Quicksilver(52)
Face-to-face with her, he could not hold his scowl. He shook his head and sighed. “Suddenly, I feel old.”
“You’re not old,” she said. “You’re seasoned. The squad needs someone seasoned. It doesn’t work without you.”
Sparky looked at me and said he was sorry, and I said he didn’t need to be, and he told Panthea Ching that he still wasn’t sure about her, and she said, “Likewise,” which made him smile.
Bridget withheld from him her presentiment that not all of us would survive. I wondered if she had withheld anything from me.
|?23?|
Although the desert lives with less water than seashores and forested mountains and fruited plains, the rare storms sometimes pound the earth in torrents that turn dry arroyos into raging rivers and inundate lowlying areas with flash floods. The rain that broke upon us that day didn’t gently rataplan upon the Quonset hut, but rattled against it in violent barrages, as if Nature misunderstood our purpose and, siding with the Screamers, had gone to war with us.
Panthea said that we would be called to service soon, would be leaving Peptoe this evening, and needed to have dinner to fortify us for what we might endure between now and dawn. She spoke with quiet confidence and authority. Her pellucid blue eyes seemed like windows to a serene mind incapable of deceit. Bridget, Sparky, and I didn’t doubt she was a seer and our ally; if we were anxious about what came next, we were also relieved that we’d found the person able to lead us to a full understanding of the Screamers and our purpose.
Given her petiteness and seeming inclination toward mysticism, Panthea might have been expected to put before us a meal of organic greens and tofu, but happily her tastes ran counter to those of the kale-and-carrots crowd. She had prepared for our visit, and the spread that she produced included sliced roast beef, sliced ham, sliced chicken breast, a variety of cheeses, three artisanal breads that she baked herself, potato salad, three-bean salad with bacon, and numerous condiments. She intended that we accompany dinner with icy bottles of beer kept in a refrigerated drawer at thirty-six degrees, and she was met with no objections.
The Dionysian nature of the buffet suggested the indulgent last meal of those condemned to death, but if Panthea foresaw that this feast would be followed by multiple fatalities, she had the grace to keep that knowledge to herself.
Her dining room, an industrial-chic space, featured two big round tables of polished pine with seating for eight at each, to accommodate gatherings of her family. We sat at one table with an open chair between each of us, and yet the moment felt intimate. The room was illuminated by maybe sixteen flames wimpling on wicks in red cut-glass cups and by pulses of fierce lightning that flared through the small windows and made shadows leap as if they were agitated spirits. The effect was like a séance with refreshments.
Noble Winston sat on what would otherwise have been the empty captain’s chair between Bridget and me. He accepted pieces of beef from her—refusing them from me—but never begged, behaving with the decorum of a prime minister.
“What you call Screamers,” Panthea said, “were once beautiful beings, not monsters in appearance, though in their minds and hearts they became monsters. I’ve dreamed of them for fifteen years. My dreams aren’t just dreams, but lessons in the reality of the cosmos. I’m being instructed in dreams. The Screamers are from the first universe, which preceded ours. The envious among them corrupted all of their kind, seeding suspicion and resentment that became hatred, which they called a virtue, bitter hatred so destructive that they brought Earth to ruin. That devastated world was the legacy they made for themselves. The physical appearance of those who survived the destruction then changed to reflect the condition of their souls. They became immortal monsters in the prison of that first universe. When they were beautiful and radiant, they were called Rishon. When they became monsters, they were called Nihilim.”
The softness of her voice and the ease with which she spoke reminded me of a girl, Annie Piper, at the orphanage. Annie was eight years older than me, and for a few years when my age was in the single digits, she read stories to us, tales written by others but also by her. They were stories of things that had never happened and could never happen, but she told them with such quiet verve and conviction that we believed them and wanted to continue believing even after time robbed us of our sense of wonder. Encouraged by Sister Margaret, who took a special interest in her writing, Annie went to college on a scholarship, and we all expected great things of her, at least that she’d become a well-known writer one day. Instead, she dropped out of college after a year and drifted into some other life she evidently preferred, and we never heard from her again.
Sad as that was, I could nevertheless understand it. Writing novels seems like a glamorous and exciting occupation, although in reality I suspect that it’s a lot less glamorous than professional wrestling and only marginally more exciting than being a librarian.
To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.
“We are the Rishon of the second universe,” Panthea continued, “though we’re a species with fewer gifts than those that the Rishon of the first universe possessed. Think of it like this—the genome of those original Rishon was edited to make us humbler and give us a better chance of avoiding the arrogance that would destroy our world as they destroyed theirs. The Nihilim, those you call the Screamers, can never by their own choice cross from their universe into ours. But the worst among us, the most morally deranged, are able to open a door to them, invite them, which is what happened long ago.”