stifling, a sirocco. The children tried to sit in their places but the wind roared toward them, onto them, through them, past them, and they were slammed into the walls of the empty room. It was a wind from nowhere.
And then, behind the wind came the sounds. Sounds of things that were not metal or plastic or glass but neither were they human. Sounds of rising notes, of chitinous surfaces sandpapering against one another, of water being heated to steam, of tympani echoing from a mountaintop. The sounds seemed to pour from a single spot in the room. From a place high up in the middle of the air, where now the children could see a strange orange spiderweb of light spreading like a starburst of filament-fine lines, crazing in the trembling air as a projectile crazes glass.
“This is how it begins. When you hear these sounds and you see that orange light, you know it’s beginning. You will call it a spiracle; that is what we call it. And it means a hole is being made. Do you know what comes through that hole?”
The children could not answer. The wind had passed, but they lay in terror, tossed in a pile in a corner, and the sounds ratcheted and grated and scraped at their nerves, and they were frightened.
“This is what comes through the hole,” the old paladin said, closing his eyes again, concentrating again.
The orange spiderweb grew larger, split down the air, became a ten-foot rip in nothingness, and beyond it, as though seen through trembling water… darkness.
Things moved in the darkness.
The children scrambled together, arms and legs struggling to get farther away, closer to the white wall, out of sight and out of line of that fissure in the air, that color of orangeness that seemed to continue beyond the spectrum their eyes could perceive, those sounds that clattered in their bones and made their teeth hurt. And the things began to come through from the darkness.
The first one was squat and thick and the color of potatoes. It had no face but it had a ring of slit-eyes that ran round its forehead; the top of its mealy form—what might have been a head, had it not been so unlike a head—ended with a million trembling cilia, each suet-white and wormlike. It did not have legs, but it was divided up the middle and its substance compressed the two stubs like dough as it shambled forward.
The second was glass-smooth but dark. Light seemed to touch it and vanish, to be gathered in and nullified. It was faceted and part of it appeared and disappeared like reflections in mirrors when the surfaces were turned. It was large and thin and tall, then it was tiny and endwise and razored; then it was gone, then it was back.
And behind them came a thing that moved like a chicken, arching itself forward then hauling itself up behind and under. It was covered with matted fur like a rat that has soaked itself in oil. The tips of the hairs gave off a faint green light.
And behind it came a thing that looked like cheesecloth, but it was made of flesh. It was oozing with dark blood, and there were mouths everywhere on it, and rings of teeth and the blood could be seen pumping and circulating through the tubes that joined the empty holes in its rotting cheesecloth form.
And behind it came four snapping things that tore chunks from one another as they gibbered toward the hole in the air. And then came a slab of wood with human hands growing all over its surface, and it scuttled along on the hands. There were others, seen only dimly in the darkness, and seen at all only because they gave off their own moist, green light.
The children screamed and some of them cried, and all of them tried to get away, to become small and hide in the comer, and the paladin was speaking to them and even through the terrible noises they could hear his voice saying, “When you see the spiracle begin to form, you will know it is starting, that these things and others will be trying to get through. You will stop them. Do you know how you will stop them?”
The children could not answer, would not; screamed. Only Alan managed to husk out a frightened, “Howwwww… ?” The paladin opened his eyes suddenly, looked at Alan and said in that odd voice that needed no movement of mouth to be formed, “Do this”:
Together—the old paladin helped the child—they turned their eyes inward. Rushed along a sparkling silver thread, Alan felt the old paladin urging bursts of yellow light from the central fire deep inside him, out along feeders branching off the central silver thread. Each time the yellow light raced out it found a reservoir of pulsing energy; and it came hurtling back to the source purified and enlarged with power. Along and down the silver thread they raced together, the old one keeping the child in touch with the coruscating yellow power source, building it, shaping it, narrowing it into a lance of yellow light that was incredibly dense and potent. When it seemed Alan could contain no more of the yellow power, when he felt nausea bubbling up from below, far below the silver thread, the paladin
Alan slammed back inside himself, his eyes opened and he pitched over on his side, emptying his bladder, his bowels and his stomach-drenching himself and the wall beside him. His eyes rolled up in his head. He went limp as death and fainted, off off off…
The old paladin sent the other seven children to the primary sensitivity sections and took Alan pryor for advanced work. Alan was already sensitive and potent.
This is what the old paladins taught him:
The crazing in the air was a tearing of the fabric of time. The darkness beyond the orange spiderweb was the future. Earth’s future… how far ahead no one knew. Something terrible had happened up there. No one knew what it was, nor how far ahead the disaster lay. It had changed those who lived ahead up there. Now they wanted to escape. The disaster had done something to the interface between the present and the future. Frequently, without warning, those ahead up there were able to force entrance. At such times, the paladins brought their powers into play. The nature of the power was never explicated. It could never be explained because it was a random talent. It was born in rare children but some things had to be done to them before they could exercise the full potency of the power. They stood between the present and the future; against those things that might be human but no one cared to find out. There was no doubt that if they came through, they would destroy the human race and take this Earth for themselves.
There were winds, and there were scorched places, and people died where they burst through; but always the paladins unleashed their power and the rift in time was sealed again and the humping, lurching, odorous creatures from the other side were sucked back into their own present and the Earth was safe again. For a while.
He was assigned to a ready station in Brazil. His apartment was in one of the old Bauhaus buildings fronting Leblon. He went where he chose and he was honored wherever he went. He was a paladin. The ivory and blue uniform was a badge of respect. He swam in the totally unbelievable blue of the ocean off Copacabana Beach and he stood every evening on the balcony of his apartment as the ten-minute torrential downpour eased the killing mugginess of the rain forest humidity. He attended brushup sessions in shock focus rooms like the one on the Island and he waited for his time.
One night, when he was twenty-seven years old, he attended a reception for the international crowd that had come to Rio for the film festival. When he came up the dramatically winding staircase in the American Embassy the band stopped playing and the enormous crowd turned and applauded him. He smiled shyly and accepted the individual greetings of the handsome men in their summer-weight dinner jackets and the extraordinary women in their diaphanous gowns. Then he sought a place along one wall where he could stand
