  “Music lover,” Neumann said modestly. “I collect records. It was the Missa Papae Marcelli that settled the issue of music in the liturgy,
right?” Added, “A terrific piece. Very moving.”

  Cardinal Palestrina disapproved of the secular recording of liturgical music. Though he himself did own one recording, Giovanelli’s Jubilate Deo on a Spanish lacquer disk, a secret love: he played it on his tiny electrical Victrola. “No,” he said primly. “No relation.”

  Neumann seemed disappointed.

  Palestrina said, “I’m really very tired. If you could tell me where you’re taking me—?”

  “I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I assumed you’d been briefed. We’ll be in Washington by midnight. There’s a hotel room for you and I’ll be your guide, your contact, whatever. Then, of course, you’re looking at a daily commute to the Defense Research compound. There are people there you’ll need to meet …”

  “We’ll be driving five more hours?”

  “Afraid so, Your Eminence.”

  God help me. “And then,, in Washington, I’ll be allowed to see him?”

  “See whom, Your Eminence?”

  “This prodigy, of course. This monster you’ve created. The man who walks between worlds.”

  The silence in the automobile was brief but intense. The wheels ground against pavement. The headlamps played over deep grottoes of autumn woodland.

  Neumann said, “Why, I assume so, Your Eminence.”

  2

  Cardinal Palestrina’s personal encounters with evil had been very limited.

  Nevertheless he had a great respect for evil. Evil, this last century, had been what the Americans would call a growth stock. No one seemed exempt from it. Even the Church—he allowed himself a mildly blasphemous thought—even the Church had committed acts that might be called excessive. The Teutonic Inquisition, its oppression of the Jews and the Poles, doctrine wielded for political ends while Rome herself stood mute…

  But that was history. History was replete with oppression. More important was that, lately, Christendom itself seemed threatened. Islam had swept like a brushfire through northern Africa, fomenting revolution against the Dutch, the French, the British; the Russians were battling rebellious Moslems on their southern borders. The Oriental races had evicted the military forces of the Novus Ordo from their Pacific outposts and banned commerce with the West. There were small wars everywhere and larger ones seemed inevitable.

  All the portents were ominous. On Palm Sunday in 1982 the image of the Prince of Darkness had appeared in a cloud of trichlorophenol above San Pietro in Vincoli—hundreds had been hospitalized. This last Christmas, a rain of doves had fallen on the Palazzo Venezia. Sicily had nearly succumbed to the Turkish fleet; the Mediterranean was endangered; troops had been mustered throughout Italy and Spain. The situation was desperate, or why would he have been sent here, eking out this dubious liaison with the Americans on the chance that they might in fact have produced a secret weapon?

  Because, Palestrina thought, for all their naive Protestantism and unrepentant superstition, they are more like us than the Arabs. Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitude-. It went without saying. Also: politics makes strange bedfellows.

  He slept a little in the automobile. When he stepped out into the fierce artificial light of the hotel vestibule he felt permanently bruised. His spine shrieked in pain. Neumann, perversely, was as fresh as ever. He smiled up at Palestrina through the window of the automobile like the framed painting of an especially insolent harlequin. “Can I see you to your room?”

  “I’ll find it myself.”

  “I’ll be by tomorrow to pick you up. I imagine you can use the rest.”

  “Thank you,” Cardinal Palestrina said dryly.

  The hotel—it was called Waterwheel or Waterfall or some such fanciful name—overlooked the Potomac. It was in the Gothic style that had been so popular a half-century ago, a maze of courtyards and false spires. He checked in, rode the lurching elevator to the fifteenth floor, opened the door to a roomful of stale air, and collapsed into the bed. He slept without changing his clothes.

  He woke in the dark hours before morning. He had slept deeply but briefly and he felt as exhausted as ever, dead in spirit. He offered a silent prayer and washed his face in the echoing tiled bathroom.

  Feeling claustrophobic, he opened the curtains. Across the black gap of the Potomac he could see this American city breathing flame from its night foundries, sooty and dark. He pulled up a chair and sat drinking tap water from a hotel glass. The glass had been wrapped in paper: a novelty. So many new things. It occurred to him then that he was old… for the first time in his life, he felt old. As if to underscore the point, his belly clenched in a spasm.

  He was old and he had never been so far from home.

  So far from God.

  Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

  But here, he thought unhappily, I am the Church.

  He glanced at the phosphorescent hands of the bedside clock. It was 4:20 a.m. He felt bereft, spiritually empty. He put the glass on the windowsill; his head nodded forward.

  He blinked, and suddenly it was dawn; the window was full of light and Carl Neumann was hammering at the door.

  3

  “It’s an old project, really,” Neumann said. “It began in the forties. A lot of research came together then. We had the talent—mainly refugees.”

  They drove through the city of Washington toward the Defense Research Institute. Traffic was light and mainly equine. The day had dawned cold and windy, and Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could smell snow in the air. Last winter a freak storm had struck Rome; ice had battered down the hydroelectric lines. The wet, pervasive chill had invaded his office in the Vatican and etched itself in his memory. Now the same unpleasant air poured in the automobile’s ventilator grills and made Palestrina’s knees ache hideously.

  “Heretics,” Palestrina said. Neumann seemed puzzled. “What?” “Heretics. Not refugees.”

  “Maybe both, Your Eminence. In any case, useful men. We had Einstein and Heisenberg on the run from the Inquisition, we had Russians like Lysenko. We had Dirac and Planck. And we supported their work. Some very unique ideas began emerging from that.”

  Palestrina had read profane philosophy; he was familiar with their ideas. “They were deemed heretics for a reason, Mr. Neumann.”

  “But surely the fundamental notions aren’t terribly heretical? I know I’m treading on dangerous ground here”—his smile was fixed—“but the duality of nature, the light and dark creative forces, those are things your order recognizes, are they not?”

  “Please don’t lecture me on theology.” To Neumann’s chastened expression he added, more gently, “We also recognize a moral order.”

  “But it’s not new—the idea of looking at nature objectively.”

  “Hardly. Descartes was hanged for it.”

  “But it’s useful.”

  “Is that what matters?”

  Neumann shrugged. “I’m not equipped to judge.”

  “God bids us all judge, Mr. Neumann.”

  “If you say so, Your Eminence.”

  The town was full of flags. The flag of the Novus Ordo was everywhere, the black pyramid with that single leering eye set in a field of red and white bars. Between the flags and Neumann’s cheerful amorality, Cardinal Palestrina began to understand Europe’s cherished horror of Americans: they feared nothing. Europe’s bastard offspring, a nation of Waldensians and Calvinists and Freemasons and worse. A chaos of perverse beliefs, which they had the temerity to call freedom of religion. Maybe there was a secret weapon. Anything was possible in such a climate. Maybe the rumors were true.

  “We gave these people a free hand,” Neumann said. “We gave them the tools they wanted. There was criticism from certain sectors, of course. I mean, we’re talking about kabalistic magic, trafficking with elementals, alchemy. And the secrecy was a strain; they fought among themselves. But they were brilliant men, and they shared this need to understand certain things—stars, atoms, the plenum itself.”

  “Theory,” Palestrina said, wishing he could dismiss it as easily
as that.

  “They predicted,” Neumann went on blithely, “that there was not a single plenum but many—worlds inside of worlds, if you can compass that, all divided by units of probability, which Planck called quanta. The theory predicted that it might be within the power of the human mind to penetrate those barriers.”

  Cardinal Palestrina wanted to say that this was nonsense, chimerical, a snare and a delusion. But of course it was not nonsense, or he wouldn’t be here… Neumann wouldn’t be telling him this. The Curia had some covert knowledge of the so-called Plenum Project; Palestrina understood that Neumann was being more or less open with him.

  “I admired those men,” Neumann said. “They were dedicated, they were serious. They were working at a very high level. Mind you, they didn’t pay much attention to the practical applications. An army, say, or even one man, an assassin, who could pretty much move through walls, pass through any barrier …it took them by surprise that anybody might be interested in that. Some of them were appalled when we cast the finding spells, when we sequestered civilians who showed signs of latency. Well, there is a moral question, I’m the first to admit it. But rough measures for rough times. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, right, Your Eminence?”

  Palestrina felt ill.

  Neumann said, “The Institute’s just around the corner.”

  They were deep in the government quarter now, vast stone structures crowding against the cobbled streets, a canyon of sooty architraves decorated with didactic friezes of the Virtues, of Capital and Labor striding hand in hand toward the ostensible future. The factories by the Potomac contributed a pall of oily coal smoke; on a bad day, Neumann had said, you couldn’t tell noon from midnight.

  But the Defense Research Institute was the most appalling of any of these structures. The sight of it made the day seem even colder. There was nothing here of the spirituality of the Vatican, an architecture striving toward God; nothing prayerlike in these black stone bastions, a fence of spikes rising automatonlike as the automobile approached. They drove beneath a pillared arch, the eye-and-pyramid motif engraved in the sooty keystone, and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.