The Traveler (28 page)

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 Moliere'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 `

.' 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."