Sleep followed night across the Russian steppes, across rusting collective farms and lightless arctic forests, across the Urals and the Caucasus, sleep like an army moving west until it crossed the Finnish border, marched into Ukraine and then Romania, then Poland, where it met no opposition but the cool night air.

Sleep conquered China and rolled into Tibet, Pakistan, India, swept from Calcutta across two longitudes to Hyderabad.

Sleep took Africa in a space of hours. It moved westward from the Gulf of Aden into the dry hinterlands, took the dying children in the refugee camps and suspended them in darkness; followed the equator through jungles and grasslands and consumed the stony deserts of Egypt, Libya, Algeria; took its final subject in a fish shop in Dakar.

Dreaming unwound the cities of Europe, interrupting a river of human night noise that had run without surcease since the founding of Rome. Dreaming silenced Berlin and Leipzig; captured Naples and Milan; shut down the humming grids of Paris and Amsterdam; crossed the English Channel and conquered, finally, London, where a few frightened individuals had monitored the systematic dysfunction of the world with their shortwave radios, silent now, but who slept at last with everyone else, and with everyone else dreamed.

It was the same dream for everyone. The dream was complex, but the dream in its most fundamental form was a single thought, a question posed in six billion human skulls and more than three thousand languages.

The question was: Do you want to live?

Simon Ackroyd, D.D., Rector of St. James Episcopal Church since his appointment to Buchanan in 1987, woke from a long sleep thinking about the Aztecs.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the Aztec Empire had brought the practice of ritual sacrifice to such a pinnacle of efficiency that on one occasion in 1487 eighty thousand individuals—prisoners of war—were systematically killed, their beating hearts extracted with obsidian knives. The lines of victims stretched for miles. They had been caged, fattened, and sedated with a plant drug called toloatzin so they would endure the nightmare without struggling.

The Aztecs, when Simon read about them in college, had been the first real test of his faith. He had grown up with what he recognized now as a sanitized Christianity, a pastel Sunday School faith in which a gentle Jesus had redeemed humanity from the adoration of similarly pastel pagan idols—Athena and Dionysus worshiped in a glade. The problem of evil, in this diorama, was small and abstract.

There was the Holocaust, of course, but Simon had been able to rationalize that as a terrible aberration, the horrendous face of a world in which Christ commanded but did not compel.

The Aztecs, however… the Aztecs had lodged in his mind like a burning cinder.

He could not dispel the persistent, horrible vision of those lines of prisoners snaking through angular stone colonnades to the temple at Tenochtitlan. It suggested whole worlds of unredeemed history: centuries fathomless, Christless, and unimaginably cruel. He envisioned the sacrificial victims and thought: These were men. These were human beings. These were their lives, alien and terrible and brief.

And then, one night in Episcopal Seminary, he had dreamed himself talking with an Aztec priest—a bony, nut-brown man in a feathered headdress, who had misunderstood his horror as religious awe and who responded with his own attempt at a compliment. Our knives are trivial, the priest had said. See what your people have achieved. All your missile silos, your invisible bombers, each one an obsidian knife aimed at the hearts of tens of millions of men and women and children; each one a temple, painstaking, ingenious, the work of an army of engineers, contractors, politicians, taxpayers. We have nothing to compare, the Aztec priest had said.

And Simon had awakened with the chilly suspicion that his own life, his own culture, everything familiar and dear, might in its essence be as twisted and cruel as the stone altars and kaleidoscopic deities of the Aztecs.

His faith sustained him through college, through his divinity degree, through his appointment to this parish. He was a thoughtful Christian, and on his good days he suspected his doubts only made him stronger. Other times—when the winter fogs enclosed Buchanan, or on moonless summer nights when the pines seemed to take on the barbed and thorny aspect of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of the underworld, in the repulsive mural of Tepantitla—he wished his doubts could be abolished, annihilated in a light of faith so intense it would wash away all these shadows.

Then—last night—he had had a very different dream.

He woke tentatively, as if exploring a world made new and unpredictable. Which perhaps it was.

Simon felt the world wake up around him. It was waking, he knew, from a very dramatic and peculiar kind of sleep.

But the immediate world, his world, was still the same: same bed, same bedroom, same creaking wooden floors.

The fair weather had not broken. Simon opened the bedroom drapes. The rectory was a wood-frame house erected in the boom years after the Second World War, next door to the church, in the old part of Buchanan riding up the foothills from the bay. A modest house: its luxury was this view. The morning sky was luminous above blue ocean water. Wind stirred up foam on the crests of the waves.

The world was transformed but not new, Simon thought. Or rather, it was the human landscape that had been transformed. They are at work inside us now.

He shaved and wondered at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Here was a gaunt forty-five-year-old man, receding hair and graying beard, quite ordinary, but all of us, he thought, have become remarkable underneath. He dressed and padded downstairs in his bare feet. It was Simon’s special indulgence to go barefoot around the house on pleasant summer mornings. His housekeeper, Mary Park, disapproved. She would glare at his feet as if they were a display of obstinence or bad taste, then shake her head. In fact, Simon rather admired his feet. His feet were unpretentious, unadorned, unbeautiful. They appealed to his Protestant impulses. They were “plain” feet, as the Amish might say.

Mrs. Park knocked and entered as Simon was tuning his small television set in the parlor—actually the church’s television set, usually appropriated by the Sunday School for audiovisual displays. The rectory had been connected to cable last June at Simon’s expense and for the purpose of indulging his addiction to news broadcasts and PBS. He tuned in CNN this morning, where a dazed female announcer was describing the events of the last thirty-two hours in baffled generalities. Apparently Western Europe was still asleep. Simon had a momentary vision of the Earth as an animal, a bear perhaps, groggy after a winter’s hibernation, stumbling toward the light.

Mrs. Park offered a distracted “Good morning.” She ignored his bare feet for once and began to assemble his breakfast—two eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. It was a cholesterol sin he could never bring himself to renounce. In any case, he was hungry this morning: He had slept for a night, a day, and another night. He thought with some awe of the morning he had missed, of the silent afternoon no human being had seen.

Mrs. Park seemed to be keeping an eye on the television through the kitchen doorway. Simon turned up the volume for her.

“Evidence of this ‘enforced sleep’ is inescapable,” the newswoman was saying. “Reports of injuries, remarkably, are nil. Reports of the subjective experience suggest a direct, almost telepathic, contact with the orbiting Artifact.”