Blue Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

must multiply. We must grow until every animal and fish, every rock and drop of water is one. Everything must merge.”
    “Like an explosion?”
    “Yes. But slowly. Over thousands of years. But it will never be unless we can mate.”
    “Why can’t you?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I try,” he said. “But my blood is too strong. It devours the egg.”
    My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by then. There was a wooden bench behind Ordé and a pile of clothes or rags on the floor.
    He stood up and walked toward the door with the electric light shining behind it. I followed him into the light.
    It was a small dinette separated from the kitchen by a waist-high wall of shelves. A large table, topped with red linoleum, dominated the room, but it was the small corpse slumped back in one of the chrome chairs that captured my attention. It was Mary Klee, one of the Close Congregation. Head thrown back, dark foam down her chin. One eye was wide-open while the other was mostly closed. She wore jeans and a T-shirt.
    There was a bowl half filled with what looked like congealed blood on the table before her. I’m sure I would have been sick if I wasn’t still stunned by the power of Ordé’s words.
    “I hoped that if we shared blood, her cells might have been strengthened.” There was no apology in Ordé’s voice. “But even just to drink some of it, she died.”
    He stood for a long time then, pondering, I suppose, the future of his race — the generation of blue divinity. I sat down across from Mary, looking into her cockeyed stare. I’d never seen a corpse before, but then again, I’d never believed in God before Ordé told me that there was something higher than God.
    The silence continued for half an hour or more.
    “Can you drive a car?” he asked finally.
    I must have nodded.
    “Put her in the car in the backyard and take her somewhere,” he said.
    There was a junkyard in Alameda I knew. No one patrolled it at night and there were no fences. All the way out I wondered why I obeyed him.
    “It’s only words,” I said out loud. “Only words, but Mary’s really dead.”
    But I knew the answer. Those words had transformed me, made me believe in something that I could be a part of. Ordé didn’t mourn Mary. How could he? People were, at best, coma victims in his eyes. He hadn’t murdered her; he had tried to elevate her life.
    Detective Barber interrupted my thoughts.
    “I know you think that he’s your friend, kid,” he said. “But you knew those people too. If you think he cares more about you than them, you’re wrong. MacIlvey was his girlfriend and she’s dead.”
    “We’re all dead, Officer,” I said. “Some of us just don’t know it yet.”
    Barber shook his head at me. He was a good guy. At that moment I wanted to be like him. I wanted to forget the sad truth of Ordé’s prophecies.

Two
    P HYLLIS YAMAUCHI WAS AN astronomer working at Berkeley when the shaft of blue light came in through her laboratory window. A year later she heard about a fanatic who claimed that knives of blue cut through heaven to enlighten us. She came the following Wednesday. I had no special senses then, but I could tell that the meeting between Ordé and Phyllis Yamauchi was monumental.
    The tall blond fanatic came down from his rock and took Phyllis in his arms. She was crying and he made sounds and faces that expressed no emotion that I knew.
    Ordé picked up Phyllis, hoisting her with one arm as if she were a child and said, “God is not alone on this earth.”
    At first there was silence among us. Then I started to clap. After that the applause came, applause and cheers.
    It was Ordé’s power to see the past as it moved toward the future and to rouse the hearts of men with this knowledge.
    But others had seen the blue light also. Gijon Diaz, a man who loved puzzles. Reggie and Wanita Brown. Eileen Martel, who brought home dozens of wounded animals, all of whom recovered even from the worst injuries. And there