The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  There's some confusion going on ... Something on the TV. I'm going to look. Oh, Lord, it's a hash-up. Some amateur astronomer called the media, some guy who hadn't given up his scope or who's built a new one. They're all reporting it, no response from the observatories, huge, coming fast... I'm turning off for a minute.

  "Good lord, the moon moved. Did you see that? The moon moved, the thing actually moved the moon, it jerked backwards in its orbit, look at this thing. It's in two pieces. It's split. There's two parts of it. One looks like it's coming faster than the rest of it..."

  Those words were a famous news anchor, just before someone turned the TV off. So I'm outside, looking up. There's time, still ... There it is, quite visible ... I can smell that purple smell, dense smoke rolling up from an endless brushfire of prayer. No. It went away. That smell is gone, completely. I smell something else, cedar? No, no. Sandalwood! And roses, like my grandmother's garden. Where is that coming from. And I hear...

  There's a damned voice in my head. It's the voice that carries the smell. That doesn't make sense. It says, "Come to me quickly, with all your children." Now what the hell? over and over. "Quickly with all your children." Who's it talking to?

  I shake my head to get it out of my nose, my ears, but it just hangs there. Am I smelling a sound or hearing a smell? Or maybe both hearing and smelling something I can see! I don't know. I'm going back inside to tell Alan.

  Alan's busy. I ended up not telling anyone. The last few of us are being put in the coffins ... They just gave me a sedative, to keep me calm...

  I'm still sitting here, recording...

  "You want to give me that recorder, Nell?"

  "Take the book. Take the recorder after they put me out. Gimme a hug, Alan, for old time's sake."

  He laughed and cried, and so did I. Auld lang syne. The techs are headed in this direction to connect me up. Except for me and Alan and his three shift mates, who won't be put to sleep for four more years, the coffins have been filled in order of waking, and I am the last one. Only a few hours left before the Bitch, the event, the occurrence. The happening.

  And here I go. Stretched out in the sterile pod with a needle in the arm, the recorder still at my lips. Some of us have teddy bears or pictures of our families. Mine's in my locker. Thank whoever I'll be asleep before the cold. Look at the techs, so sober. Well, hell, why wouldn't they be. The Bitch will be here in a few hours, but they won't be down here when she comes. Nobody much will be down here. Just us. The selected ones, chosen because of stuff we know, or think we know, and the fact that we're young enough to have forty years left, in ten four-year chunks.

  Goodbye, Jerry. You're in as safe a place as anyone could be. Goodbye, Jerry I used to love.

  Goodbye Michelle, Tony. Mommy's going bye-bye. They're coming to lower the lid. I have to put this away. My throat is full of tears. Here's Alan again.

  "Nell?"

  "Ummmmm?"

  "Sleep well."

  20

  sorcery

  Sometimes after class, Dismé sneaked into the research wing of the museum, hid herself, and listened to sorcerous talk.

  "At the College of Sorcery, Bice Dufor said the parchment or paper a spell is written on can be dangerous in and of itself."

  "Why would the one who wrote it make it dangerous?"

  "The one who writes it wants power over the one who uses it, and the more the magician uses it, the more power the original sorcerer has over him."

  "If that's true, you wouldn't want to use someone else's spell."

  "Bice says it's all right if you know what you're doing."

  Faience workers wore long white coats, white wraps covering their hair, and tight goatskin gloves and visors so none of their skin or hair could fall on magical artifacts that might be what they called potentiated by contact. People had been mysteriously burned or crushed or infected with terrible diseases from touching ancient things the wrong way. The search for sorcery would have been given up long ago if it weren't for the rare discoveries that proved magic really worked.

  Dismé had watched from a shadowed balcony when Bice Dufor, Warden of the College of Sorcery, delivered a guest lecture on sorcel-sticks. "This is a fire spell," he began, fussily laying out materials upon the altar. "First, the magician lays the kindling. Mine is here, in this cresset, splints of wood over shavings. The implementor must be dressed as I am, in a cotton or woolen robe unmixed, with hair combed out and feet bare. Mixed fabrics and tangled hair have a tendency to 'knot' or depotentiate enchantments, and shoes separate one from the foundation of power.

  "This particular kind of sorcery is called contagious magic, which means it catches its impetus from the intention of the 'assembly,' the materials we assemble around it, for every material and artifact conveys at least one intention, and for things with multiple intentions, the assembly serves to identify the particular intention that is meant. Since we wish to start fire, we use fire-making implements. A fire-drill, flint and steel, and a lens of glass," and he took one of these rare items from its protective covering, "sometimes called a burning glass. We also need one or two sorcel-sticks." He held them in his hand while the researchers gathered closely around. "They are made of ordinary wood, with clay heads colored red to signify power and no doubt also containing some sorcerous material we have not yet identified. We get them from non-demonic peddlers, who tell us they mine them from the ruins of a great old city east of here.

  "Now, we have on hand some transfer fuel for the fire, a bit of soft cloth or shavings. We take a sorcel-stick and touch it to each of the fire-making implements in order that it be infected with the intention of fire before laying it on a flat surface. The spell is as follows: 'Angel of Fire, hear me! EEG-nis EEG-nis EEG-nis FAH-tyu-us FAH-tyu-us FAH-tyu-us'"

  Warden Dufor then struck the sorcel-stick with the arrowhead. It blazed up, and all the students gasped in astonishment, as he transferred the blaze to the kindling, remarking, "Sometimes you have to give the fire your breath to get it going—that's contagious magic also—and with hair long and loose, you risk being burned unless you're careful."

  A student asked, "Warden, wouldn't it be quicker just to use the flint and steel? Why go to all that trouble?"

  The warden snorted. "Well we obviously don't go to all that trouble. We don't use magic for simple things like this. My showing you this enchantment is like teaching the alphabet to a toddler. He must know the individual letters before he can learn to read. When The Art is totally rediscovered, our population will be ready to use it. One step leads to another until we recover all the ancient Art..."

  "But, sir, at the Newland Fair, last year, I saw a sorcerer start a fire with one gesture and six words: She cried out, 'Hail Tamlar, let there be fire,' and the fire blazed up. That seems more magical."

  The warden scowled. "It's more efficient, certainly, but it's an unreliable spell. Only a few people can do it, and even they can't do it unfailingly. Also, we consider it suspect that those who can do it are mostly young people who have never studied the Inexplicable Arts. That smacks of demonism."

  "Sir, where do we get sorcel-sticks?"

  "You don't. The College of Sorcery in Apocanew buys a few for teaching purposes. The peddlers call them matches, because they match the effect of other implements, such as flint and steel, but they're terribly expensive, and used only for educational purposes."

  Rashel dismissed the class, then invited the warden to tea. Dismé watched them leave—the Warden very pink and importunate, Rashel very coy—and when they had gone, Dismé came out of hiding to pilfer one of the sorcel-sticks. She would never have stolen anything from a person or from a shop, but this seemed more like research than stealing, like taking a leaf from a tree in order to identify it with the help of old books.

  She left the museum grounds by a side path that led to the dilapidated barn, and once settled in the loft, she set the sorcel stick in a crack in a board and looked at it for a while. It seemed a simple enough thing. Too simple,
really. Why was a thing this simple needed at all?

  Inside herself, near that place where Roarer dwelt, she sensed an opening as if a gateway swung wide into an echoing space. She heard a chime of bells, very distant, almost at the far edge of hearing. She reached her hand toward the sorcel-stick, without touching it, palm upward, and murmured, "Hail, Tamlar. I summon fire."

  It was there on her palm, a standing flame, burning from what fuel she could not tell. Her hand felt no heat, the flame felt no wind, for it was rock steady while all the air about it seethed with rushing and whispers. "See, see, she has called the light and it has come..."

  She looked through the flame to see a wall of ouphs, ouphs frozen into place, fixed upon the flame, for once not grieving or wondering but silent, as though held by a core of stillness outside and beyond themselves. When she focused her eyes on her palm once more, the flame was gone. When she looked up at the ouphs, they too had gone and there was only quiet all around.

  So, she could do it herself. The Art was not lost; it was here—or some small part of it was, unless Rashel learned of it and harassed it out of her. Which wasn't going to happen. She wasn't going to tell anyone about this very small talent, this tiny magic, of no use whatsoever unless one were lost in the dark.

  21

  omega site

  Nell awakens.

  At first there is pain: a sick horror that invades bones, crawls along nerves, and surrounds every living cell. Awareness whimpers before intransigent ice. The ice does not want to let go. Pain is the battlefield on which cold contends against consciousness.

  Inevitably, cold gives way, easing gradually into deep chill, then into mere clamminess, the feeling of a springhouse, where deep water flows. The sense of suffocation is strong, the panic of smothering, the frantic horror of no air, no air—nor can there be, for nothing moves, lungs are still, diaphragm is still, nothing breathes, nothing screams. When the torture becomes merely ache, when the terrible coldness becomes merely chill, then the body—not necessarily hers, it has no owner yet— rotates to one side on cushioned robot arms, the face turns downward, the head lowers, and liquid runs freely from nose and mouth, emptying lungs.

  Now that the body is capable of screaming, vomiting, gasping, the need to do so has passed. It lies limp and passive as it is turned supine once more, as nozzles enter nostrils and puff to inflate lungs, once, twice, three times. The fourth time the body manages to gasp on its own. Then comes music, a soft repetitive strain in strings and woodwinds with an occasional, almost random reverberation of a deep-toned chime. The ache fades. Blanketing arms hold the body and warm it. Nose detects a minty and resinous smell; muscles click and twitch as hair-thin electrodes are inserted, tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick, an endless zipping-up which starts at the top of the head and ends at the soles of the feet. Soft pressure rolls up and down arms—they are becoming her arms—a gentle stroking as if this body were a kitten being licked down by a conscientious mother. First arms, then legs, then shoulders and back. Finally a drop of something on the tongue. The taste varies from moment to moment, but is always delicious and seductive, like the music and the stroking, all of it provided by her coffin.

  She wonders dreamily—as she has before, many times—at the necessity of being seduced back into life when one has been dead such a very long time. Is it ninety-six years again?

  Warm but exhausted by this near approach to living, the body dozes once more as the needles go on pulsing, making muscles and tendons tense and relax and tense again. Though not all strength is lost while deeply frozen, still it will take some time before the body feels like normal flesh. This body is now Nell, and Nell will sleep. Real sleep. Sleep that allows the dream, the one dream that returns during every waking.

  In the dream she sees the shelter. Jerry is there among the meticulous stacks of supplies that fill all the space beneath beds, on top of cupboards, wherever there is a cubic inch unused. The children are there, still dressed in swimsuits, just home from the lake where Jerry takes them to swim. Nell herself is there, an observant mote hanging in the camera's eye. She knows what is coming, but they haven't been near a television all day. They haven't heard the news...

  "Daddy, when's the meedeors coming?" Michy flops herself on the top bunk and punches her pillow. "Are we going to stay all night?"

  "Don't want to," Tony, whining his pro-forma objection to life itself.

  "Don't have to," Jerry replies, He can't see Nell, he doesn't know she's there. Each time she wakes, she has to remind herself that she is not, was not actually there, that she had already gone to join the sleepers.

  Jerry says, "We'll just stay until the meteors stop coming down, Tony."

  "Why isn't Mommy here? Won't she get hit?"

  "They have a shelter at Big Eye."

  "Where she washes the stars," Tony says, with satisfaction. "Mommy's a 'portant washer."

  "Mommy's a very important watcher," Jerry agrees, with a finality that means, yes she is, but now she's away, good riddance. The dreamer watches during a brief period of ordinary living filled with ordinary doings: yawnings, scratchings, and gapings by the children while Jerry neatens and stacks, all interrupted by...

  "Whas that?" Michy asks. "That noise."

  Each time she dreams this, Nell is surprised, for she had not actually expected to hear it, not this tar from the ocean where the Bitch was expected to land Obviously, Jerry hadn't expected to hear it either. His face shows shock first, then horrified surprise. He has been confident that nothing will happen to him and the children. He has put himself in God's hands, sure that nothing will happen, but the sound is happening, building like an unbraked train careening down steep tracks, a rattling roar one recognizes mostly from old movies. He darts to the air lock and slams both doors. The shrill screaming is like steam engines, too, and like wheels trying to stop and the whistle going, all at once, only this one goes on and on and on, louder and louder, and the crash, when it comes is a greater sound than human ears can tolerate.

  Jerry is facedown on the cot, pillows around his head, trying to block the sound. The ping lens trembles as does the room. The water tank bounces among its heavy springs, a weighty plumb bob, signifying unimaginable forces begun five, six thousand miles away.

  Jerry raises his head, looking for Michy. She's on the floor, blood trickling from her ears. Tony is where? There, under the cot, pillows around his head. He is the younger, but he is the one who always has to do what Daddy does.

  Jerry pulls the children onto the cots, packs comforters and pillows around them. Michy's eyes are open and her lips move, but he cannot hear her. The world is totally filled by the groaning of monstrous powers rending the earth, forces Jerry has never believed will touch him. The camera is hidden inside a box of Nell's personal supplies; it sees through a pinhole lens.

  It is only a coincidence that Jerry is now facing the camera, his mouth drawn into a rictus of fury! He is not yet as frightened as he will be in a day or so, but, oh, he is raging with anger! In the dream her insect voice admonishes him. "You should have believed me, Jerry..."

  He doesn't hear her as she hangs there, staring at that furious face, those wide, angry eyes, those lips curled back to show bared teeth. Over the vast, underground grinding, the sound changes, very gradually, and now she can hear the sound of water, a heavy downpour, as though the house had been moved beneath a waterfall. The salty ocean that had been displaced now falls upon them. Jerry struggles to the door to the airlock, to one of the listening posts, flexible pipes, one leading up into the house, one to the outside world with a rain cap at the end of it, put there so the ones inside could hear what was happening without opening the airlock.

  When he takes off the inner seal, the sound of rain is a roar, a deluge. Rain trickles out the end of the tube. Jerry stares at the water stupidly. She sees his realization that this is the tube that went up into the house. The water is coming from where a house was, a dribble of liquid dark with ashes. She reads the understanding on his face
: the house is gone. His world is gone. He lies down between the children while all around them the world moans like some gargantuan animal, wounded unto death but unable to die without interminable agonies.

  He lies there in the yellow light of the lantern, hands clenched, still raging at the chaos around him. Though the exterior noise drowns his words, she can read his lips as he cries, "Oh, God, I turn away from you. Damn you. I turn away from you if you treat me like this...!"

  Nell had first seen the event ninety-six years after it had been recorded. After that, each time she wakened, she relived it before she could go on. There had been later images, as well, one of them leaving the shelter, one of the children half-grown accompanied by a bearded Jerry and a small band of refugees; still another of a gray-haired Jerry leading a much larger group as they barricaded their shelter against monsters, and last of all, a lengthy recording of Jerry as a white-bearded magus, raging upon his followers like Moses down from the mountain. They were Turnaways, he cried. They were followers of the Rebel Angels who had spared them from destruction.

  In each case, pings had recorded the images. Pings were the eyes of Omega site. Thousands of them, tiny and self-contained, many of them still functioning after all this time. Through them she knew that her husband and children had survived. At the end of his life, he was patriarch of a multitude that went on wandering and growing, eventually settling in Bastion, a place not far from where Jerry had begun his trek and not far from where Nell had been sleeping. Wonderful, she had thought at the time it happened. Wonderful and strange. And now that she has had the dream once more, she can rest and become flesh yet again.

  22