I went out of the room, motioning for them to let me go, and I stood in this dreamy little tropical garden. I could hear a waterfall somewhere, perhaps more than one, and that throbbing engine of the jungle, that engine of so many voices.
“Who are you, Voice?” I asked aloud. “Why don’t you tell me? I think it’s time, don’t you?”
Laughter.
Low laughter and that same distinctly male timbre. Right inside my head.
“What’s the name of the game, Voice?” I asked. “How many are going to have to die before you finish? And what is it you really want?”
No answer. But I felt certain someone was watching me. Someone was off in the jungles beyond the border of this garden, beyond this horseshoe of little thatched-roof luxurious guest suites, staring at me.
“Can you even guess what I suffer?” said the Voice.
“No,” I said. “Tell me about it.”
Silence. It was gone. I could feel its distinct absence.
I waited a long time. Then I walked back into the little suite. They were sitting together now on the foot of the bed which looked a bit like a shrine with all its draped white mosquito netting. David was holding Jesse. Jesse was drooping like a broken flower.
“Let’s do as Maharet asks,” I said. “Perhaps she has some plan, some plan she doesn’t dare confide in anyone, and we owe it to her and to ourselves to allow her time to work it. I need a plan myself. This isn’t the moment for me to act on my suspicions.”
“But what are your suspicions?” demanded Jesse. “You can’t think Mekare has the cunning to do all this.…”
“No, not Mekare. I suspect Mekare is holding the Voice back.”
“But how could she do that?” Jesse pressed. “She’s only the host of the Core.”
I didn’t answer. I marveled that she hadn’t guessed it. I wondered how many others really hadn’t guessed it. Or was everyone out there—Benji and all those calling him—afraid to say the obvious?
“I want you to come with us to New York,” said David. “I hope many others are already there.”
“What if that is exactly what the Voice wants?” I sighed. “What if it’s becoming ever more clever at controlling others like Khayman and enlisting them in its pogroms? We all gather in New York, and the Voice brings a cabal of monsters against us? Seems foolish to make it so easy for the Voice.”
But I didn’t say this with much conviction.
“Then what is your plan?” asked David.
“I told you. I need time to think on it.”
“But who is this Voice?” Jesse pleaded.
“Darling,” said David in a low and reverent voice as he embraced her. “The Voice is Amel, the spirit inside Mekare, and he can hear all that we’re saying to one another right now.”
A look of unspeakable horror swept over her face, and then a sudden collapse into deep quiet. She sat staring in front of her, eyes narrowing and then widening very slowly with her thoughts.
“But the spirit is unconscious,” she whispered, pondering it, her soft golden eyebrows knitting. “For millennia it’s been unconscious. The spirits said, ‘Amel is no more.’ ”
“And what is six thousand years to a spirit?” I asked. “It’s come to consciousness and it’s talking and it’s lonely and it’s vindictive and it’s confused and damned incapable, it seems, of really getting whatever it wants. Maybe it doesn’t even know what it wants.”
I could see David flinching, see his right hand rising just a little, and pleading with me to take the edge off, not to push it.
I stood stock-still looking out into the night, waiting, waiting for the Voice to speak, but the Voice didn’t speak.
“Go on to New York,” I said. “As long as it can rouse and control others, no place is safe. Maybe Seth and Fareed are headed there. Surely they know what’s happening. Get on the radio with Benji and call to Seth. Figure some way to disguise your meaning. You’re good at that. Call to any old ones who might help us. If there are old ones out there who can be roused to burn, there are others who can be roused to fight. And we do have some time after all.”
“Time? What makes you say that?” asked David.
“I just explained it,” I said. “It hasn’t figured out yet how to get what it wants. It may not even know yet how to articulate its own ambitions, plans, desires.”
I left them there.
It was day now on the European continent, but I didn’t want to stay in that wild, primitive, and devouring place. It made me bloody furious that I couldn’t get back home.
I went north towards Florida and made it to a fine Miami hotel before dawn. I rented a suite on a high floor with a balcony looking out over warm, sweet Biscayne Bay, and I sat out there, my foot on the ledge, loving the moist tender breeze, and looking at the huge ghostly clouds of the deep Miami sky and thinking about it.
What if I was wrong? What if it wasn’t Amel? But then I thought back, back to those first murmurings, “beauty … love.” It had been trying to tell me something momentous about itself and I had dismissed it. I had had no patience with its ravings, its desperate efforts. You don’t know what I suffer.
“I was wrong,” I said now, watching these huge tumbling clouds shift and drift past me. “I should have paid more attention to what you were trying to say. I should have talked to you. I wish I had. Is it too late?”
Silence.
“You too have your story,” I said. “I was cruel not to realize it. I was cruel not to think of your capacity for suffering.”
Silence.
I got up and paced the dark thick carpet, then I went back out on the balcony and looked at the lightening sky. Sunrise coming. Relentless implacable sunrise. So comforting to the world of mortal beings and animal things, and the plants breaking through the soil everywhere, and the trees sighing through a billion leaves. And so deadly to us.
“Voice, I am sorry,” I said.
I saw Pacaya volcano again, that image that had flashed repeatedly through Maharet’s mind, that fiery image. I saw in terror her carrying her sister upwards, like an angel with a child in its arms, until she was above that horrid gaping mouth of fire.
Suddenly I felt the presence of the other.
“No,” said the Voice. “It’s not too late. We’ll talk, you and I. When the time comes.”
“Then you do have a plan?” I asked. “You aren’t just slaughtering all your own progeny.”