To my surprise, he’d expressed what I felt but didn’t know I felt, a sadness arising from the necessity of soon having to admit that I was fully of this beautiful but dark world no matter by what strange means I had been brought into it, that I was as vulnerable to corruption and as capable of evil as anyone. I, like everyone, would conduct my life on a high wire in the circus of this world, trying my best to retain at least a thin, bright filament of the incandescent innocence of childhood, always aware that I might not be the same person when I reached the far platform, and in fact might be someone I didn’t like. The best friend I’d ever had, Litton Ormond, died while still an innocent, little if at all corrupted by any acts of his own. But even if I could have continued living for decades in my studio apartment, writing sweet human-interest stories for a regional magazine, eating at Beane’s Diner, watching favorite movies again and again on my days off, taking my dry cleaning to Dirty Harry Clean Now, and yearning chastely for a romance with Sharona Shimski, philatelist and granddaughter of Julius, I couldn’t hold fast to the virtues of childhood and remain a fair-hearted boy forever. Considering what I would have to do at the Oasis and in places like it yet unknown, if I were eventually to encounter Litton Ormond in a life beyond this one, he would never recognize me by my unstained soul. I would be profoundly stained. I might even have changed so much that I had become a stranger to him, which seemed to be a terrible thing.
Panthea poked my chest with a finger, as if aware that I needed to be refocused by an insistent prodding. “Does Frodo mean anything to you?”
“The Lord of the Rings. I loved those books.”
“Of course you did. Was Frodo a hero?”
“Yes. A great one.”
“After he carried the One Ring all the way from the Shire to the evil realm of Mordor, to the place where it could be destroyed, the ring corrupted him. He put it on.”
“Only for a moment. He did nothing evil.”
“Because Gollum bit Frodo’s finger off to get the ring. Frodo would otherwise have succumbed to the lust for power.”
“I’d like to think he wouldn’t have.”
“Of course you would like to think it. That’s you. But Frodo lost his innocence and never was quite at home in the Shire again when he returned to it, never at home among the innocent hobbits.”
“I never liked that part. I wish he could have been at home among them,” I said.
“Of course you do. He was nonetheless a great hero. Had he not been, the hobbits would have perished, every one, and with them all others with any room for innocence in their hearts. Middle-earth would have been a place of endless horror. We’re guardians. Aluf shel halakha. Legis naturalis propugnator. We are called upon to be scourges. We belong in that honorable and essential place between innocence and corruption, a place called duty. Either get with the program, Quinn—or your fate will be an early, meaningless death.”
Wiping my face to slough from it sweat that was occasioned by more than the heat, blotting the hand on my shirt, I said, “You don’t pull your punches, do you?”
She smiled. “What would be the point?”
“‘Guardians.’ You said it might be a quest, but now you call us ‘guardians,’ which sounds like . . . for life.”
“I told you we might be in part on a quest to secure something, but at the moment I don’t know what the object of the quest is. I know for sure that being guardians is our reason for being, and that will never change.”
“Are we going into the Oasis to save someone?”
“You know as much as I do. Maybe someone waits to be saved. Maybe many someones. We’ll know when magnetism has taken us to the task.”
“Or,” I pressed, “are we going down there to kill someone?”
“Emmerich won’t peacefully abdicate. If he has a praetorian guard, perhaps we’ll have to kill many to save a few. We will know when we know.”
I wanted a clearer sense of our mission. However, I had been born into this world a mystery, and the clarity I wanted was not mine to demand. “All right. I’m with the program,” I said at last.
How odd it seemed that making a mortal commitment of mind and heart and soul should be at one and the same time deeply satisfying and terrifying. Movies hadn’t prepared me for that dichotomy. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that movies hadn’t prepared me for much of anything.
Bridget came to me and put an arm around my waist and had the wisdom to know that nothing she might say was better than her touch. From his luggage, Sparky retrieved spare magazines for his and Bridget’s weapons.