Robert Wilson - Gypsies

Neumann’s office was sere, stony, and blank. Palestrina said, “I want to see this creature you’ve created.”

“You make him sound like one of our homunculi.”

“There are homunculi working as servants at the Vatican Library, Mr. Neumann. I assure you I wouldn’t speak of them in the same tone.”

At last—Cardinal Palestrina considered it a kind of personal triumph—Neumann’s smile faded. “I hate to see you go into this with a negative attitude.”

“I don’t mean to insult your work—”

“Because, you know, the implications are tremendous. Even the Curia has acknowledged that. Frankly, it seemed like an extremely generous thing for the State Department to invite you here. We don’t normally share this sort of material even with allies.”

Palestrina bowed his head. “The stakes are considerable.”

“The oil supply,” Neumann said.

“I was thinking of the survival of Christendom.”

Neumann’s smile flickered faintly. “That, too.”

“Show me the man,” Palestrina said.

“Isn’t that a little premature?”

“I know the history of this place. Do I really have to admire the architecture?” He leaned forward. “The Vatican acknowledges your nation’s generosity. Nevertheless, a moral issue persists. That’s why I’m here.”

“A moral issue,” Neumann said blankly.

“Means and ends.”

“I don’t understand.”

Palestrina was not surprised. “Is he here?”

“Yes, he’s in the building, but—”

“Then take me to him, please.”

Neumann hesitated, annoyed, Palestrina thought, at being forced off his schedule. Finally he shrugged. “I guess there’s nothing to lose.”

The room was a gray stone chamber. Neumann agreed to wait outside.

Palestrina understood that, in a sense, he was at Neumann’s mercy. He could not have found his own way here; he doubted he could find his way back out. The Defense Research Institute was literally a maze, corridors turning back on themselves or twining into blank stone walls. The building housed not only Neumann’s Plenum Project but a dozen other deeply shrouded efforts: biochemical warfare, sorcels of invisibility, commerce with the dead. Every level in the bureaucratic hierarchy had its own fragmentary map of the building. The rumor, Neumann said, was that no single comprehensive map existed; no single architect had overseen the project and no living man understood the building as a whole. Neumann offered this as a legend, for its quaintness; Cardinal Palestrina found it only too easy to believe.

He entered the gray room from one of its two doors, sat down in one of its two chairs. Momentarily, the man he had come to speak to entered.

Only a man, Palestrina thought.

The man sat opposite him, silently, hands folded in his lap.

How ordinary he looked. A shabby old man in a shabby gray suit, a gray slouch hat on his head. In Rome, Palestrina thought, he would have attracted no attention. He would have been taken for one of the less successful bourgeoisie, an alcoholic shopkeeper or a retired subaltern from the cavernous bureaucracy of the Tribunals. Palestrina, scanning for omens of bad faith, found nothing more sinister here than a certain shiftiness about the man’s eyes. But his own gaze was hardly fixed. The temptation to look away—somehow, to look away from oneself— -was nearly overwhelming.

He said, “Do you have a name?”

“ Walker,” said the man in the gray suit.

The voice was odd: resonant but somehow toneless.

“Walker—?”

“Walker, stalker, hunter, finder.” His grin was vulpine. ” Walker is my family name.”

Palestrina said, “Did you know your parents?”

“No, sir. I was creched here.”

Then it was true, Palestrina thought, what the Secretariat had told him before he left, what Neumann had implied. Men and women had been bred like cattle in this building. Surgical interventions: female ova plucked from living tissue and fertilized in vitro. Clonings practiced in sterile laboratories under fertility spells. The thought of it sickened him.

Walker added, “But I know who you are… you’re the Papist.”

“They call me that?”

“No one much talks to me. But I hear them say things.”

“Then, do you understand why I’m here?” “Something to do with war.” “Something to do, I profoundly hope, with peace.”

Walker shrugged, as if to say, It’s all the same to me. He said, “You’re a judge.”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking. Do you know what it is I have to judge?”

“Me,” Walker said. The grin was persistent, childlike in a horrible way.

“Your usefulness,” Palestrina said. “Whether you can help us, whether what you’re doing can help us, in Europe.”

“What I’m good for,” Walker interpreted.

No, Palestrina thought. Not what you’re good for, but whether you’re good. Or worse: whether you are a purchase our moral budget can afford.

But he said, “In a way.”

“Oh, I’m not good for much. They made me that way.” He tapped his head. “But I can do a few tricks.” “Tell me about it.”

“Spells. Binding and finding. It’s slow work but I’m talented at it. And I can do the other thing, I guess you know about that.”

“Traveling between worlds,” Palestrina said. It still strained credulity. But here, in this room, this building…

“Across the plenum,” Walker said, “yes.” “Could you do it now—if you wanted to?” “Yes.”

“You could go”—Palestrina held out his hands palms up—“anywhere?”

“Only certain places,” Walker said. “What places?” “Where they’ve been.” The heart of the matter.

“My understanding,” Cardinal Palestrina said, “is that you were a family.”

“A long time ago,” Walker said, and a shadow seemed to cross his face: not an emotion, Palestrina thought, so much as the shade of an emotion.

He said, “Would you like to talk about it?”

“They told me to answer your questions.”

“Do you have to do what the people here tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, then,” Cardinal Palestrina said.

Walker closed his eyes and seemed to regard the memory directly.

“There were three of us,” he said. “We were the best they could make. We had the talent. Very strongly. So they closed us in, of course… caged us with sorcels and spells. And it worked for a time.”

He knitted his hands in his lap. Palestrina could not look away as the fingers laced and unlaced: old, bony fingers.

“They gave us one name apiece. Walker and Julia and William. We all had different parents, or no parents, but we used to think of ourselves as brothers and sister. William was the oldest. I admired him a lot. He was always surprising the doctors and nurses, doing things they didn’t think he could do. I think William carried the whole plenum around inside him: he was that big, that powerful. He was like a god.”

Walker’s eyes shone with ancient feeling.

Cardinal Palestrina remained silent.

“Julia was very beautiful. Tell you the truth, Father, I felt kind of lost between them. William was big and powerful, Julia was beautiful and smart. Me, I was just Walker. Ordinary Walker. Oh, I could do the tricks, too. But not like they could. But that was all right… we had each other.”

“Until they left,” Palestrina said gently.

Walker’s expression hardened. “They talked about it sometimes. I thought it was bad. A mistake. No good could come of it. But they included me. I appreciated that. ‘They can’t hold us,’ William used to say. ‘Not all their spells can keep us here.’ And in the end, you know, he was right.”