The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Camwar shook his head. "We are to be needed, but I'm not sure for what."

  "You say 'we.' How many of you will there be?"

  Camwar frowned, as though in deep thought. "A book exists, the Book of Bertral. All of us are in it. Fire came first. Then the two who shape the world. Then the three keepers of souls, and the four fosterers of life, and after them, the five, of whom I am one. Of the five, I was called first, for my labors will be great. The six who vary and distinguish life come last in the book, but some of them may already be at work." His voice trailed away into silence for a moment before he turned to the High Priest, saying, "You asked for wisdom? Hear these words. Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality."

  In the middle of that night, Camwar woke in his luxurious palace room, knowing a ship had sailed up the river as far as it could and was anchored there, awaiting him. He rose and dressed himself, taking with him the tools and musical instruments that had been fetched from his shop. Though they made a heavy load, they seemed unburdensome.

  At the river, he was guided dowstream to the shadow-wrapped ship by whispers and nudges, as though he had a good friend at his ear. A small boat put out from the ship and came to the riverbank to pick him up. The hooded ones bowed very low before the sign, and gestured him aboard.

  "Are there others?" he asked.

  The master of the ship replied, saying, "You are first of the five. Of the six, who will not be involved in the great battle, Befum, Pierees, Falasti, and Ushel have long been awake and at their labors; Geshlin will soon arise; Tchandbur has been identified. The rest, like you, live in lands far from the place of battle. They, like you, will be fetched to the battleground, Shining One."

  "I would prefer it if you called me Camwar," he said, rubbing the sign on his forehead, which by now was very pale. "I am myself, though from moment to moment something else seems to be looking on. Whatever will be required of me, however, can be best done if I remember who I am."

  The ship sailed away, leaving the town behind it, and in that town the High Priest went to bed in a mood halfway between humiliation and sorrow. He was grieving over his own ignorance and the fact that his people had no way of finding out what was happening. They had come to this land in ships! Once they had had ships! Their city was named after people who built ships! How could they know the world, without ships?

  He woke in the morning remembering Camwar's words of wisdom and determined upon a crusade. He began with that day's exhortation in the Temple. "We must be able to find out what really is," he said. "It is not enough merely to tell stories about what exists. We must go out into the world again. The sign has come. Therefore, build ships!"

  By the time the people had been organized and begun work, building the things they would need to build the things they would need to build ships, they wondered why they had not done this centuries ago. It was exciting! It was remarkable! It was fun! And so the sign came and went and yet remained, while its coming set the people of Everday stoking the furnaces of the future.

  5

  the latimer book

  The year after Roger died, Dismé's father fell ill. Call-Her-Mother was worried about him. She had little lines on her forehead when she looked at him, and she got cross at Rashel, which she almost never did.

  "Don't forget the book," Father whispered to Dismé the night after he got back from seeing the doctor. He was lying on the couch in the living room.

  "I won't," she promised him, worriedly. "But you're all right, Father. The medicine will fix whatever it is!"

  He thought about this gravely for quite some time, moving his head restlessly on his pillow. "Yes," he said at last. "But remember the book anyhow."

  She wanted to talk about the book, but some friends arrived just then, to visit her father.

  "You ought to go to Hold, Val," one of his friends told him. "There's a doctor there, fellow named Jens Ladislav. Seems to know more about doctoring than the rest of them put together."

  "I'll be all right," Father said, squeezing Dismé's hand.

  When the friends left, Gayla said, "You should go to Hold, Val. The doctor here in Apocanew isn't helping you."

  "I'm better," he said, testily. "I'm much better. I think my stomach rebelled against the seasoning Cora uses when she cooks. Turnaway food is more highly spiced than our family is used to, that's all. I'm sure this was just a passing thing."

  And it seemed that it was, for Father did feel better. In a few days, he got up and went back to his work at the Office of Textual Approval, Department of Materials, Division of Education. He seemed so well recovered that it shocked them all when not long after, in the middle of the night, he became very ill indeed. His cries woke everyone. The doctor was called, and Father was taken away to the Medical Center. Dismé wanted to go visit him, but Call-Her-Mother said to wait until he was better, even though she and Rashel went to the Center the next day.

  When they told her she couldn't go, Dismé felt the beast that lived inside her raise its head and sniff the air. The beast's name was Roarer. He was a strange unaccountable animal, and he was a secret, but sometimes when she was very angry he came out of his den. Father was hers, not Rashel's! They had no right to keep her from visiting him! She would get even with them by, by...

  Roarer growled softly, cautioning her, reminding her of True Mother's words. Don't break out in anger. Get even some other way. Well then, what would be a secret pleasure she could have they wouldn't know about? Finding Father's book, of course. Finding it and hiding it in a place they'd never think to look, and doing it before they got back.

  She began in the attics and searched frantically throughout the entire house, looking in all the old places plus other places she'd never dared get into before. Nothing. She sat fuming in the living room, her nails making small ragged moons in the palms of her hands. Where else was there? She'd been through the whole house except for the bottle room.

  The thought resonated. She had never looked in the bottle room! She never went into the bottle room; she only passed it as quickly as possible. She hated the bottle room, which meant the bottle room would be the perfect place to hide something she wasn't supposed to find!

  Half weeping over her own stupidity, she took a bit of her cheek between her teeth and bit down on it to keep her from yelping or making some other untoward noise while she lighted a candle and carried it inside the dark space, full of whispering and gurgling sounds like voices she couldn't quite hear. To drown them out, she hummed to herself, as she crawled about the room and thrust her broomstick into every corner under the bottle racks. Wonder of wonders, she found it! They—or she—hadn't even bothered to hide it very well. They—or she—had wrapped it in an old towel and stuffed it down behind one of the older bottle racks, one that dated back five or six generations.

  As soon as she made sure it was the right book, she went into her father's library and found another one the same size and color. Except for the worn name, it could have been the same book that she wrapped in the same old towel and replaced precisely in the place she had found it. Then she fled to her tiny corner room where she had already prepared a hideaway by loosening the nails in one of the boards covering the back of her closet. When she pulled all the nails out but one, the board could be pivoted aside to disclose a tiny attic under the corner of the porch roof. She took her mother's shawl, the one that had been shrunken into kerchief size, wrapped it around the book and placed the bundle inside.

  When the closet board was pulled back into place with the nails reinserted in their holes, the hiding place might as well not have existed. A row of hooks along the back of the closet held her cloak and her dresses, and no one would think of there being space behind them, not in a million years. She couldn't wait for Father to come home so she could tell him!

  Call-Her-Mother came home first, saying Father would be home within a day or so. The next d
ay, people arrived who tramped heavily through the hallway downstairs, back and forth to the bottle room. Dismé, tears running unheeded down her face, heard the clinkering sounds of tools, the mutter of voices. Outside her window a wagon was parked, and on the side was painted: Department of Health, Division of Death Prevention, Office of Bottle Maintenance.

  "There he is," said a deep male voice from downstairs. "Home again."

  Rashel and Call-Her-Mother went downstairs to see the visitors out. Dismé washed her face and froze it into her now usual expression of nothing.

  "Now you can visit your father," Call-Her-Mother said to Dismé in a kindly though far-away voice, as if she were thinking about something else.

  Rashel grinned, and Dismé could read her mind. Rashel thought Dismé would run to the bottle room, expecting to find her father there. Her father wouldn't be there. There would be a bottle with his name on it, but that was all. She didn't cry. She didn't scream or yell or cry; she just turned and went up to her room.

  "I guess she doesn't care about him much," said Rashel.

  Dismé heard the words but refused to react to them. She would not visit Father. She knew he would hate that, and besides, she had a half-formed intention regarding the bottle room, a thing she meant to do without any notion of how to go about it yet. She needed to find out more about many things before she did anything at all. All she could do now was watch them, and wait, and hope that something would happen to break the sad monotony.

  Something did a few days later when Call-Her-Mother and Rashel left the house quite early in the morning. They didn't return until late in the evening. Dismé heard the horses and ran to her usual hiding place. She peeked out to see Call-Her-Mother half carrying Rashel into the house. Rashel's face was ashen where it wasn't bloody. Her eyes were blank. There was blood on her clothes, and she dripped blood as she walked. She looked half-dead. Dismé stepped back to be completely hidden as Call-Her-Mother dragged Rashel up the stairs.

  "Come on, Rashel. Another step."

  A whisper full of horror and pain. "I can't. I can't. Not after what he did ... to me."

  "Yes you can, and will. You brought this on yourself, now cope with it."

  "Don't tell ... her..."

  "Dismé? Of course not. What business is it of hers. I think you've learned where your responsibility lies regarding Dismé. At least, I hope you've learned it. If you haven't, we won't be living here long."

  A moan. "... didn't know we were watching all the damned La-timers..."

  "Now, another few steps, and you can go to bed."

  The staggering, stumbling went off down the hall to Rashel's room.

  When they were silent behind the closed door, Dismé sneaked back to her room without making a whisper of sound. She had thought Rashel couldn't be hurt by anything, but Rashel had been hurt and her mother either couldn't or didn't protect her. Who did it? Who or what was it that Rashel feared? For the moment it was enough to know that Rashel feared something. From its lair, Roarer also rejoiced, putting out a fiery tongue to lick her heart.

  Each night she peeked into the hidden cubby before she slept, to see that the book of Nell Latimer was there, where it belonged, where it was soon joined by one of the old dictionaries from Father's office, a book so fragile that one had to hold one's breath while turning the pages. When both Rashel and Cora were away, she took the book out of hiding and read it, making a list of words to look up in the old dictionary, slowly, carefully, writing each definition down, sometimes only after looking up a dozen other words. The words weren't that different, but the spelling was. Sometimes she had to guess. What was an observatory? What was 6:30 p.m. What was conscientious? Eventually she figured out conscientious was the same as Regimic, and observatory was some kind of place to look at the stars, and 6:30 p.m. was a way to say day-endish.

  The first page took her forever to read. The second one came more quickly. Then she had read five, ten, and finally, all, still without knowing whether the story they told was true.

  6

  nell latimer's book

  I sent Neils a message about Selma's discovery, which he didn't acknowledge, and since he was due back in two or three days and I had time, I logged some eyetime to verify what Selma had shown me, mentioning it in passing to a few close associates.

  No one has been able to see anything yet. The thing is a dark body in dark space, visible only as a shadow. Neils returned eventually, I dumped the whole thing in his lap, and he in turn involved some colleagues around the world, and I heard nothing more until this morning when he told us the thing is not huge and far away but smaller and inside the orbit of Uranus. It is now reflecting a little light; it will indeed cross earth's orbit; and it may do so at an inopportune time, i.e. when that point is occupied by the human race.

  However, said Neils, over our incipient panic, since the thing will be influenced by the gravitational pull of Saturn, which it will almost certainly encounter closely, or by Jupiter, which is even more likely, it's difficult to say just where it's going to end up. He hemmed and hawed and we pressed the matter until he confessed that if it hit us, even glancingly, its apparent size indicated the damage would be ... ah ... possibly terminal. Of life, that is. He would only say apparent size, because no one knows how big the thing actually is.

  We were all sworn to secrecy. Not enough was known to get the citizenry into an uproar. We all agreed to this, even those of us with families. Most people face their own deaths as inevitable. I understand that even the death of loved ones can be grieved through. But everybody? The whole human race, every thought, every passion, every achievement wiped away? Gone? That thought creates a deep shuddery feeling, like swallowing an earthquake.

  These notes are turning out to be more about me than about Selma, even though I'm only writing in it when there's something astronomical to report. It's been several months since the entry above, after which I argued with myself for almost a week before deciding that if the situation is utterly terminal, nothing I do will make any difference. If we get hit not quite that hard, however, I may be able to save our family without breaking the silence we've sworn to keep. I can't tell the truth but I can tell a plausible lie, and I do have a separate savings account with enough money in it to build a shelter.

  So I babbled at Jerry while I was peeling potatoes: "A meteor shower. Something extraordinary. I'm going to build us a shelter, Jer."

  "Nell, I keep telling you, if you'd just put your trust in..."

  "Shh," I said, mock angry. "I'm not going to ask God to protect us when we're able to protect ourselves. When you started getting religious, we agreed not to fight about it. You can pray away all the meteorites in the universe and I won't mind a bit, but I'm going to build us a shelter."

  When the two of us met and courted and married, we were fellow scientists. We stayed fellow scientists for five or six years, but sometime along in there, back maybe four or five years, Jerry gave up on science. I honestly don't know whether he got religion first and gave up science out of religious conviction, or his career disappointment made him use religion as an excuse. Back then I was gaining a respectable reputation as a solid, workaday hack, who had made several small discoveries and who had added some to the knowledge store of the human race by slogging away at it. That was fine by me. I've never had any huge aspirations, I just like astronomy.

  Jerry, however, has ... had big ambitions. The Nobel Prize, at least. Or some cosmological theorem named after him. He didn't like slogging, preferring innovative and highly flamboyant theorizing on the basis of very little, all of which tended to raise the hackles both of his colleagues who played by the rules and of the big names in cosmology who had totally invested themselves in other points of view. I've always known Jerry was egocentric, but he kept his ego mostly under wraps at home. Also, he has ... had a lovely dry humor and I thought we were okay. I was busy, and I liked my work. He was busy teaching and writing and doing what cosmologists do, causing an occasional flurry but becoming no
more an immortal in his field than I am in mine.

  Being an immortal doesn't matter to me. If one looks out into the universe and perceives what true immortality would mean in terms of time and space, it takes monstrous hubris to even conceive of personal immortality, much less desire it. However, once Jerry turned religious it became clear that Jerry really wanted to be immortal, one way or the other, and if science wouldn't do it for him, religion might.

  Personal beliefs are unarguable, even if the other side has all the facts. Jerry wasn't interested in facts, so we didn't discuss his belief in a near future apocalypse. I just went ahead and had the shelter built: reinforced concrete, buried under twelve feet of dirt with an escape hatch. I ordered dehydrated food enough for a year. In a separate pit there's a fuel tank for lanterns and stove, tied in with flexible connector lines, disconnected until time of use. There's an air filtration system run by pumping a bicycle and a water tank on heavy springs that can sway any which way without breaking. Also, in a survivalist catalogue I found a sort of hollow pipe with a folding windmill inside that can be pushed up into the wind and connected to a generator. There are bunks for four: one for Michy, who's five, and one for Tony, who's three, one for Jerry, one for Nell.

  During the construction, Jerry went around with his above-it-all smile firmly fixed on his face. His actions were as affectionate and sweet toward me as always, though they didn't feel right. The only actual criticism I got was a kind of teasing: "The wrath of God Almighty approaches, and she wants to build a shelter?"

  Keeping the evasions to a minimum, I usually said something like, "As a parent, it makes me feel better to have it, that's all."

  "Why no solar panels?" he asked, grinning at my bicycle power source.

  "Meteors can set fires and kick up dust. There might not be any sunshine for a while," I murmured. "Besides, whoever's in here will need some exercise."