The Traveler

Gabriel turned around and realized that Sophia had been watching them. “We respect each other…”

“If a woman told me that, I would consider her to be extraordinarily dim-witted, but you’re just a typical man.” Sophia returned to the table and began to pick up the dirty dishes. “Maya likes you, Gabriel. But that’s absolutely forbidden for a Harlequin. They have great power. In exchange for this gift they’re probably the loneliest people in the world. She can’t allow emotions of any sort to cloud her judgment.”

As they stored the food and washed the dishes in a plastic tub, Sophia questioned Gabriel about his family. Her scientific training was evident in the systematic way she went about getting information. “How do you know that?” she kept asking. “What makes you think that’s true?”

The sun drifted toward the western horizon. As the rocky ground began to cool, the wind grew stronger. It made the parachute above them snap and billow like a sail. Sophia looked amused when Gabriel described his failed attempts to become a Traveler. “Some Travelers can learn how to cross over on their own,” she said. “But not in our frantic world.”

“Why not?”

“Our senses are overwhelmed by all the noise and bright lights around us. In the past, a potential Traveler would crawl into a cave or find sanctuary in a church. You have to be in a quiet environment, like our missile silo.” Sophia finished covering the food boxes and faced him. “I want you to promise that you’ll remain in the silo for at least eight days.”

“That seems like a long time,” Gabriel said. “I thought you’d know fairly soon if I had the power to cross over.”

“This is your discovery, young man, not mine. Accept the rules or go back to Los Angeles.”

“Okay. Eight days. No problem.” Gabriel walked over to the table to get his knapsack and the jade sword. “I want to do this, Dr. Briggs. It’s important to me. Maybe I can contact my father and my brother-”

“I wouldn’t think about that. It’s not very helpful.” Sophia brushed a king snake away from a storage bin and picked up a propane lantern. “You know why I like snakes? God created them to be clean, beautiful-and unadorned. Studying snakes, I’ve been inspired to get rid of all the clutter and foolishness in my life.”

Gabriel looked around him at the missile site and the desert landscape. He felt like he was about to leave everything and go on a long journey. “I’ll do whatever is necessary.”

“Good. Let’s go underground.”

41

A thick black power cable ran from the windmill’s electric generator to the missile silo. Sophia Briggs followed the cable across the concrete pad to a ramp that led down to a sheltered area with a steel floor.

“When they stored the missiles here, the main entrance was through a freight elevator. But the government took the elevator away when they sold the site to the county. The snakes get in a dozen different ways, but we have to use the emergency staircase.”

Sophia set her propane lantern on the ground and lit the wick with a wooden match. When the lantern was burning with a white-hot flame, she pulled up a hatch cover with two hands, exposing a steel staircase that led into darkness. Gabriel knew that the king snakes weren’t dangerous to humans, but it made him uneasy to see a large specimen gliding down the steps.

“Where’s he going?”

“One of many places. There are between three and four thousand splendida in the silo. It’s their breeding area.” Sophia went down two steps and stopped. “Do the snakes bother you?”

“No. But it does seem a little unusual.”

“Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings. Now come along and shut the door behind you.”

Gabriel hesitated a few seconds, and then shut the hatch. He was standing on the first step of a metal staircase that spiraled around the outside of an elevator shaft protected by a chain-link cage. Two king snakes were on the stairs in front of him and several more were inside the cage, moving up and down the old conduit pipes as if they were branches of a snake highway. The reptiles slithered past each other as their little tongues darted in and out, tasting the air.

He followed Sophia down the staircase. “Have you ever guided a person who thought he was a Traveler?”

“I’ve had two students in the last thirty years: a young woman and an older man. Neither one of them could cross over, but maybe that was my fault.” Sophia glanced over her shoulder. “You can’t teach people to be Travelers. It’s more of an art than a science. All a Pathfinder can do is try to pick the right technique so that people can discover their own power.”

“And how do you do that?”