Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The building was immense, prisonlike. It had its own powerhouse and commissary, Neumann said, its own shops and laundry. They passed through a second stone portcullis and Neumann identified himself to a guard. The guard presented a plastic tag for Palestrina to wear on his robe; his name was embossed on it. “We’ll need a photograph of you,” Neumann said, “but this will do for now.”

  Palestrina hated the tag, hated the association of himself with this place. The inner buildings loomed very large now and some of the windows were barred. He imagined he could hear the screams of the people the Institute had, in Neumann’s ugly euphemism, “sequestered.” But, he thought, surely all that is past?

  “We had some trouble in the forties,” Neumann admitted. “Congressional investigations, fanatics trying to close us down. It was a turbulent decade. That’s over now, thank God. But it put our work back by at least a dozen years… and it allowed some of the lapses you may have heard about.”

  “The escape,” Palestrina said. “The people who broke out.”

  “I don’t like to use unnecessarily melodramatic language.”

  Neumann parked the car in a space marked private—reserved. They climbed out, dashed through the cold to an immense iron door which Neumann opened with a key. The hallway inside was sterile with the light of aging fluorescent tubes; the doors were all painted salmon pink and numbered.

  Neumann seemed amused by Palestrina’s disorientation. “Follow me, Your Eminence.”

  “Where are we going?” Palestrina’s reluctance was an imperative now, a physical resistance.

  “My office,” Neumann said. “Unless you want the grand tour right away?”

  “I should speak to someone. Someone with rank… someone in charge.”

  That smile.

  “You’re looking at him,” Neumann said.

  Neumann said he’d been at the Institute for almost thirty years now, that his fortunes had fallen and risen with the Plenum Project, that he had been coordinating it independently for the last five years. “I’m not a scientist, mind you. But as far as operations are concerned, goal-setting, management, I have pretty much a free hand.”

  Neumann’s office was sere, stony, and blank. Palestrina said, “I want to see this creature you’ve created.”

  “You make him sound like one of our homunculi.”

  “There are homunculi working as servants at the Vatican Library, Mr. Neumann. I assure you I wouldn’t speak of them in the same tone.”

  At last—Cardinal Palestrina considered it a kind of personal triumph—Neumann’s smile faded. “I hate to see you go into this with a negative attitude.”

  “I don’t mean to insult your work—”

  “Because, you know, the implications are tremendous. Even the Curia has acknowledged that. Frankly, it seemed like an extremely generous thing for the State Department to invite you here. We don’t normally share this sort of material even with allies.”

  Palestrina bowed his head. “The stakes are considerable.”

  “The oil supply,” Neumann said.

  “I was thinking of the survival of Christendom.”

  Neumann’s smile flickered faintly. “That, too.”

  “Show me the man,” Palestrina said.

  “Isn’t that a little premature?”

  “I know the history of this place. Do I really have to admire the architecture?” He leaned forward. “The Vatican acknowledges your nation’s generosity. Nevertheless, a moral issue persists. That’s why I’m here.”

  “A moral issue,” Neumann said blankly.

  “Means and ends.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Palestrina was not surprised. “Is he here?”

  “Yes, he’s in the building, but—”

  “Then take me to him, please.”

  Neumann hesitated, annoyed, Palestrina thought, at being forced off his schedule. Finally he shrugged. “I guess there’s nothing to lose.”

  4

  The room was a gray stone chamber. Neumann agreed to wait outside.

  Palestrina understood that, in a sense, he was at Neumann’s mercy. He could not have found his own way here; he doubted he could find his way back out. The Defense Research Institute was literally a maze, corridors turning back on themselves or twining into blank stone walls. The building housed not only Neumann’s Plenum Project but a dozen other deeply shrouded efforts: biochemical warfare, sorcels of invisibility, commerce with the dead. Every level in the bureaucratic hierarchy had its own fragmentary map of the building. The rumor, Neumann said, was that no single comprehensive map existed; no single architect had overseen the project and no living man understood the building as a whole. Neumann offered this as a legend, for its quaintness; Cardinal Palestrina found it only too easy to believe.

  He entered the gray room from one of its two doors, sat down in one of its two chairs. Momentarily, the man he had come to speak to entered.

  Only a man, Palestrina thought.

  The man sat opposite him, silently, hands folded in his lap.

  How ordinary he looked. A shabby old man in a shabby gray suit, a gray slouch hat on his head. In Rome, Palestrina thought, he would have attracted no attention. He would have been taken for one of the less successful bourgeoisie, an alcoholic shopkeeper or a retired subaltern from the cavernous bureaucracy of the Tribunals. Palestrina, scanning for omens of bad faith, found nothing more sinister here than a certain shiftiness about the man’s eyes. But his own gaze was hardly fixed. The temptation to look away—somehow, to look away from oneself—-was nearly overwhelming.

  He said, “Do you have a name?”

  “ Walker,” said the man in the gray suit.

  The voice was odd: resonant but somehow toneless.

  “Walker—?”

  “Walker, stalker, hunter, finder.” His grin was vulpine. ” Walker is my family name.”

  Palestrina said, “Did you know your parents?”

  “No, sir. I was creched here.”

  Then it was true, Palestrina thought, what the Secretariat had told him before he left, what Neumann had implied. Men and women had been bred like cattle in this building. Surgical interventions: female ova plucked from living tissue and fertilized in vitro. Clonings practiced in sterile laboratories under fertility spells. The thought of it sickened him.

  Walker added, “But I know who you are… you’re the Papist.”

  “They call me that?”

  “No one much talks to me. But I hear them say things.”

  “Then, do you understand why I’m here?” “Something to do with war.” “Something to do, I profoundly hope, with peace.”

  Walker shrugged, as if to say, It’s all the same to me. He said, “You’re a judge.”

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking. Do you know what it is I have to judge?”

  “Me,” Walker said. The grin was persistent, childlike in a horrible way.

  “Your usefulness,” Palestrina said. “Whether you can help us, whether what you’re doing can help us, in Europe.”

  “What I’m good for,” Walker interpreted.

  No, Palestrina thought. Not what you’re good for, but whether you’re good. Or worse: whether you are a purchase our moral budget can afford.

  But he said, “In a way.”

  “Oh, I’m not good for much. They made me that way.” He tapped his head. “But I can do a few tricks.” “Tell me about it.”

  “Spells. Binding and finding. It’s slow work but I’m talented at it. And I can do the other thing, I guess you know about that.”

  “Traveling between worlds,” Palestrina said. It still strained credulity. But here, in this room, this building…

  “Across the plenum,” Walker said, “yes.” “Could you do it now—if you wanted to?” “Yes.”

  “You could go”—Palestrina held out his hands palms up—“anywhere?”

  “Only certain places,” Walker said. “What places?” “Where they’ve been.” The heart of the matter.
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  “My understanding,” Cardinal Palestrina said, “is that you were a family.”

  “A long time ago,” Walker said, and a shadow seemed to cross his face: not an emotion, Palestrina thought, so much as the shade of an emotion.

  He said, “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “They told me to answer your questions.”

  “Do you have to do what the people here tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, then,” Cardinal Palestrina said.

  Walker closed his eyes and seemed to regard the memory directly.

  “There were three of us,” he said. “We were the best they could make. We had the talent. Very strongly. So they closed us in, of course… caged us with sorcels and spells. And it worked for a time.”

  He knitted his hands in his lap. Palestrina could not look away as the fingers laced and unlaced: old, bony fingers.

  “They gave us one name apiece. Walker and Julia and William. We all had different parents, or no parents, but we used to think of ourselves as brothers and sister. William was the oldest. I admired him a lot. He was always surprising the doctors and nurses, doing things they didn’t think he could do. I think William carried the whole plenum around inside him: he was that big, that powerful. He was like a god.”

  Walker’s eyes shone with ancient feeling.

  Cardinal Palestrina remained silent.

  “Julia was very beautiful. Tell you the truth, Father, I felt kind of lost between them. William was big and powerful, Julia was beautiful and smart. Me, I was just Walker. Ordinary Walker. Oh, I could do the tricks, too. But not like they could. But that was all right… we had each other.”

  “Until they left,” Palestrina said gently.

  Walker’s expression hardened. “They talked about it sometimes. I thought it was bad. A mistake. No good could come of it. But they included me. I appreciated that. ‘They can’t hold us,’ William used to say. ‘Not all their spells can keep us here.’ And in the end, you know, he was right.”

  “But you stayed behind,” Palestrina pressed.

  “I couldn’t go! Or I didn’t want to go. Or I wasn’t strong enough to go…”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember them begging me. We were all older then. By then I knew that Julia and William loved each other, that they loved me but in a different way. A lesser way. So we battered down the sorcels and we were going to go where no one could find us, worlds and worlds away from this place. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t and finally I told them to go while there was still time, just go and leave me… and they did…”

  “They left you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You resented that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why don’t you remember?”

  “Because the proctors took me. They took me to the surgeons.” He regarded Palestrina with his head cocked, an expression that was at once sly and pathetic. He said, “They operated on me.”

  Cardinal Palestrina experienced a twinge of abhorrence. “Operated—?”

  Walker lifted his battered gray hat.

  The scar was prominent, all these years later. It ran in a ragged circle from the tip of Walker’s left ear past the orbit of his eye socket and up into the hairline. Walker traced it with his finger. “They opened up my skull,” he said. “They took things out.”

  “Things,” Palestrina whispered.

  “Love and hate. Caring and not caring.”

  “And left—?”

  “Obedience. Loyalty. They call it loyalty.”

  “My God… and you don’t despise them for it?”

  Shockingly, Walker smiled. “I don’t think I can.”

  No, Cardinal Palestrina thought. No, this is too much: too much cruelty, too much obscenity. It recalled a kind of torture the Tribunals had not practiced for centuries.

  They had cauterized a part of this man’s soul, Palestrina thought… and how much could be murdered of conscience or outrage before a man was, essentially, dead?

  So perhaps he was talking to a dead man.

  The thought was chilling and unwelcome.

  “You followed them,” Palestrina said. “That’s what you were trained for.”

  “Followed them for years.” Again that distant look, Walker’s old eyes gone diffuse. “It’s hard work, you know. But I can smell them out. They leave trails.”

  “Julia and William? You found them?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Brought them back?”

  “Killed them.”

  Cardinal Palestrina blinked.

  Walker said, “It was unavoidable.”

  His face was bland, affectless, smiling. Palestrina thought, He is dead. “But then it’s over, surely? Your work is finished… the project is finished?”

  “There were children,” Walker said.

  “I see… and they have the power?”

  “They have it strongly. More strongly than they know.”

  “You’ve hunted them?”

  “I’ve been close to them. Often! But it’s not as easy as all that, bringing them back. These arms won’t hold them. A cage won’t hold them. That’s the paradox! It’s a lifework. Spells and geases are the only weapons we have. And they work less well far along across the worlds. But we’re very close now.” He bent toward Cardinal Palestrina; his breath was sour. “They’ve learned things in this building since I was young.”

  “I’m sure they have,” Palestrina said faintly.

  “And there’s one other,” Walker said. “Child of a child. Hybrid, but the genotype is true. He’s what we worked for all these years. We’ll bring him back. I’ll bring him back. And he can do what you want, you know. He’s powerful enough. A few adjustments—” Walker tapped the pale line of his scar. “He’ll do what you tell him. Lead armies against the Holy Land if that’s what you want. Call up forces across the plenum. Armies that would terrify a god, weapons that would devastate a city. It’s all out there.” Walker showed his teeth again. “Would that suit you? Is that what you’re after?”

  And Cardinal Palestrina thought, It might save us.

  Or damn us.

  He moistened his lips. A cramp seized his belly; it was all he could do to keep from crying out. He drew a breath and said, “You can do that—you can bring him here?”

  “Oh yes.” Walker put his hands in his pockets, reclined happily against the chair back. “This time,” he said, “we have help.”

  Part Two

  HEARTLAND

  Chapter Eight

  They pulled in late Wednesday afternoon at a motel called the Stark Motor Inn somewhere west of Barstow.

  Stark it was indeed, Karen thought. There was no shade but the meager shadow cast by a juniper rooted in the gravel courtyard; the tiny swimming pool out back stood pure and empty as a turquoise chip in the brown vastness of the desert. The room smelled of false lilac and air conditioning.

  She reminded herself that they were back home now. Not home in the very specific sense—this desert was surely as exotic a place as she had ever been—but in a world where the verities were familiar: John F. Kennedy dead all those years ago, handguns for sale in the highway malls, no gentle bohemian ocean towns for people like her sister. The real world.

  Home—the other kind of home—was still a long way off.

  Michael unpacked his bathing suit and went out through the searing afternoon light to the pool. “Dibs on the shower,” Laura said. Laura had driven all the way from L.A. and looked weary. From Los Angeles, Karen thought, and across a canyon of time. They had passed between worlds out on the empty highway, amid the scrub brush and the dust devils. Miracles and murders and hotels in the desert.

  She read Time magazine while Laura showered. The news was as dour as it had ever been. AIDS was on the increase; there was trouble again in the Philippines. Laura emerged finally from the tiled cavern of the bathroom, toweling her hair. She had thrown on an old flower-print shift; the clot
h adhered to the damp angles of her body and Karen was momentarily jealous of her sister’s youth, preserved somehow while her own had slipped mysteriously away. Laura had never married. Laura was a single woman. While I, Karen thought, am that very different thing: a single mother.

  Laura said, “They don’t know we’re coming.” Mama and Daddy, she meant. “No,” Karen agreed.

  “We should call them.” “We?”

  Laura admitted, “I don’t want to be the one.” “I guess you haven’t talked to them all that much.”

  “I guess I haven’t talked to them for years. I’m the wayward daughter, right? Bad seed. Anyway,” she said, “they’ll take it better from you.”

  But Karen had never liked telephones. She disliked the sounds they made, the click and hum of fragmentary dialogues, foreign voices holding foreign conversations. Long distance was the worst. There was something so lonely about a long-distance call: the extra numbers, like mileage, tokens of separation. She punched out the area code tentatively. Michael was still swimming, out there in the blistering light.

  In truth, Karen had not been very good about phoning home either. She called every couple of months, sometimes less. And on holidays. But mostly she tried to call weekday afternoons, when the rates were higher but when Daddy was likely to be at work or out drinking. It was a long time since she’d spoken directly to her father. Years, she wondered, like Laura? Yes, maybe: maybe that long.

  She imagined the phone ringing at the house in Polger Valley. The family had moved there the year after Karen went off to college, but she remembered it clearly. The phone was in the parlor. Fat textured yellow sofa, telephone on the walnut end table. Sunlight, maybe, sifting in through dust motes and the glacial ticking of clocks. Karen understood intuitively that none of this would have changed, that the Polger Valley house had become a kind of fortress for her parents, that they would live there until they died.