head, this tiny, perfect girl, then raised her hand to his cheek and tapped it. “Soldier,” she had said.
Morning brought new necessities. There were twenty-two human beings here, they needed food and water, they needed decent sanitation and children are not good at sanitation. They were growing up fast, but as nobody could leave the tent at night, they used things like an old plastic bucket they’d brought with them and plastic bags which they seemed to have in abundance, and these tended to get spilled. They were not modest, the little ones, but the poor teens were desperate for privacy, the boys trying to control their vital young bodies, the girls trying to put them at their ease.
It was altogether the kindest, most forgiving, and smelliest group of people Martin had ever known. The roughest dig he’d ever been on did not even begin to compare to this.
There were two kids called flap guards who remained at the door of the tent, making certain nobody opened it after dark and, above all, nobody went outside. The drumming was loud enough to drown the sounds generated by the outriders and the nighthawks, so the little ones might cry for their parents, but they did not experience the kind of fear that would have brought the things leaping down on the tent.
As the hours slid past, Martin felt more and more trapped in the damned thing. The kids absolutely refused to stop their drumming or go outside even for a few seconds, not until dawn. They wouldn’t let him leave either, not that he wanted to. Trevor clung to him. His bevy of little ones did, too, and he would never deprive them of that comfort, no matter how illusory he feared that it was.
After they had forced Martin into initiation, and to some extent to be transformed himself, he had found Trevor with strange, pink sweat on his face and staining his filthy shirt. Martin thought he knew what it was—from the stress of sending his father to face that test, capillaries on the surface of his son’s skin had burst. His boy had sweated blood.
Over the long night, Martin had tested his new mind and found true changes. He still thought as he always had, but there was new information and there were new things he could do with his thought.
Trevor had spoken of another world he had seen, a world a lot like this one but with other people, and no evidence that it was under attack. He had gone through a gateway, he said, and there had read a book, and it was the book of their suffering and the secrets of their days.
Martin was familiar with the multiverse concept, of course, and he was aware of the recent discoveries at the Four Empires Supercollider in Switzerland that had suggested that parallel universes were real. But that there would be gateways that you could just walk through—well, this was going to be interesting to see.
There was a stirring in the tent as the sun rose. The drumming became haggard, then stopped. Then it got very quiet.
“What’s up?” Martin asked Trevor.
“I think something’s wrong with Wylie. I think the seraph have broken through to his world,” he replied.
Martin realized that he could see, in his mind’s eye, a shimmer hanging over the Saunders river. It could as easily be a spiderweb gleaming with dew as an entrance into another universe. He saw, also, that outriders were pacing there, looking for all the world like enormous tarantulas. They had been designed by the seraph to strike terror into the human heart, and even seeing them in this way touched him with fear, and made them lift their forelegs and eagerly test the air.
He withdrew.
“Any thoughts, Dad?”
“It’s a gateway. If it wasn’t it wouldn’t be so heavily guarded.”
“Okay,” Pam said, “we’re gonna take the opportunity to move the tent off this sludge factory, then I’m taking a supplies detail into town.” She glanced at Martin. “You stay here.”
He couldn’t disagree with that.
Martin followed the others into the kind of morning that comes after great storms, when sunlight washed pure seems to cleanse the world. Golden columns of light marched among the pines, and when they walked out and it fell on Martin, he had a shock, because it was just the sun but it felt as if somebody was there.
A couple of the kids, aware of his thoughts, glanced at him. He was going to have to somehow get used to this lack of inner privacy—and the deep sense of belonging that came with it.
Gentle, probing fingers seemed to be touching him, the fingers of a being that was deeply accepting of him, of life, of everything.
Who was this? Was the sun alive?
“It’s all alive,” Trevor said. “Everything is alive and everything is conscious. All the stars, all the grass, the trees, every little animal there is. And some of them have high consciousness. The bees do, Dad. When you’re in a glade with them, you’ll see.”
“The brain of the bee is microscopic, son, so they couldn’t really be all that conscious.”
Trevor smiled a little. “Just let yourself happen, Dad. You’ll be fine.”
Watching the chaos of kids moving here and there with stakes, with boxes and ropes, singing, laughing, you would never think that they were working together, and carefully organized at that. But they were, and exactly at the moment the tent shuddered and collapsed, four of them came out carrying all the bags and buckets of refuse that had accumulated inside.
Not a word was said as it was rolled and folded and carried off, followed, improbably, by a little boy who was completely overshadowed by the huge Cougars bass drum balanced on his head.
Their efforts looked a lot like those of worker bees, Martin thought, and then that a shared mind would naturally be far larger than any single component.
It hit him then—all mind is shared. That’s the way things work. Just surrender to it. Let yourself happen, like Trevor said.
“Okay, Dad, let’s go.”
Of course, Trevor could read his thoughts.
“Don’t let it bother you.”
“But I can’t read you.”
“Sure you can.” He headed off into the caressing sunlight.
Following him, Martin did see into his son’s thoughts, which were of that gateway, and going through it. But that wasn’t possible, look at the river!
“It’s possible, Dad. But you have to not think about it and not worry about it. Concentrate your thinking on your body, the way your feet feel as you walk, your hands, every physical sensation.”
—Why?
—This is why, what you’re doing right now.
Martin was stunned. The exchange had been so perfect. Of course, he understood the recent advances in mind-to-mind communication that were being achieved at Princeton, but that was with the help of implanted microchips.
—No implants here, Dad.
Trevor headed up the sharpening rise that separated them from the Saunders and the gateway. Martin looked ahead in his mind, and saw the outriders still guarding the gateway, and the water just a literal torrent. As soon as his mind touched them, though, every outrider turned this way and raised its forelegs. Some of them began to march.
“Blank your mind, go to your body!”
He forced his awareness into his flexing muscles, his feet, his heart and lungs. Although he could no longer see the outriders in his mind’s eye, he could still have clear awareness of them, and he knew that their alarm had subsided.
To do this successfully, you had to be like animals were, looking out at the world without looking in at your thoughts. Not easy for a professor.
—If you start to hear that rattling noise, stay in your body. Do not let your mind go out to it or they’ll be on you.
Why was nobody else coming? This was obviously extremely dangerous and more would be safer.
Trevor glanced over at him. His eyes said it all: this is my job. Our job.
At that moment, they came up the rise, and Martin saw that the Saunders, even in just the past few minutes, had risen more. It had been bad before, but now it was a great, surging mass of gray-black water full of trees, roofs, walls, floating staircases, even a car’s wheels appearing and disappearing as it went tumbling
