though, the terror being experienced by billions.
What would happen if everybody became a wanderer?
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Damn Brooke and her rules. A cigar would go very, very well right now.
Maybe Martin was right and it was a harvest of slaves. Might not six billion slaves be worth something in the parallel earth of the reptilians? But if the souls were being taken out, then what was happening to them? Martin thought they were just disintegrating, but Wiley wasn’t so sure of that. He had no idea what to think. He’d never really believed in the soul or God or any of that stuff. Like Martin, he’d been to Stanford, and had come away, also, with a strong rationalism and fundamental disrespect for unprovable assertions.
Those monstrous creatures wanted the bodies, he was convinced of it.
Unless…how many parallel universes might there be? If the Many Worlds interpretation of Hugh Everett was correct, then this oppression could be coming from any one of literally uncountable numbers of parallel universes.
He thought not, though. He thought that the reptilian forms that the people in the church had glimpsed were the final telltale. He was right about the creatures and he was right about their world. He could feel their need, could see their glaring, relentless eyes the same way he had on that night five years ago when they’d tried to— what had they tried to do? Had they really somehow captured him?
No, something was wrong with that picture. He’d written a whole book about it, but he was increasingly aware of a missing element. Because what had happened to him on that night had been hard, but—there was just something missing. Tip of the tongue. Couldn’t quite remember.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that there were three earths involved. A triad.
Buckminster Fuller had called the triangle the building block of the universe because of its structural integrity. There was a reason in conscious life, also, that notions of trinity made structural sense. A triad had a positive side, a negative side, and a balancing side. If the two-moon earth was the positive side, then the negative side was the reptilians with their evil hungers.
Oh, Christ, he was not the balancing factor. I mean, well, let’s face it, a middling writer with a burr up his ass about aliens is not the right guy to bring things into balance.
In other words, not up to the job of—what? So far, he wasn’t really doing a whole lot beyond writing a history that his world would take to be fiction. He wasn’t helping anybody.
He closed his eyes. If there was a god anywhere out there, may he now deliver his servant Wylie Dale from the curse of this writing.
But even as he tried to push away the other human world, his mind slipped back toward its suffering. There, this house was now cold and dark, not nicely heated and cozy with a lovely family inside.
As dawn broke here, the phoebes started their sweet calling, the very essence of peace in the country. Over there, though, the people left alive were crying together, their sorrow unspeakable. Wylie was crying, too—in silence, though. Brooke and the kids mustn’t hear.
Then Brooke was there. She had come quietly and he had not heard her, but she was there, standing in the door of his office, and he thought she was an angel come down, and he turned to her in his creaky old chair, and slid out of it and to his knees, and embraced her waist, and buried his face in the sweet and sour scent of her.
Her hands came around his head, and he felt cradled. She said, “You need to come to bed, love.”
“What time is it?”
“The phoebes are starting.”
He’d been in here for close to twenty-four hours. “Oh, man.”
“Wiley?”
He looked up at her in her nightgown, so pale in the thin light that she might have been a ghost or a memory. “We’re travelers on the long water,” he muttered, “you and me, sweets, you and me.” Her hand came into his and it was warm, and he kissed it and it smelled like sweat and remembrance.
He went to his feet and took her into his arms, and she settled there. He closed his eyes and sailed in the comfort of her closeness.
“You were crying,” she said.
“Mm. My story.”
“It’s really getting to you, Wiley.”
He nodded against her shoulder.
“Your imagination is supposed to be a tool, not a weapon, especially not against yourself.”
“Oh, honey,” he said.
“Wiley, it’s not real, remember that this time. Don’t get yourself confused.”
He nodded again. Her hands swept his thighs, then her long fingers probed at his pants, but playfully, quickly. He felt himself stir. She was his home, Brooke was, the home of his soul.
She’d been there that night five years ago. It had been the two of them. And it—was it—not what it seemed?
“Let me show you a little reality,” she whispered in his ear. “Let’s do dawn patrol.”
That’s what they called it when they made love in the early hours, which they often did. This is the time when childrens’ sleep is deepest and parents are least likely to be disturbed, and, for Wiley, when his body called him to the ocean of his wife.
But as they walked arm in arm to the bedroom, he heard a door open and close downstairs, and then the voice, low and full of sorrow, of an invisible man. The man went into the living room and became silent there. “Did you hear that?”
“The warbler? He just started in.”
“Not the warbler.”
She guided his hands to the familiar pink ribbon that was tied behind her neck, and he untied it, and the nightgown floated down. Her matchless curves shone in the rising light, her nipples blushed pink and coming tight, and she was the loveliest thing that he knew, a beauty that, when it surrendered itself to his big hands and arms, seemed as if it must bear some sort of strength in it that was connected to eternity, or it would have melted into shadow at his touch.
As she unbuckled his belt, she made a familiar tune in her throat, “Never grow old, never grow old,” a line from the old hymn that was a theme in the music of her life. And they would not, not in a love like the one that had possessed the two of them. And had possessed Martin and Lindy, too, and been destroyed, just freshly, along with the children that had been woven out of its flesh.
They lay with the windows open, their bodies close in the cool morning breeze, and came together while the birds called softly, the phoebes and the tanagers and the doves, and the first sun spread across the floor.
When he should have been completely absorbed in her, when his body was radiant with pleasure, his eyes drinking her face, his powerful hips pumping and making her cry out softly, then, at that grand private moment, he heard another voice cry out, and knew that it was his own and not his own, a broken, bereft voice from downstairs and a universe so close and so very far away.
He went plunging on, but then heard the back door slam and the voice screaming, but faintly, faintly…and yet so terribly that it shattered everything and caused him to go twisting off her.
He flopped onto his back, gasping.
“Honey,” she said, “oh, honey,” and came to him. But he leaped out of the bed.
“It’s him,” he said.
“Who?”
Out in the back yard, he was screaming. Wiley ran downstairs. “Martin,” he yelled, “Martin!”
He went through the living room and out the back door into the dewy grass.
“Wiley, for God’s sake!”
Then he heard them, their shuffling walk, the wanderers coming up from Harrow. He stood in a shaft of hazy light as they came closer, and saw the branches shake, and then heard their voices murmuring, and heard Martin screaming and screaming.
The murmuring came closer, got louder. “Hear it, Brooke?”
“What?”
They were right in front of him now, murmuring, breathing, their feet shuffling. “Brooke, look at the
