The Traveler

She climbed onto the front porch and knocked on the door. No one answered, but she could hear music coming from the backyard. Maya opened a side gate and found herself in a passageway between the house and a concrete wall. In order to free her hands, she left all her bags near the gate. Bobby Jay’s automatic was in a breakaway holster strapped to her left ankle. The sword case hung from her shoulder. She took a deep breath, prepared herself for combat, and went forward.

A few pine trees grew near the wall, but the rest of the backyard was stripped of vegetation. Someone had dug a shallow pit in the sandy ground and covered it with a five-foot-high wicker dome of sticks lashed together with rope. While a portable radio played country and western music, a bare-chested man covered the dome with blackened squares of tanned cattle hide.

The man saw Maya and stopped working. He was Native American, with long black hair and a flabby stomach. When he smiled, he showed a gap in his back teeth. “It’s tomorrow,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I changed the date for the sweat lodge ceremony. All the regulars got an e-mail, but I guess you’re one of Richard’s friends.”

“I’m looking for someone named Thomas.”

The man leaned down and turned off the radio. “That’s me. I’m Thomas Walks the Ground. And who am I talking to?”

“Jane Stanley. I just flew in from England.”

“I went to London once to give a talk. Several people asked me why I didn’t wear feathers in my hair.” Thomas sat down on a wooden bench and began to pull on a T-shirt. “I said I was one of the Absaroka, the bird people. You whites call us the Crow tribe. I don’t need to pluck an eagle to be an Indian.”

“A friend told me that you know a great many things.”

“Maybe I do or maybe I don’t. That’s for you to decide.”

Maya kept looking around the yard; no one else was in the area. “And now you build sweat lodges?”

“That’s right. I usually have one going every weekend. For the last few years, I’ve organized sweat lodge weekends for divorced men and women. After two days of sweating and pounding a drum, people decide they don’t hate their ex-spouse anymore.” Thomas smiled and gestured with his hands. “It’s not a big thing, but it helps the world. All of us fight a battle every day, but we just don’t know it. Love tries to defeat hatred. Bravery destroys fear.”

“My friend said you could tell me how the Tabula got their name.”

Thomas glanced at a portable cooler and a folded-up sweatshirt on the dirt. That was where the weapon was hidden. Probably a handgun.

“The Tabula. Right. I might have heard something about that.” Thomas yawned and scratched his stomach as if she had just asked him about a group of Boy Scouts. “Tabula comes from the Latin phrase tabula rasa-which means ‘a blank slate.’ The Tabula think the human mind is a blank slate when you’re born. That means the men in power can fill up your brain with selected information. If you do this to large numbers of people you can control most of world’s population. The Tabula hate anyone who can show that there’s a different reality.”

“Like a Traveler?”

Once again, Thomas looked at his hidden weapon. He hesitated, and then seemed to decide that he couldn’t grab it in time to save himself.

“Listen, Jane-or whatever your name is-if you want to kill me, go ahead. I don’t give a damn. One of my uncles was a Traveler, but I don’t have the power to cross over. When my uncle came back to this world, he tried to organize the tribes so that we would turn away from alcohol and take control of our lives. The men in power didn’t like that. Land was involved. Oil leases. Six months after my uncle started preaching, someone ran him down on the road. You made it look like an accident, didn’t you? A hit-and-run driver and no witnesses.”

“Do you know what a Harlequin is?”

“Maybe…”

“You met a French Harlequin named Linden several years ago. He used your address to obtain fake passports. Right now, I’m in trouble. Linden said that you could help me.”

“I’m not fighting for the Harlequins. That’s not who I am.”

“I need a car or a truck, some kind of vehicle that can’t be tracked by the Vast Machine.”

Thomas Walks the Ground stared at her for a long time, and she felt the power in his eyes. “All right,” he said slowly. “I can do that.”

21

Gabriel walked up the drainage ditch that ran alongside the San Diego Freeway. It was almost dawn. A thin line of orange sunlight glowed on the eastern horizon. Cars and trailer trucks raced past him, heading south.

Whoever had attacked Mr. Bubble’s clothing factory was probably waiting for him to return to the house in West Los Angeles. Gabriel had left his Honda back at the factory and needed another bike. In New York or Hong Kong-any vertical city-he could lose himself on the subway or in the crowd. But only homeless people and illegal immigrants walked in Los Angeles. If he were on a motorcycle, he would be absorbed by the traffic that flowed from the surface streets into the anonymous confusion of the freeways.