And so on. Simon wondered how long this pretense at objectivity would be maintained. Good grief, he thought, we know all this.

No one wanted to name what was looming in the future. Elysium, he thought. Jerusalem. The illud tempus.

He adjourned to the kitchen when Mrs. Park summoned him. Had breakfast ever smelled this good before? Or was his body already different in some way?

She hovered at his shoulder. “Dr. Ackroyd—”

“Yes, Mary?”

“You had the dream?”

“We all did.”

His housekeeper confessed: “I told them—I told them yes.”

“Yes, Mary. So did I.”

She was obviously surprised. “But you were religious!”

“Why, Mary, I still am. I think I still am.”

“But then how could you answer them yes? If it’s all right to ask, I mean.”

He considered the question. Not a simple one. Many of his deepest beliefs had been challenged in the last thirty-odd hours. Some had been abrogated. Had he been tempted? Had he yielded to temptation?

He pictured the temple at Tenochtitlan, the arc and fall of the obsidian knives.

“Because of the Aztecs,” he said. “Sir?”

“Because there won’t be any Aztecs in the world anymore,” the Rector said. “That’s all finished now.”

The question had been posed in democratic fashion and it was becoming obvious that the yeas outnumbered the nays.

Mary Park had said yes, and so had her husband Ira; and they had known this about each other as soon as they woke and exchanged glances across the bedsheets. Ira was sixty this year, seven years older than Mary. All spring and all summer his emphysema had kept him housebound and weak as a child—his day a slow rotation of morning game shows, afternoon movies, evenings rereading the sports magazines that came in the mail. This morning he sat up and took a deep, experimental breath… then coughed, but not as deeply or painfully as the morning before. The air felt good. Sweet summer morning air, fresher than hospital oxygen. It was like a memory long forgotten and suddenly recalled. Do you want to live? Yes, by God! This morning he wanted very much to live. Even if it meant—in the long run—a certain strangeness.

Lingering in bed, Ira Park thought briefly about the possibility of going back to work at Harvest Hardware, where he had labored behind the counter for twenty-five years. Then he figured not. He had spent twenty-five years in retail sales and that was enough for one lifetime. Find something new to do for the next twenty-five years. Or twenty-five hundred.

He had been replaced at Harvest by Ted Keening, eighteen, who had been described by his high-school guidance counselor (in a private joke in the teachers’ lounge) as “not exactly college material. Too dumb for an academic scholarship, too fat for a sports scholarship, and too poor to buy his way in.”

Ted was a television junkie and still some twenty pounds bigger than he’d like, but he’d lost weight since he started working at the store. There was a fair amount of physical labor involved, hauling stock up from the basement and so forth. But Ted was beginning to realize that his future contained more than a career in measuring chain and weighing nails. He had awakened this morning with the knowledge that he didn’t have to die and that pretty soon no one would be liable to call him fat or stupid—which was how he had thought of himself even before he paused by the east window of the teacher’s lounge and overheard his guidance counselor’s joke. His reaction to this morning’s revelation wasn’t triumphant or gloating, just… he guessed “astonished” might be the best word. He didn’t completely understand what was happening. It was too big to understand. But he felt the future. His own. The world’s. The future had become a curious and wonderful thing. It shimmered on the horizon like a heat mirage, as hard to see, as achingly bright, but much more real.

He told his boss he might not be working at Harvest much longer. Mr. Webster, who had also said yes to an unvoiced question during his long sleep, told him he understood and that, as far as he could tell, there might not be hardware stores much longer. Which would be kind of a shame, given the years and money he had invested in this place. “But what the hell. I’m sixty-five years old. I’d have to give up the store one way or another. I guess I’d sooner walk away from it than get shut in a coffin. Ted, I think we’re all bound for something we can’t even guess at. It’s as strange a thing as I have encountered, and you probably feel the same. But unless you’re done with us already, would you mind ringing up these items for Mr. Porter?”

Billy Porter, Beth’s father, was a fairly steady customer. Usually he came in for car parts from the automotive section. Billy was always fiddling with his ten-year-old Subaru, a car that stalled at intersections no matter what he did to the choke or the idle or any other part he could get his hands on. Or he came in to buy shells for his hunting rifle, Billy being an occasional hunter whenever his friends offered to drive him up into the mountains. Today he had bellied up to the checkout with a selection of garden tools, which Mr. Webster found vaguely amusing: The idea of Billy down on his hands and knees in the mulch… planting tulips, maybe…

But maybe it wasn’t so funny. “Becky always kept the garden in such fine shape,” Billy said. “I’m ashamed how I let it go. I thought it wouldn’t take much cleaning up. A little work, what the hell.”

“Taking the day off?” Mr. Webster asked.

“Taking an easy shift, anyhow. I don’t know how much longer they’ll need me down at the mill.” Billy had also said yes.

Some few had not.

Billy’s daughter Beth had answered No!—had understood the offer and rejected it. She couldn’t say exactly why. Something in her had grown sullen and hard and had drawn away from this alien touch. No, not me. You won’t steal from me my dying.

But she woke knowing what she had turned down and it made her a little sad. The real question was, What next? What threats and possibilities lurked in this soon-to-be-new world?

She hiked down to the mall and called Joey Commoner from a pay phone.

Joey didn’t want to talk about it, but Beth understood from his cryptic responses to her careful questions that Joey had also said No.

Wouldn’t you know it? Birds of a feather, thought Beth. Well, damn. The last real people.

The last Aztecs, Rector Ackroyd might have said.

There were others.

Miriam Flett, who woke that morning with her agonies and virtues intact, but with a new idea of whose Hand had touched her during the night.

Tom Kindle, who had lived on the slopes of Mt. Buchanan for five years in a cabin without city electricity. He came into town summer weekends, when he operated a private ferry to the bay islands, but he spent his winters alone and liked it that way. What he didn’t like was the shape of the miracle he had been offered in the night. A lemming future, Kindle thought. No damn privacy.

One junior member of the City Council and one city clerk. A salesman at Highway Five Buick.

Matt Wheeler.

Chapter 9

Many Mansions

When he woke, Mart’s first observation was that his fever had broken. He felt clearheaded and alert—there was nothing left of the sedation of the night before. But something was wrong.