Gypsies

It was about this time Walker showed up.

Walker had appeared without warning, and it was like stepping into a dream, Tim thought, like something out of his childhood. Because he had known Walker once long ago. Walker had been his friend for a while. Walker had given him things and shown him things. But then Tim had grown wary of Walker and spent all these years on the road, avoiding him, because when you came right down to it he was frightened—scared of what Walker might want from him. And now here was Walker right in this shabby room with him, an old man but still a commanding presence, radiating calm and reassurance. Tim stared at him and Walker said—these precise words—“I never forgot you.” And it was like being welcomed home.

“Everyone else forgot you,” Walker said. “Except me.”

Tim, who had gone three long days since spoon or food, began to weep.

Walker took him to the Novus Ordo and Walker got him dried out and straightened out and respectable. You don’t need the bottle or the needle, Walker said, and through some magic Tim could not fathom it was suddenly so: that longing was taken away. Just utterly vanished. And he was grateful—filled with a wholehearted gratitude he had never experienced before. It was better than the spoon.

Walker showed him everything that could be his. His inheritance, Walker said. “It’s what you were made for.” Imagine a land, Walker said, a green land spreading out for miles, farms and cities and blue skies, and you stand on a hilltop, surveying it, and it’s yours —it belongs to you.

An inheritance of lands and powers.

The kingdoms of the Earth.

“If you want it,” Walker said. “If you do a little work for us.”

Even now, in this hotel room in San Francisco, the memory was as bright and polished as a gemstone. My place, Tim thought, my home, that’s what he promised me. And maybe, Tim thought, that was Walker’s atonement for the accident on the beach. To find me and to make me well. It made sense. Anybody could have an accident. But—

“Sometimes,” Tim said, “I think we should just tell them the truth.”

“I share that feeling,” Walker said. “But you know they wouldn’t understand.”

“They don’t trust you. Not… the way I trust you.”

“Fortunately,” Walker said, “it’s not me they have to trust.”

“All we want,” Tim said, “is to take them home. Isn’t that right? They would recognize it if they went there.”

“I’m sure they would,” Walker said—fading a little now, satisfied, turning down some hidden angle out of the world. “I’m sure they will.”

“I’ll talk to them tomorrow,” Tim said. “I’ll do a better job.”

The Gray Man smiled and disappeared.

Tim—alone now—was reassured. He was doing the right thing. Or, if not the right thing, then the only thing. When you thought about it, he had very few options.

He feared Walker but he trusted him, too. And that was reasonable. It was that kind of relationship. A relationship of trust.

After all, Walker was the closest thing to a father Tim had ever possessed.

3

Michael lay awake for a long time in the leaden silence of the hotel room, no sound but the faint breathing of his mother and Laura in the darkness.

He liked the darkness and he liked being awake in it. In all these strange rooms—from Turquoise Beach to Polger Valley and all the way back to San Francisco —the one familiar thing had been the darkness. It was the next-best thing to home.

Home, he thought. A word Tim had used more than once.

Michael wasn’t sure now what it meant.

Home was a dark hotel room out along some desert highway.

Or home was that distant world he sometimes envisioned—the “better world” he had talked to Aunt Laura about. He thought of it now, oceans and forests the way America must have been a hundred years ago; but vital, too, with crowded cities and markets. Roads and farms and big, delicate flying machines. He wondered if there was a city called San Francisco in that world, and, thinking of it, realized there was: but it was not as large as this one and the people in it spoke mostly Spanish and Nahuatl. Was that home?

Maybe.

What home was probably not was the suburban house in Toronto where he’d grown up. It was already a memory. A fading memory—it might have been a million miles away.

But Tim had talked about another home.

He called it the Novus Ordo. Michael said the words to himself, softly, in the darkness.

It’s where we came from. It’s where we were made.

Like Made in Japan, or Made in Hong Kong. Maybe, Michael thought—drifting now—maybe it’s stamped on us somewhere. A birthmark or a tattoo. “Made in the Novus Ordo.”

Maybe not such a bad place after all.

He felt it faintly down a distant corridor of possibilities—a door.

Doors and angles, Michael thought sleepily. It was only a sideways step from here. He could feel it and he could see it. It was cold, a cold place. He saw an old, dark industrial city—not San Francisco but someplace back East—tarry under a gray sky. He saw flames boiling out of factory towers; he saw a dark river winding away to the south.

It was not an appealing place. But Tim had said as much. It was not exclusively good or bad. It wasn’t Utopia.

But it was home.

The word echoed in his mind until it lost all meaning. Home, he thought, is where you belong. Where there’s a place for you. Where you’re understood. Where you can talk.

Home was no place he had ever been.

Unless Tim had found it for him.

Chapter Eighteen

In the morning, Karen rode down an elevator with Michael and Laura to the coffee shop, where Tim was waiting. A foggy morning. The fog pressed in at the plate-glass window and the far side of the street was lost in layers of cloud.

Tim said, “The question is, what do you really want? Why come looking for me in the first place?”

“To find out what we are,” Laura said, “and to do something about the Gray Man.”

It was past the breakfast rush and the room was nearly deserted. A man with a bucket and a mop did slow ballroom turns across the tiled floor. Karen sat with Michael in the central curve of a vinylette booth, content for now to let her sister do the talking.

Tim said, “Well, you have part of that. You know what you are and you know where you came from. As for the Gray Man—I guarantee you can’t deal with him without help.”

“Your help?”

“The help of the people who created him.” “The people you were talking about—the Novus Ordo.”

“Exactly,” Tim said. “You want us to go there.”

Laura shot a glance at Karen, who nodded to acknowledge it.

Tim said, “It would be the wise thing. Maybe the only thing. How many choices do you have?”

Laura said, “But we have to take your word on all this.”

Tim drew back. His expression was cautious. “I’m not sure I like what you’re implying.”

“It’s been a long time, that’s all. Last time either of us saw you, you were Micheal’s age. You remember that? A bad-tempered teenager in a leather jacket. You had a tremendous chip on your shoulder.”

He managed to look insulted. “You mean you don’t trust me.”

“I mean trust is a lot to expect. You’re standing in the street one day and suddenly it’s hi, sis, how are you? But it’s been twenty years, Timmy. People change. Who is this guy, what does he want from us? I think it’s a natural question.”

Tim shook his head. He looked sad, Karen thought, but there was also a suggestion—very faint— of the contempt he used to express so freely.

He said, “This isn’t new, is it? You come up to the edge and then you shy away. It’s the way you’ve been living. Both of you. Well, it’s easy to make excuses. But it won’t solve your problems.”