The Traveler

39

Maya and Gabriel passed through the town of San Lucas around one o’clock in the afternoon and headed south on a two-lane highway. As each new mile clicked on the van’s odometer, Maya tried to ignore her growing tension. Back in Los Angeles, the message from Linden was quite clear. Drive to San Lucas, Arizona. Follow Highway 77 south. Look for green ribbon. Name of contact-Martin. Perhaps they had missed the ribbon or the desert wind had blown it away. Linden could have been tricked by the Tabula’s Internet group and they could be walking into an ambush.

Maya was used to vague directions that led to safe houses or access points, but guarding a possible Traveler like Gabriel changed everything. Ever since the fight at the Paradise Diner, he had kept his distance from her, saying only a few words when they stopped for gasoline and looked at the map. He acted like a man who had agreed to climb a dangerous mountain and was prepared to tolerate obstacles along the way.

She rolled down the window of the van and the desert air dried the sweat on her skin. Blue sky. A hawk riding a thermal. Gabriel was a mile in front of her and suddenly he turned and raced back down the road. He pointed to the left and signaled with the palm of his hand. Found it.

Maya saw a length of green ribbon tied around the steel base of a mileage marker. A dirt road-no wider than two wheel ruts-touched the highway at that point, but there was no sign indicating where it would lead them. Gabriel pulled off his motorcycle helmet and it dangled from the bike’s handlebars as they followed the road. They were passing through the high desert-a flat, arid land with cactus, clumps of dead grass, and cat’s-claw acacia that scraped against the sides of the van. There were two junctions in the dirt road, but Gabriel found the green ribbons that guided them east. As they gained elevation, mesquite and gray oak trees began to appear and there were holly-green bushes with little yellow flowers that attracted honeybees.

Gabriel led them to the top of a low hill and stopped for a minute. What had looked like a line of mountains from the highway was actually a plateau that extended two enormous arms around a sheltered valley. Even from a distance you could see a few box-shaped houses half hidden in the pine trees. Far above this community, at the edge of the plateau, were three wind turbines. Each steel tower supported a rotor with three blades that was spinning like a massive airplane propeller.

Gabriel wiped the dust off his face with a bandanna, and then continued up the dirt road. He traveled slowly, glancing from side to side, as if he expected someone to jump out of the undergrowth and surprise them.

The combat shotgun was lying on the floor of the van, covered with an old blanket. Maya picked up the weapon, pumped a round into the firing chamber, and placed it on the passenger seat beside her. She wondered if a Pathfinder were really living in this place or if he had been hunted down and killed by the Tabula.

The road turned directly toward the valley and crossed a stone bridge that arched over a narrow stream. On the other side of the stream, she saw figures moving in the undergrowth and slowed down.

Four-no, five-children were carrying large stones down the path to the stream. Perhaps they were building some kind of dam or swimming hole. Maya couldn’t be sure. But they all stopped and stared at the motorcycle and the van. A thousand feet up the road, they passed a small boy carrying a plastic bucket and he waved at them. They still hadn’t seen any adults, but the children appeared quite happy to be on their own. For a few seconds, Maya envisioned a kingdom of children growing up without the constant influence of the Vast Machine.

As they got closer to the valley, the road became paved with brownish-red brick, slightly darker than the surrounding soil. They passed three long greenhouses with glazed windows, and then Gabriel pulled into the courtyard of a vehicle maintenance area. Four dusty pickup trucks were parked inside an open pavilion that was used as a repair garage. A bulldozer, two jeeps, and an ancient school bus were lined up near a wooden shed filled with tools. Brick steps led up the slope to a large pen filled with white chickens.

Maya left the shotgun concealed beneath the blanket, but slung the sword carrier over her shoulder. When she shut the door of the van, she saw a ten-year-old girl sitting on top of a brick retaining wall. The girl was Asian and had long black hair that touched her narrow shoulders. Like the other children, she wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a solid pair of work boots. A large hunting knife with a horn handle and a sheath was hanging from her belt. The weapon and long hair made the girl look like a knight’s squire, ready to grab their horses as they arrived at a castle.

“Hello there!” the girl said. “Are you the people from Spain?”

“No, we’re from Los Angeles.” Gabriel introduced himself and Maya. “And who are you?”

“Alice Chen.”

“Does this place have a name?”

“New Harmony,” Alice said. “We picked that name two years ago. Everyone had a vote. Even the kids.”

The girl jumped down from the wall and went over to inspect Gabriel’s dusty motorcycle. “We’re waiting for two possibles from Spain. Possibles live here for three months and then we can vote them in.” She turned away from the motorcycle and stared at Maya. “If you’re not possibles, then what are you doing here?”

“We’re looking for someone named Martin,” Maya explained. “Do you know where he is?”

“I think you better talk to my mom first.”

“That’s not necessary-”

“Follow me. She’s in the community center.”

The little girl led them across another bridge where the stream tumbled over red rocks and swirled around in pools. Large houses built in the Southwestern style were on both sides of the road. The houses had stucco outer walls, small windows, and flat roofs that could be used as patios on hot nights. Most of the houses were quite large, and Maya wondered how the builders had trucked in tons of brick and concrete over the narrow dirt road.

Alice Chen kept glancing over her shoulder as if she expected the visitors to run away from her. As they walked past a house painted pastel green, Gabriel caught up with Maya. “Weren’t these people expecting us?”

“Apparently not.”

“Who is Martin? The Pathfinder?”

“I don’t know, Gabriel. We’ll find out soon enough.”

They walked through a grove of pine trees and reached a compound of four white buildings around a courtyard with a stone fountain placed in the center. “This is the community center,” Alice told them as she pulled open a heavy wooden door.

They followed her down a short hallway to a schoolroom filled with toys. A young teacher sat on a throw rug with five children and read from a picture book. She nodded at Alice, then stared at the strangers as they walked past the doorway.

“Little kids have school all day long,” Alice explained. “But I get out at two o’clock in afternoon.”

They left the school, passed through the courtyard, and entered the second building. This contained three windowless offices filled with computers. In one of the rooms, people sat in separate cubicles, studying the images on computer screens while they talked on phone headsets. “Turn the mouse over,” said a young man. “Can you see a red light? That means…” He stopped for a few seconds and stared at Maya and Gabriel.

They kept moving, passing back through the courtyard and into a third building with more desks and computers. A Chinese woman wearing a white physician’s jacket came out of a back room. Alice ran up to the woman and whispered to her.

“Good afternoon,” the woman said. “I’m Alice’s mother, Dr. Joan Chen.”

“She’s Maya and that’s Gabriel. They’re not from Spain.”

“We’re looking for-”

“Yes. I know why you’re here,” Joan said. “Martin mentioned you at the council meeting. But there was no agreement. We didn’t vote on the issue.”

“We just want to talk to Martin,” Gabriel said.

“Yes. Of course.” Joan touched her daughter’s shoulder. “Take them up the hill to see Mr. Greenwald. He’s helping build the new house for the Wilkins family.”

Alice ran ahead of them as they left the clinic and continued up the road. “I wasn’t expecting a welcome committee when we showed up here,” Gabriel said. “But your friends don’t seem to be very hospitable.”

“Harlequins don’t have friends,” Maya said. “We have obligations and alliances. Don’t say anything until I can evaluate the situation.”

Bits of straw littered the road. A few hundred yards later, they reached a stack of straw bales placed next to a busy construction site. Steel rods had been embedded into the concrete foundation of a new house and the bales were being skewered on the rods like giant yellow bricks. About twenty people of all ages were working on the house at the same time. Teenagers wearing sweat-stained T-shirts were hammering rods into the bales with sledgehammers while three older people pinned a galvanized steel mesh to the outer walls. Two carpenters wearing tool belts were building a wood frame to support the home’s roof beams. Maya realized that all the buildings in the valley had been built in the same simple way. The community didn’t need massive amounts of brick and concrete, just plywood boards, wood beams, waterproof plaster, and a few hundred bales of straw.

A muscular Latino man in his forties was kneeling in the dirt, measuring a piece of plywood. He wore shorts, a stained T-shirt, and a well-worn tool belt. When he saw the two strangers, he stood up and approached them.

“Can I help you?” he asked. “Are you looking for someone?”

Before Maya could come up with an answer, Alice stepped through the doorway of the house with a stocky older man who wore thick eyeglasses. The man hurried over to them and forced a smile.

“Welcome to New Harmony. I’m Martin Greenwald. And this is my friend, Antonio Cardenas.” He turned to the Latino man. “These are the visitors we discussed at the council meeting. I was contacted by our friends in Europe.”

Antonio didn’t look happy to see them. His shoulders tensed up and he spread his legs slightly as if he was getting ready to fight. “Do you see what’s hanging from her shoulder? Know what that means?”

“Keep your voice down,” Martin said.

“She’s a goddamn Harlequin. The Tabula wouldn’t be happy if they knew she was here.”

“These people are my guests,” Martin said firmly. “Alice will take them down to the Blue House. Around seven o’clock, they can come over to the Yellow House and we’ll have dinner.” He turned to Antonio. “And you’re invited too, my friend. We’ll talk about it over a glass of wine.”

Antonio hesitated for a few seconds, then returned to the construction site. Acting as tour guide, Alice Chen escorted her visitors back to the parking area. Maya wrapped her weapons in the blanket and Gabriel slung the jade sword over his shoulder. They followed Alice back up the valley to a blue house on a side road near the stream. It was fairly small-a kitchen, one bedroom, a living room with a sleeping loft. A pair of French doors opened onto a walled garden with rosemary bushes and wild mustard.

The bathroom had a high ceiling and an old-fashioned claw-foot tub with green stains on the faucets. Maya stripped off her dirty clothes and took a bath. The water smelled faintly like iron, as if it came from deep in the earth. When the tub was half full, she lay back and tried to relax. Someone had placed a wild rose in a dark blue bottle above the sink. For a moment she forgot about the dangers around them and concentrated on this single point of beauty in the world.

If Gabriel turned out to be a Traveler, then she could continue to protect him. If the Pathfinder decided that Gabriel was just another ordinary soul, then she would have to leave him forever. Sliding beneath the surface of the water, she pictured Gabriel remaining at New Harmony, falling in love with a pleasant young woman who liked to bake bread. Gradually, her imagination pulled her down a darker path and she saw herself standing outside a house at night, staring through a window while Gabriel and his wife prepared dinner. Harlequin. Blood on your hands. Stay away.

She washed and rinsed her hair, found a bathrobe in the cabinet, and slipped down the hallway to the bedroom. Gabriel was sitting on the bed in the sleeping loft that occupied a half ledge in the living room. A few minutes later he got up quickly and she heard him swear to himself. More time passed and then the wooden ladder creaked as he climbed down to take a bath.

AT SUNSET, SHE rummaged through her travel bag and found a blue tank top and an ankle-length cotton skirt. When she looked in the mirror, she was pleased to see how ordinary she looked-just like any young woman Gabriel might have known in Los Angeles. Then she pulled up the skirt and strapped the two knives onto her legs. The other weapons were hidden under the quilt that covered the bed.

She came out into the living room and found Gabriel standing in the shadows. He was peering through a crack in the curtains. “Someone is hiding in the bushes about twenty yards up the hill,” he said. “They’re watching the house.”

“It’s probably Antonio Cardenas or one of his friends.”

“So what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Nothing. Let’s go find a yellow house.”

Maya tried to look relaxed as they walked back down the road, but she couldn’t be sure if someone was following them. The air was still warm and the pine trees seemed to have captured little patches of darkness. A large yellow house was near one of the bridges. Oil lamps glowed from the roof patio and they heard people talking.

They entered the house and found eight children of different ages eating dinner at a long table. A short woman with frizzy red hair was working in the kitchen. She wore a denim skirt and a T-shirt with the cartoon image of a surveillance camera and a red bar slashed across it. This was a resistance symbol against the Vast Machine. Maya had seen the symbol on the floor of a Berlin dance club and spray-painted on a wall in the Malasaña district of Madrid.

Still holding her spoon, the woman stepped forward to greet them. “I’m Rebecca Greenwald. Welcome to our home.”

Gabriel smiled and gestured to the children. “You got a lot of kids here.”

“Only two of them are ours. Antonio’s three children are eating with us plus Joan’s daughter, Alice, plus two friends from other families. The children in this community are constantly eating dinner at someone else’s house. After the first year, we had to make a rule: the child has to tell at least two adults by four o’clock in the afternoon. I mean, that’s the rule, but it can get a little frantic. Last week, we were making road bricks so we had seven muddy kids here plus three teenage boys who eat double. I cooked a lot of spaghetti.”

“Is Martin…?”

“My husband is up on the roof patio with the others. Just climb the stairs. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

They walked through the dining room to a walled-in garden. As they climbed the outer staircase to the roof, Maya heard voices arguing.

“Don’t forget about the children in this community, Martin. We’ve got to protect our children.”

“I’m thinking about kids growing up all over the world. They’re taught fear and greed and hatred by the Vast Machine…”

The conversation stopped the moment Maya and Gabriel appeared. A wooden table had been placed on the roof patio and lit with vegetable-oil lamps. Martin, Antonio, and Joan sat around the table drinking wine.

“Welcome again,” Martin said. “Sit down. Please.”

Maya made a quick assessment of the logical direction of an attack and sat next to Joan Chen. From that position, she could see whoever was coming up the staircase. Martin bustled around them, making sure they had silverware and pouring two glasses of wine from a bottle with no label.

“This is a Merlot that we buy directly from a winery,” he explained. “When we were first thinking about New Harmony, Rebecca asked me what my vision was and I said that I wanted to drink a decent glass of wine in the evening with good friends.”

“Sounds like a modest goal,” Gabriel said.

Martin smiled and sat down. “Yes, but even a small wish like that has implications. It means a community with free time, a group with enough income to buy the Merlot, and a general desire to enjoy the small pleasures of life.” He smiled and raised his glass. “In this context, a glass of wine becomes a revolutionary statement.”

Maya knew nothing about wine, but it had a pleasant taste that reminded her of cherries. A light breeze came down the canyon and the flames on the three lamp wicks fluttered slightly. Thousands of stars were above them in the clear desert sky.

“I want to apologize to both of you for the inhospitable welcome,” Martin said. “And I also want to apologize to Antonio. I mentioned you at the council meeting, but we never voted. I didn’t think you’d arrive so soon.”

“Just tell us where the Pathfinder is,” Maya said, “and we’ll leave right now.”

“Maybe the Pathfinder doesn’t exist,” Antonio growled. “And maybe you’re spies sent by the Tabula.”

“This afternoon, you were angry that she was a Harlequin,” Martin said. “And now you’re accusing her of being a spy.”

“Anything’s possible.”

Martin smiled as his wife came up the staircase carrying a tray of food. “Even if they are spies, they’re our guests and they deserve a good meal. I say, eat first. Let’s talk on a full stomach.”

Platters and bowls of food were passed around the table. Salad. Lasagna. A crusty wheat bread cooked in the community oven. As they ate dinner, the four members of New Harmony began to relax and talk freely about their responsibilities. A water pipe was leaking. One of the trucks needed an oil change. A convoy was going to San Lucas in a few days and they needed to leave very early because one of the teenagers was taking a college entrance exam.

Past the age of thirteen, the children were guided by a teacher in the community center, but their instructors were from all over the world-mostly university graduate students who taught on the Internet. Several colleges had offered full scholarships to a girl who had graduated last year from the New Harmony school. They were impressed by a student who had studied calculus and could translate Molière’s plays, but was also capable of digging a water well and fixing a broken diesel engine.

“What’s the biggest problem here?” Gabriel asked.

“There’s always something, but then we deal with it,” Rebecca explained. “For example, most homes have at least one fireplace, but the smoke used to hang over the valley. Children were coughing. You could barely see the sky. So we met and decided that no one could have a wood fire unless a blue flag was flying at the community center.”

“And are you all religious?” Maya asked.

“I’m a Christian,” Antonio said. “Martin and Rebecca are Jewish. Joan is a Buddhist. We’ve got a whole spectrum of beliefs here, but our spiritual life is a private matter.”

Rebecca glanced at her husband. “All of us were living in the Vast Machine. But everything began to change when Martin’s car broke down on the freeway.”

“I guess that was the starting point,” Martin said. “Eight years ago, I was living in Houston, working as a real estate consultant for wealthy families that owned commercial property. We had two houses and three cars and-”

“He was miserable,” Rebecca said. “When he came home from work, he’d go down to the basement with a bottle of scotch and watch old movies until he fell asleep on the couch.”

Martin shook his head. “Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality. I probably would have trudged down the same road for the rest of my life, but then something happened. I took a business trip to Virginia and it was an awful experience. My new clients were like greedy children without any sense of responsibility. At one point in the meeting, I suggested that they give one percent of their yearly income to charities in their community and they complained that I wasn’t tough enough to deal with their investments.

“Everything got worse after that. There were hundreds of police officers at the Washington airport because of some kind of special alert. I got searched twice passing through security and then I saw a man have a heart attack in the waiting lounge. My plane was delayed six hours. I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things that I didn’t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

“When I got back to Houston, it was about 110 degrees with 90 percent humidity. Halfway home, my car broke down on the freeway. No one stopped, of course. No one wanted to help me. I remember getting out of the car and looking up at the sky. It was a dirty brown color because of all the pollution. Trash everywhere. The noise of the traffic surrounding me. I realized that there was no reason to worry about hell in the afterlife because we’ve already created hell on earth.

“And that’s when it happened. This pickup truck stopped behind my car and a man got out. He was about my age, wearing jeans and a work shirt, and he was carrying an old ceramic cup-no handle-like something you’d use for the tea ceremony in Japan. He walked up to me and he didn’t introduce himself or ask about my car. He looked in my eyes and I felt like he knew me, that he understood what I was feeling at that moment. Then he offered me the cup and said ‘Here’s some water. You must be thirsty.’

“I drank the water and it was cold and it tasted good. The man pulled up the hood of my car, tinkered with the engine, and got it going in a few minutes. Now, normally, I would have just given this man some money and been on my way, but that didn’t feel right, so I asked him home for dinner. Twenty minutes later, we got back to my house.”

Rebecca shook her head and smiled. “I thought that Martin had gone out of his mind. He met a man on the freeway, and now this stranger is eating dinner with our family. My first thought was that he was a homeless person. Maybe a criminal. When we finished eating, he cleared the dishes and started washing them while Martin put the children to bed. The stranger asked me about my life and, for some reason, I began telling him everything. How unhappy I was. How I was worried about my husband and my children. How I had to take pills to go to sleep at night.”

“Our guest was a Traveler,” Martin said, looking straight across the table at Gabriel and Maya. “I don’t know how much you know about their power.”

“I’d like to hear anything you can tell me,” Gabriel said.

“Travelers have gone outside our world and then they’ve come back,” Martin said. “They have a different way of looking at everything.”

“Because they’ve been outside this prison we live in, Travelers can see things clearly,” Antonio said. “That’s why the Tabula are scared of them. They want us to believe that the Vast Machine is the only true reality.”

“At first, the Traveler didn’t say very much,” Rebecca said. “But when you were with him it felt like he could look inside your heart.”

“I took off work for three days,” Martin said. “Rebecca and I just talked to him, trying to explain how we had ended up in this situation. After the three days were over, the Traveler checked into a motel in downtown Houston. Every night, he would come out to the house and we started to invite some of our friends over.”

“I was the contractor who built the new bedroom in the Greenwalds’ house,” Antonio said. “When Martin called me, I thought he wanted me to meet some kind of preacher. I went over there one night and that’s when I met the Traveler. There were a lot of people in the living room and I was hiding in the corner. The Traveler looked at me for about two seconds and it changed my life. It felt like I had finally met someone who truly understood all my problems.”

“We learned about Travelers much later,” Joan said. “Martin contacted other people through the Internet and found out about the secret Web sites. The crucial thing to know is that every Traveler is different. They come from different religions and cultures. Most of them only visit one or two realms. When they return to this world, they have different interpretations of their experiences.”

“Our Traveler had visited the Second Realm of the hungry ghosts,” Martin explained. “What he saw there made him realize why people are desperate to feed the hunger in their souls. They keep looking for new objects and experiences that can only satisfy them for a short time.”

“The Vast Machine keeps us dissatisfied and frightened,” Antonio said. “It’s just another way to make us obedient. I gradually realized that all these things I was buying weren’t making me any happier. My kids were having problems at school. My wife and I were talking about a divorce. Sometimes I would wake up at three o’clock in the morning and just lie there, thinking about what I owed on my credit cards.”

“The Traveler made us feel that we weren’t trapped,” Rebecca said. “He looked at all of us-just a group of ordinary people-and helped us see how to make a better life. He made us realize what we could do on our own.”

Martin nodded slowly. “Our friends talked to their friends and, after about a week, we had a dozen families coming to our house every night. Twenty-three days after he arrived, the Traveler said goodbye and went away.”

“After he left, four families stopped coming to the meetings,” Antonio said. “Without his power, they couldn’t break away from their old habits. Then some other people went on the Internet and found out about Travelers and how dangerous it was to oppose the Vast Machine. Another month went by and we were down to five families. That was the core of people who wanted to change their lives.”

“We didn’t want to live in a sterile world, but we didn’t want to give up three hundred years of technology,” Martin explained. “What was best for our group was a mixture of high tech and low tech. It’s sort of a ‘Third Way.’ So we pooled our money, bought this land, and came out here. The first year was incredibly difficult. It was hard to set up the wind turbines so that we’d have our own independent power source. But Antonio was great. He figured it all out and got the generators working.”

“By that time we were down to four families,” Rebecca said. “Martin talked us into building the community center first. Using satellite phones, we were able to go online. Now we give technical support for the customers of three different companies. That’s the main source of the community income.”

“All the adults at New Harmony have to work six hours a day, five days a week,” Martin explained. “You can work at the community center, help at the school or in the greenhouses. We produce about a third of our food-our eggs and vegetables-and buy the rest. There’s no crime in our community. We don’t have mortgages or credit card debts. And we have the ultimate luxury: a great deal of free time.”

“So what do you do with that time?” Maya asked.

Joan put down her glass. “I go hiking with my daughter. She knows all the trails around here. Some of the teenagers are teaching me how to hang glide.”

“I make furniture,” Antonio said. “It’s like a work of art, only you can sit on it. I made this table for Martin.”

“I’m learning how to play the cello,” Rebecca said. “My teacher is in Barcelona. Using a computer cam, he can watch and listen to me play.”

“I spend my time communicating with other people on the Internet,” Martin said. “Several of these new friends have come to live at New Harmony. We’re now up to twenty-one families.”

“New Harmony helps spread information about the Vast Machine,” Rebecca said. “A couple of years ago, the White House proposed something called the Protective Link ID card. It was voted down in Congress, but we’ve heard that it’s currently being used by the employees of large corporations. In a few years, the government will reintroduce the idea and make it mandatory.”

“But you haven’t really broken away from modern life,” Maya said. “You have computers and electricity.”

“And modern medicine,” Joan said. “I consult with other physicians on the Internet and we have basic group insurance in case of severe illness. I don’t know if it’s exercise, diet, or lack of stress, but people rarely get sick around here.”

“We didn’t want to run away from the world and pretend to be medieval farmers,” Martin said. “Our objective was to gain control of our lives and prove that this Third Way of ours can work. There are other groups like New Harmony-the same mix of high tech and low tech-and we’re all connected by the Internet. A new community just started in Canada about two months ago.”

Gabriel hadn’t spoken for a while, but he kept staring at Martin. “Tell me something,” he said. “What was the name of this Traveler?”

“Matthew.”

“And what was his last name?”

“He never gave us one,” Martin said.

“Do you have a photograph of him?”

“I think we have one in the storage chest.” Rebecca stood up. “Should I…”

“No need for that,” Antonio said. “I’ve got one.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a leather memo book that was stuffed with lists, old receipts, and building plans. Placing the book on the table, he thumbed through the pages, then pulled out a small photograph.

“My wife took this four days before the Traveler left. He ate dinner at my house that night.”

Holding one edge of the photograph like it was a precious relic, Antonio handed it across the table. Gabriel took the photograph and stared at it for a long time.

“And when was this taken?”

“About eight years ago.”

Gabriel looked up at them. His face showed pain, hope, joy. “This is my father. He was supposed to be dead, destroyed in a fire, but here he is-sitting next to you.”