The Birth of a new moon

Dulcie's face showed mostly relief, and wonder at her daring, and trepidation lest the sundered end should suddenly burst into life like some live thing or cartoon entity, spitting furiously and peeling back countless loops of yarn until her weeks of effort were reduced to a room-sized heap of kinked-up yarn.

It did nothing, just sat there with the two snug lumps at its end. Dulcie noticed the spool and picked it up. She worked the stub of yarn rope from its nails and thoughtfully pulled at the loose end. Around and around the yarn unraveled, each loop pulling free. When she held only a length of kinked chartreuse yarn in her hand, Dulcie dropped it into the wastebasket, put the spool and hook out of sight in her pocket, and bundled the now-severed rope into the bag.

"You know," Ana suggested, "when you're finished with the rug, if you decide you don't like it, you could always give it to Carla."

Chapter Eighteen

The word "cult" has become meaningless as a description of human behavior, so laden is it now with negative emotional baggage. Any small and vaguely eccentric group of religious seekers-after-truth is apt to find itself slapped with the label and instantly converted in the minds of outsiders into a potential People's Temple or Branch Davidian. This is a heavy burden to carry, and serves primarily to increase the level of paranoia in even the most level-headed group.

Of course, short words with hefty emotional impact are the stock in trade of the media. When a newspaper reporter describes a group as a "cult," it has nothing to do with the actual technical definition of that word. The media are not interested in matter-of-fact; that sells no papers. It speaks in polemic, describing not what is, but what has been in the past and, more to the point, how we as readers have to feel about it: outraged, righteous, and moved to demand action.

Cults—or as they should usually be termed, sects—can be vicious, stupid, paranoid, murderous, suicidal, incomprehensible, and hysterical; as indeed may any group of human beings involved in a quest and immersed in passion. They can also be gentle, contemplative sources of creativity and peace, but we do not hear much about those. We must keep firmly in mind, however, that most of the picture we see of cultic activity has been drawn for us by ex-members, and if in some cases their withdrawal from the community may be seen as a return to sanity, in other cases the ex-member's dissatisfaction may have its roots in political, personal, or even financial reasons. To expect a calm and balanced Image of their former life would be to hope for rational words from a jilted lover about the ex. Grains of salt must be applied with a generous hand—an exercise the news media has never shown much interest in. [laughter]

Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the FBI Cult Response Team. April 27, 1994

During the afternoon, Ana found a dentist in Sedona who would see to her teeth, and made an appointment with him for the following day. Teresa agreed to take her classes again.

Teresa also agreed that unless Jason had reappeared, it looked as if Ana would have to take Dulcie along, since the child showed no sign of relinquishing her hold on Ana. They ate dinner together, and then Ana borrowed an armful of bedding from the stores closet and made up a bed for the child in the corner of her room. She showed Dulcie where the bathroom was, supervised a bath and the brushing of teeth, and settled the child into her makeshift bed.

"I have some reading to do," she told her. "I'll turn out the lights in a little while."

"Ana?"

"Yes, Dulcie?"

"Jason always lets me read for ten minutes when I go to bed. We used to watch TV," she confided, "but then one of my mom's boyfriends broke it and so Jason said I could read instead,"

"Oh. Well, books are better anyway. Except that I don't know if I have anything you'd like,"

Dulcie promptly sprang up and trotted over to the bag of things they had fetched from her room, and came back to the heap of tumbled sheets and blankets with two well-thumbed paperback picture books. Ana laboriously remade the bed with her one hand, tucked Dulcie in again, and returned to the papers her students had written. For ten minutes all was quiet but for the turning of pages; then Ana told Dulcie it was time to put her books away and go to sleep.

"I have to go to the bathroom, Ana."

"You go ahead, then. Just try not to mess up your bed when you get up."

Five minutes later: "What are you reading, Ana?"

"I'm reading papers I had my students write about what they expected to see on their trip to Phoenix. Next week they'll hand in papers on what they did see."

"Did any of your students say they were going to see you hurt in a fight?" Dulcie knew all about what had happened to Ana; everyone on the premises knew.

"No, none of them so far has mentioned that."

"What does Jason's paper say?"

"Jason isn't my student, Dulcie. I don't know what he wrote for his teacher."

"Jason hit you, didn't he?" said a small voice.

Ana let the paper she was reading drop onto the table. "Jason's hand hit my mouth, somebody else's elbow hit my back, and I think Dov Levinski the math teacher stepped on my hand. No one was aiming for me, Dulcie. There were a lot of people moving quickly, and I just happened to be in the way."

"So you're not mad at Jason?"

"Of course not. I'm sorry that he lost his temper, and I'm sure he's sorry he did, too. But I'm not at all angry at him. I like your brother."

"I love Jason."

"And Jason loves you. Now go to sleep."

"Ana?"

"Yes, Dulcie."

"Is Jason okay?"

"Jason will be fine, Dulcie. There are just some things he needs to do, and then he'll be back."

A few minutes later: "Would you say my good night prayer with me, Ana?"

"Why don't you say it and I'll listen?"

"Now I lay me down to sleep," Dulcie began to chant. Ana winced. She had always considered it a sadistic idea to make a child's final words for the day "If I should die before I wake"; after Abby's death the thought had become truly appalling. She steeled herself, but when the second half of the poem came, it was, instead, Thy love guide me through the night, and wake me with the morning light." A much better version.

"Amen," Ana said.

"Ana, is the Lord like Don Quixote?"

"What?"

"The Lord. You said that Don Quixote's name meant 'lord'."

"Well, no. 'Lord' is the way we speak to noblemen, to knights and kings and very important people, and when we talk to God, we use the same word, because it's one of the most important words we have. God is much bigger than any king; it's just that language doesn't go far enough to describe how we feel about things as big as God. You could say that God is bigger than language."

"Is Steven God?"

"No! For heaven's sake Did somebody say he was?"

"I don't think so. But Amelia said that Steven sees everything and knows everything."

"Steven is a human being, so he can't be God. You could say—" Ana paused to choose her words. "You could say that Steven tries to act for God, that he knows something of what God wants and helps others know it, too. Steven may be a man of God, but he can't be God. No person can be God."

"Wasn't Jesus God?"

Ana had to smile. "That, my dear, is a question that better minds than yours or mine have dedicated their lives to thinking about. Now: sleep."

Five minutes later, in a tiny voice: "Ana?"

"What, Dulcie?"

"If you're not here when I wake up in the morning, you'll be back as soon as you've finished your walk?"

"That's what I told you. I promise I'll be back."

"Like Jason. He goes running in the morning sometimes."

"Yes, I know. I've seen him."

"Ana?"

"What?"

"I love you, Ana."

Dulcie was asleep before Ana could formulate an honest response to that last statement. She sat with her papers, listening to the child's even breathing, the occasional hitches and pauses in the rhythm, an indistinct mutter and chewing noise when Dulcie entered a dream.

I love you, Mommy. All the various meanings that simple phrase had once held. It could mean, Thank you, Mommy, for the great birthday party, or it could be a spontaneous and inarticulate recognition of the joy of human companionship. It had even, once or twice, been a preemptive strike, an attempt at disarming Ana's probable anger when she found out that something had been broken, spilled, or otherwise spoiled. I love you, Mommy.

Oh, God; what was she doing here?

Ana had no difficulty waking early the next morning; she had not actually been asleep. Shortly after she had turned out the light and gotten into bed, Dulcie woke crying. Ana took her into bed with her, warmed her back into sleep, and then, when the child was limp and deep, she had moved herself over to the bed on the floor. It was amazing how hard six blankets on the boards could be, and how vivid pain became in the dark. Her hand pounded, her lip hurt, Dulcie snored and muttered, and dawn gradually crept near.

It was still dark when she went outside, but the stars were beginning to fade. The Change members with early morning jobs were on their way to barn or kitchen, or to the cars that would take them to employment in Sedona or Flagstaff. Ana exchanged a couple of greetings but she did not stop to talk, just made her way along the road out of the compound.

She passed the boxy guest quarters, where four or five visitors now slept, and walked by the rocks where she had first met Steven and watched the sun come up over the compound. She stayed on the road, which was growing more visible by the minute, and went through the gate until she reached the heap of spilled rock one-half mile from the Change entrance, the heap that included one boulder that had sheared off in the fall to reveal a white face. In cross-section the white would appear as a vein, but now it was a bright flag visible even from the small planes that from time to time overflew the area.

Ana went over to sit atop the rocks. She gathered her knees to her chin and waited while the land took form around her. A car drove out of the compound, its headlights on, and Ana raised a hand. The lights dipped in response, and when it was past, when she was as certain as she could be that no one was watching, she reached underneath the white-marked stone for the papers she had told Agent Steinberg in Phoenix she needed.

Her fingers encountered only stone, sand, and one small slip of paper. She pulled it out, opened it, and saw written on it: I will be in Sedona today.

It was Glen's writing, though looking at it carefully she decided it was a faxed reproduction rather than the real thing. So, he was flying in to talk with her.

What could be so urgent that he would get on a plane and drive up from Phoenix or Flagstaff to see her in person? And even more disconcerting, once she thought about it, were the implications of how he knew she would be in Sedona. It was one thing to have a friendly ear in the local school district offices who could pass on the news of an impending field trip to the museum; it was quite another to have a legally sanctioned wiretap on the community's phones, which was the only way she could think of that he would know of her dentist appointment. Glen was not the sort to arrange for rogue surveillance, not if he had any other options. Had something happened to boost the Bureau's level of anxiety about the Change movement? And if so, why wasn't she aware of it here?

She crumpled the paper and finished her morning walk, tossing the small, tight wad among some thorny cactuses along the way. When she got back to her room and opened the door, Dulcie immediately sat upright on the bed, so wide-eyed and alert that Ana knew she had been fast asleep until the instant her hand hit the doorknob.

"Come along, Dulcinea, you slugabed," she said cheerfully. "There's a bowl of cereal with your name on it in the dining hall."

There was no sign of Jason at breakfast. When she was preparing to leave for her appointment with the dentist and with Glen, the teenager had still failed to emerge from hiding and Dulcie was looking even more miserable. Ana sat down on the bed so she could look the child directly in the face. Feeling like a traitor, or a wicked stepmother, she took Dulcie's hand in hers.

"Sweetie, I think you'd be happier if you stayed here and waited for Jason. You can help Amelia in the kitchen—she'd love to have you—and you'd be right here if Jason gets finished with his work. If you come with me, you'll have a long, cold ride in and out of town, and a long, boring wait in the dentist's office. He'll probably make you sit in the waiting room, too, while I'm in with him."

Dulcie wavered, torn between the possibility of Jason's restoration and the sure security represented by Ana. In the end, the deciding factor was something else entirely.

She asked Ana, "Will we go in Rosy Nante?" When Ana admitted they would, that was all Dulcie needed to hear. Ana drove to Sedona with Dulcie in the seat beside her.

As Ana had predicted, the dentist suggested firmly that Dulcie occupy herself with the children's books in the waiting room while he and Ana went back to mull over the choice between repairing the bridge and starting from scratch. In the end they did both, making temporary repairs on the shattered plastic and taking impressions of it and her mouth.

"No apples," he ordered. "Don't bite anything. And don't get in the way of any more fighting boys."

Ana thanked him distractedly, her attention caught by the voice she could hear coming from the waiting room. Sure enough, as she approached the nurse's station she could tell that it was Glen in monologue. No—he was reading something aloud, a story about a pony.

She made an appointment for Monday, four days away, which seemed quick work on the part of the lab that would be making the bridge. She said something appreciative to the receptionist.

"Yes," said the woman. "You're lucky—the new delivery man for the lab happened to be through today, and he said he'd wait for your impressions. That saves you two or three days. In fact, that's him out there, reading a story to the little girl."

It was indeed Glen, dressed in the uniform of a medical delivery man, bent over that ubiquitous magazine of pediatricians and children's dentists, Highlights for Children, its pastel monochrome cover at once dull and soothing. Dulcie was sitting a polite distance from this friendly stranger, back straight but her neck craned to see the illustrations. Glen turned the page, read to the end of the story, and closed the magazine. He handed it to Dulcie.

"Thank you, young lady, I enjoyed that. I don't think I've read one of those magazines since I was your age. May even have been the same one. Is this your friend Ana?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer he stood up and introduced himself in a voice that twanged of the South. "Glen York. And you're Ana—?"

"Wakefield," she supplied.

"Ana Wakefield. Your young friend here is a most talented listener. Doesn't talk much, but boy, can she listen."

"Glen is going to take your teeth to be fixed," said Dulcie.

"That I am, if the nurse here is ready. That them? Anything to sign? Right, that'll do me, then. You don't mind if the young lady hangs on to the magazine do you? And I don't suppose you could recommend a good coffee shop around here? I don't think I actually had lunch today. In fact, maybe this young lady and her friend Ana would like a cup of coffee or something. How do you take your coffee, Dulcie? Strong and black, am I right?"

Ana was amused to see that considering he was a man without children, he had struck on a note likely to loosen up the most reticent child. Dulcie very nearly smiled at his quip.

"She'd probably rather have an ice cream," Ana suggested. "Do you like ice cream, Dulcie?"

The girl nodded hugely. Ice cream was not high on the list of supplies in the Change walk-in freezers. As they walked into the café, Glen had shipped Ana's diary into her bag.

They sat at a booth with a booster cushion to raise Dulcie's chin above the table. Glen ordered a ham sandwich and black coffee, Ana a bowl of vegetable soup, and Dulcie had a grilled cheese sandwich followed by a hot fudge sundae complete with cherry. As they waited for the food, Dulcie read the borrowed magazine under the edge of the table. Glen opened his mouth, and then shut it firmly at Ana's vigorous shake of the head and her pointed glance at the seemingly oblivious child. He was seething with impatience, both to tell and to hear, but he could see that it would not do to speak openly in front of a wide-eared and obviously bright child. It might have to wait until Ana came to town again to retrieve her new bridge.

She began telling him, an amiable stranger, interesting things about the Change community, including that Dulcie was with her today because the child's big brother was away for a couple of days. He could tell from the faces of both of his table companions that there was more to it than that, he did not give vent to his questions. Ana looked relieved. Dulcie went back to her pictures.

Glen studied Ana over his coffee cup. She looked as banged-about as he had expected, having had Rayne Steinberg's report of all that had happened at the Heard Museum. Her hand was ugly and obviously giving her pain, but he had seen her in worse shape. She would recover.

Only at the very end of the meal did he manage to have an unobserved minute with Ana, when Dulcie was in using the toilet.

"Are you bugging the phones?" Ana asked him as soon as Dulcie was safely on the other side of the door.

"We just started. The branch in Japan is acting strangely and there's an uproar brewing in England over their kids, with Social Services sticking their noses in and Change resenting it. I thought the combination justified a greater degree of concern, and I found a judge here who agreed with me, that the presence of children here made it urgent enough to justify a tap." One bleak consolation after the Waco affair, Glen reflected, was the way the name made judges want to reach for their pens. "What's this about alchemy?"

"It's too complicated to go into it now. Did you get me the books?"

"I planted them in the used-book store, just down the street. Pick them up when you leave. Look, are you all right?"

"I'm fine. A little sore, that's all."

"I meant… you're sure?" Truth to tell, Glen thought, she did look fine beneath the bruises, healthy and strong and considerably more alive than she usually did when she was immersed in one of these operations. Change obviously agreed with her. Which was, somehow, worrying. Still, there was no time to dig into it now, because the door to the ladies' room was opening. "And there's the young lady now. Dulcie, it was a real treat to meet you, and I hope I come across you again someday. Good-bye, and good-bye, friend Ana."

He waved and strode out whistling, Agent Glen McCarthy in his full Uncle Abner mode, the talkative, ever-genial Southerner. Ana suppressed a smile and looked down at Dulcie. "I've got another idea that might be an even bigger treat for you than ice cream," she said.

It turned out Dulcie liked bookstores just as much as she liked ice cream, and while Ana searched out the books on alchemy that Glen had arranged there for her, Dulcie studied the riches of the children's corner, where she chose the three books Ana had said she could have, and then a fourth one, asking tentatively, "For Jason?"

Ana laughed and said she could have four, and she put them with her own three choices (Glen had left six or seven, but these were closest to what she wanted) and paid for them with her virginal credit card. It was accepted without hesitation. As she was picking up the bag, a thought occurred to her.

"Do you by any chance have a copy of The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll?"

"Let me see," said the cheery young woman. She went to the shelves and returned with a copy of Alice. "This is all we have at the moment."

"Can you order me one?"

"Picture book or text?" she asked, already calling up the title on her computer.

"Picture would be nice, if there is one." Ana glanced at Dulcie, who was immersed in a book and not paying any attention to the conversation. "And hardback, if there's a choice."

"I can have it day after tomorrow."

"Great," said Ana, and told her she'd be in on Monday.

Back in Rocinante's passenger seat, Dulcie buried her nose in her picture books, spelling out words for Ana to translate, until the light failed and she had to put them away. She fell asleep, and did not even stir when Ana stopped the bus to retrieve a thick blanket from the back to wrap around her. Ana drove on with the window open, battering herself with fresh air to keep the weariness at bay. The child was still asleep when they bumped into the compound parking lot, but she woke and gathered up her books to carry them to Ana's room.

They were halfway to the central buildings, when Dulcie gave a loud cry, let her precious books fall to the ground, and flew into Jason's embrace. The boy wrapped his arms around his sister and buried his face in her hair, clinging to the child as if she were the last living thing on earth.

Chapter Nineteen

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

Ana slept very well that night. At dawn she continued her habit and, putting one of the books she had bought the day before into her pocket, she climbed the red rocks and watched the sun come up over the compound.

Steven did not turn up.

She went down to breakfast and read the book while she carefully chewed her cut-rate cornflakes, banana, and yogurt. No one commented on it, although she was certain that at least two of the higher initiates saw it. Both of them glanced at her quickly and then moved away.

She conducted her classes, talked about the essays the students were writing about the museum, reviewed for a test she was giving the next week, and handed back the essays they had already done. During lunch and while she was in class she left the book on her desk, its title facing up for all to see, but Steven did not come to see her, and no one seemed to take notice of the topic.

Saturday morning came and went atop the red rocks, and Steven did not approach her, and the day passed as Saturdays did around Change, with hard physical work that included the schoolchildren and a night of relaxation, with basketball and communal music in the dining hall.

Sunday morning came, and Steven was there at the red rocks when she arrived, watching the light creep over the compound and, she knew, waiting for her. She smiled a very quiet smile, put the book down next to her knee, crossed her legs, and surrendered herself to the moment.

The sun rose and grew in warmth, and half an hour later, Steven was the first to stir. "Your hand is healing," he said, his eyes still closed, his face raised to the sun. It was not a question, but a statement from an all-knowing observer of human frailty.

"It's much better, thank you."

"You have some interesting reading material, Ana Wakefield." His eyes were still shut.

"This?" She stretched out her legs and picked up the battered volume, which looked as if Glen had rescued it from a Dumpster before selling it to the woman in Vortex Books for fifty cents. The inside was in better condition, and to her relief had barely been written in by the previous owner: Volume 12 of the collected works of Carl Jung, a group of related essays entitled Psychology and Alchemy.

"Have you read any of Jung's writings?" she asked him innocently, very sure that he had.

He stirred, and she felt him looking at her. "Some of them."

"Well, I was thinking about the things you were talking about the other day before meditation, about the need for pressure in striving for personal transformation. Somewhere Jung says something along the lines of enlightenment being found at the point of greatest stress. That got me thinking about Jungian psychology in general and the goal of transformation, and I remembered that he wrote a couple of things about the symbolism of alchemy as a paradigm for change. When I was in Sedona the day before yesterday I found this book of essays in the used-book store. I'll have to see if I can hunt down the other ones." She stopped leafing through the book and made herself meet his eyes, making absolutely certain that she gave him only the face of Ana Wakefield, earnest Seeker Ana with no challenge or knowledge or academic superiority in it. She was in luck, because the sun was rising behind her, and whatever it was he saw in her face, it was not Professor Anne Waverly.

"I have it. You may borrow it if you like," he said. "You might find volume fourteen of interest."

"That's the one with the Latin title, isn't it? Mysterium Coniunctionis? Am I right, then, in thinking that Change—the Change movement—incorporates some of the ideas and symbolic processes of the alchemical tradition?"

He said something under his breath.

"I'm sorry?" she said. He rose fluidly to his feet, although he had been twisted up on the hard, cold rock in full lotus position for at least an hour.

"It's time we were going," he said. She stood up, more slowly than he had, and when she looked around she saw his head disappearing down the hill. He descended the rough terrain with the ease of a cross-country runner, leaving her to pick her way among the rocks and bushes and wonder if she had heard him correctly, and if so, what he could have meant by "not just symbolic".

Rather to her surprise, he was waiting for her at the bottom of the hill, the very picture of a man in deep thought as he stood with head bent and hands clasped behind his back. She came to a halt, not before him as a suppliant would but next to him so he had to turn his shoulders as well as his head to shoot her his piercing glance.

"Ana," he pronounced, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

She couldn't resist. "Learning," she said, and for the first time she saw Steven Change disconcerted. He blinked.

"I'm sorry?" he demanded, impatient at her apparent non sequitur.

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again." That is," she added,"supposing you were referring to Alexander Pope. It's a common misquotation, and granted it's a subtle distinction, but as an English teacher, I feel obligated to be pedantic."

God, she thought, in a minute I'll be waving my cane and calling him a young whippersnapper. "I admit, though, that I've often wondered what a Pierian spring is." Actually, she knew quite well what the word referred to: an area in Macedonia where the muses were worshiped, it was used as a classical romanticization of learning. Steven did not seem to know this, however, and merely allowed his ruffled feathers to be soothed by her disarming admission.

"In either case, having an insufficient command of a path of learning can be hazardous," he said firmly, and began to walk again. She fell in at his side.

"A person has to begin somewhere," she protested.

"Very true. And in some cases, personal exploration that allows for random discoveries and spontaneous growth is for the best." He paused, choosing his words carefully—or perhaps considering how much to tell her. "However, with the ideas that lie at the heart of Change, such unguided stumblings are more likely to result in disaster than in enlightenment. There are immense forces at work here; a misstep can be very dangerous, for you personally and for those around you."

Ana looked at the unrevealing side of his face, wondering uneasily if that had been a threat. She reached across with her right hand and laid it on his arm, stopping him and causing him to face her. No, there was no explicit threat in his eyes that she could see, just great seriousness. There was nothing to do but grab the ball and run, and see where it took her.

"Are you telling me that you are doing alchemy here?" she asked bluntly, an unfeigned edge of incredulity in her voice. "Is that what you're saying? That I mustn't mess around in things I don't understand because I could, in effect, blow up the laboratory?"

He stood for a long time studying her. Finally he said, "Yes, I am."

"But—you're not talking about real alchemy," she said. "Not furnaces and alembics and actual gold."

"The Philosopher's Stone," he said reverently. He put his hand up to his collar and reached inside for the sturdy gold chain he wore and pulled at it. Up came the chain, and on the end of it a gleaming drop of pure soft gold about the size of a small marble, an uneven shape smoothed by years of wear under his clothing.

She reached out a finger to touch it and drew back. "You mean—"

"I created this, under the guidance of my own teacher. Three of us here have transformed lead into gold, and twelve have transmuted silver."

Ana sat down abruptly on a convenient boulder. She did not have to feign astonishment; the man clearly believed. If she was any judge of charlatans at all, this man, this trained scientist, truly believed that he and who knows how many others had actually changed the atomic structure of one metal into another. Nothing metaphorical about it; "not just a symbol," indeed. A phrase from the other book she had been reading came vividly to mind: "The Middle Ages did not have a monopoly on credulity." She did not think Steven would care much for that quote.

Suddenly, all the oddities she had noticed about the upper echelon of Change fell into place: the calloused hands and hard muscles on men and women who rarely worked out of doors; Suellen's day-long absence, to reappear exhausted, famished, and glowing with an inner light; the small burn on her arm, very like Amelia's large and oddly placed scar, more easily explained by nearness to an open flame than to a cook stove. Alchemy was hard labor around hot flame—and glass: the tiny scars on Daniel Carteret's face could easily have come from an exploding glass vessel.

She drew in a breath and blew it out between puffed cheeks. "Wow."

"Alchemy has been a secret doctrine for millennia, precisely because of the value of this." He held out the pendant, letting it swing back and forth in the gesture of a stage hypnotist before he caught it up and tucked it back under his collars. "Alchemists who created gold were doing so as a by-product and an objedification of the internal transformation they were undergoing, but the gold was nonetheless there. That's why they welcomed and encouraged the skepticism, even ridicule, of the outside world—it kept them safer.

"But even without the external threat from greedy men, Ana, alchemy has always been a dangerous occupation. Explosions in laboratories were common when chemicals were heated carelessly. Impatience, Ana. Impatience is the killer of the would-be alchemist. You have it in you to do a great Work, Ana; I can feel it. But you must submit to guidance. You have to work slowly, or it will all blow up in your face."

There was the threat again, but still she did not feel any malice behind it. Instead, Steven gave her a smile of great sweetness and wisdom, and then rose and walked away. She watched him go, watched him shrink into the distance and finally leave the road and disappear behind a building. Then she herself rose, turned and walked out into the desert.

She was gone for seven hours, long enough for people to notice her absence and approach Steven about it. She walked out into the scrub, down into the dry wash and out again before she turned up to the hills that lay a few miles off, and there she sat and thought and came to some uneasy decisions.

Ana rarely outstepped the bounds of her role during the course of her investigations. Her success depended on blending in, on being who she appeared to be and acting strictly as that person was expected to act, at all times, until she even thought as that person would. Her means of gathering information was more along the lines of passive receptivity than picking locks in the dead of night. Not only did illicit snooping scare her shitless, it was too dangerous to her investigation. From the very beginning, Glen positively forbade it (even as he taught her the rudimentary skills) not only because it was a threat both to her personally and to the continuation of the case, but because anything she discovered was apt to be contaminated or otherwise rendered useless as evidence: The FBI took its rules of evidence very seriously indeed.

However, this case didn't seem to be going like any of the others, and Ana did not know what to make of that. Anne Waverly kept intruding into her thought processes at the most inconvenient times, and this seemed to be one of them: Anne badly wanted to know what was behind Change.

During the course of that long day in the dry hills, Ana gradually shed her reluctance. She needed to know what Steven had up his sleeve; she had somehow to shortcut the lengthy initiation process involved in any esoteric teaching; she itched to see what he was hiding; but mostly she wanted to convince herself that Steven did actually believe that he had made gold, and was not using the pendant he wore as a subtle joke along the lines of the claim he had made to levitate up to the red rock viewing platform.

Also, she admitted to the flock of small gray birds that had settled around her, Steven's superiority grated on her. Ana liked to win as much as the next person, and during these investigations it pleased her, tickled some deep part of her nature, to know that she held the upper hand—even if her opponent never found out about it and the only person to appreciate her was Glen. Steven was a prig and it would be a pleasure to undermine him; that alone would be justification enough.

Most important, though, was the niggling suspicion that there was something funny about Change. She caught the thought and it made her laugh aloud, startling a small desert iguana that had settled down near her boot. Come on, Ana: what could possibly be funny about a community whose belief system was based on the manipulation of atomic structure to transmute material? Sure, medieval alchemists had believed in the possibility of creating gold from lead, but they had no means of testing, no analytical apparatus capable of distinguishing true gold from sulphurous mercury. To find seventeenth-century ideas coexisting with silicon chips, electron microscopes, and the robotic exploration of Mars said a great deal about man's deep need to believe that he had some control over his environment. Witchcraft, magic, and alchemy. No funnier than a belief in a personal God, was it?

Still, there was something she didn't understand yet about Change, some group dynamic she didn't have her finger on. Something told her that it was represented by Steven's necklace. Something also told her that she would not find out by simply waiting to be told.

She got to her feet and slapped the dust from her rear end. She wanted to know what was literally underlying the Change community, and tonight she would see if she could find out. Nothing dramatic, no blackened face and silken rappelling rope, just some judicious nosing about where she was not supposed to be. Ana Wakefield, after all, seemed to be the kind of pushy female who might well do that. If she was caught—well, she would tell them that she was nosy. Steven would believe that.

But she would try very hard not to be caught.

When she got back to the compound, she went straight to her room, where she drank about half a gallon of water and stood under the shower for twenty minutes, feeling like one of those desert plants that unfurl from a state of desiccated hibernation with the rains. It was stupid to go out in the desert without water. A few weeks later in the year the consequences might have been serious, but the day had been cool and overcast and she emerged from the shower only slightly sunburned and a little trembly.

She put on clean clothes and went over to the dining hall, making straight for the serving line, where she filled a plate, put two large glasses of fruit juice onto her tray, and got to work on it. She did not look up from her dinner until half of the food was inside her, when she paused for a breath and a long drink of juice. She glanced distractedly around the room over the rim of the glass, still more interested in nourishment than in her surroundings, but she put the empty glass down slowly, and when she resumed her fork, she did so with the air of a person who is not really tasting her food.

At first she thought that her conversation with Steven had made the rounds and her precipitous introduction to the community's secrets had set her apart. When she caught two of the members who wore silver chains around their necks staring at her, only to have them shift their eyes and pointedly resume their conversations, she felt certain of it.

However, the other twenty or so other early diners neither wore necklaces nor seemed to find her worthy of attention, yet they, too, seemed subdued, even troubled. She appeared to be the only person in the room with an appetite.

She finished her food and cleared her dishes, but instead of leaving them in the trays she took them on through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. Suellen and another woman were there already up to their elbows in soapsuds, and Amelia (who shot her the same speculative look that she had received from the two initiates outside) was spooning the last of the food into the serving trays. Ana put her plate among the stack on Suellen's right, and then reached for a single rubber glove to help out, pulling it onto her good hand with her teeth.

"Man," she said, "it's so quiet out there, I thought I was too late for supper. Did something happen?"

"You didn't hear?" Suellen asked.

"I was gone most of the day."

"Some of the children in England have been taken away." Her voice was both genuinely troubled and secretly cherishing being the bearer of bad news, which Ana had counted on.

"Taken away?" Ana exclaimed. "Do you mean they've been kidnapped?"

"By the government."

"What?"

"What Suellen means," said Amelia's disapproving English accent from behind them, "is that Social Services has got involved in a custody dispute between one of the members and her ex-husband and has temporarily removed the two children while the accusations of the father are being investigated. It has happened before." And, her voice clearly said, it would happen again.

"Still," said Ana, "it sounds unpleasant for the mother."

"Unpleasant, yes, but hardly the end of the world," Amelia said repressively. They had to wait until Amelia left the kitchen, but when she did, Suellen was happy to fill Ana in. The chief trouble, it appeared, came about because although the mother was British, the father who was trying to pry his children free from the hold of the "cult" was an American. The dual citizenship of the boy and girl confused matters no end and, being a disgruntled ex-member of Change himself, the father was more than willing to drag in every authority he could, from Social Services and the American embassy to the tabloids. Not, Ana agreed, a pretty picture, but she had to agree with Amelia that it would probably quiet down in a few days, particularly if the British authorities had the sense to play it low key.

She worked one-handed alongside the other two women, carrying in plates and wiping surfaces until they had finished the heaps of pans, and then she fixed herself a cup of tea (one of the perks of working in the kitchen) and went to use the toilet before the evening meditation.

Steven began his talk by mentioning the situation in England. He sounded untroubled, though, and his attitude proved contagious. The chant was a poetic image if an awkward phrase: "Boiling water, peaceful clouds." When meditation was over, Ana slipped away and went to her room, and there to bed.

Setting the tiny alarm on her wristwatch for one A.M.

Chapter Twenty

Modern Religious Expressions 85

We Were All Once Cultists

Anne M. Waverly

Duncan Point University

All religions were once new, and all established religious were once a brash hodgepodge of ideas and images snatched and cobbled together in an attempt to put revelation into words. The prophet Mohammed built his house on the foundations of The Book, using bricks made of his own native soil; Jesus the Messiah was a believing Jew with a new vision of man's relationship with God; Judaism itself bears clear imprint of the people who worshipped in the land before they came, the psalms and images of Canaanite gods, even to the very shape of its Temple.

Archaeologists glory in (and despair over) the immutability of stone and the thrifty habits of one generation of builders to make use of the decrepit structures of previous generations in building anew: Gravestones are turned into paving stones, inscribed triumphs reversed to become part of a blank wall, and Roman markers tumble out of a medieval wall under demolition. Theological historians take equal joy in the discoveries of one tradition taken up and used by another: a theophanic hymn to Yahweh that preserves the cadence of a song dedicated to the storm-god Baal; a set of characteristics-beard, tent, age, wisdom—that speak of the authority of the God of the Israelites which are also seen in the physical description of the Canaanite El; the Gilgamesh story and certain mythic elements in the Old Testament stories

From "We Were All Once Cultists," by Anne M. Waverly, in Modern Religious Expressions, ed. Antony Makepeace, University of California Press, 1989

The outside lights were shut down at midnight, except those along the road between the gate and the parking lot and one hanging from the front of the barn, the purpose of which Ana had not been able to figure out. The halls of the buildings remained lighted, but anyone who needed to negotiate the paths after that time was expected to use one of the wild assortment of flashlights that were kept near the outer doors.

Ana took her own, pencil-sized flashlight with her as she let herself out of the sleeping building.

She ducked into the shadows away from the door to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The night was clear and cold—not as cold as when she had first come to Change a month ago but still with the crisp, dry temperature drop of the desert. A waning moon lay near the surrounding hills, casting enough light to give shape to the buildings now that her eyes were adapting, and enabling the side of her vision to pick out the white stones that edged the walkways. The sky was black from one horizon to the other with no city lights to dilute the hard brightness of the stars. In the distance, coyotes were chattering their eerie call at the moon, and one of the bats that lived among the eaves of the barn darted overhead.

Other than that, there was no sound, no movement.

Ana was wearing the thick Ecuadorian socks she had bought that first day in Sedona, which had the combined virtues of complete silence on the gravel and the innocent evocation of someone who couldn't be bothered to put on her boots just for a brief nocturnal stroll. She also wore the dark blue sweat pants and sweatshirt she habitually slept in, and her hair was uncombed from the pillow. The small flashlight in the pocket of her sweats was a natural thing for anyone to take on a restless night excursion, and she carried nothing else except one crumpled tissue.

She stepped away from the dormitory and onto the path, winced as her heel came down on a sharp rock, then walked quickly across to the hub building. The austere planting of cactuses and shrubs looked alarmingly like men standing by the path. The boojum tree loomed large and pale, although she was expecting it, and it took some effort not to turn and check on the still figures as she went past them.

Inside the building, she scurried across the dimly lit foyer, feeling as exposed as a rabbit in headlights, and went through both sets of swinging doors into the meditation hall. There she paused, catching her breath. The room was pitch black, with only the faintest light coming from right up at the top, where the moonlight on the translucent dome showed as a vague glow. She stood listening for a couple of minutes, and nearly leapt out of her skin when a small rustle and crackle came out of the dark not twenty feet away. Dry-mouthed and with pounding heart, she strained to hear, and when it came again she nearly laughed aloud in relief: It was the last coals in the suspended fireplace, collapsing in on themselves. She snapped on the flashlight, playing it around and above to confirm that she was alone, and then went forward to investigate.

The night she had come here looking for Jason she had approached the great central stem of the structure that supported the fireplace and Steven's platform. She had pounded on it with her fist in anger, hoping for a loud echo to jolt Steven from his trance, but the dull thud it gave indicated a heavy degree of insulation inside the pipe. What she had only dimly noted at the time, but which had returned to niggle at her, was that despite the insulation, the pipe had felt warm.

The fireplace above it could conceivably have sent its heat down along the base. It was, in fact, the most logical explanation. However, Ana had seen the original plans for this structure, submitted to the county planning department, and she was quite certain that there had been a partial basement included in the drawings. Heat could travel down from an overhead fire, yes, but heat more naturally traveled upward. Was there just a central heating boiler down beneath the meditation hall? Or was there something else?

An alchemical laboratory, perhaps?

Ana left the meditation hall and went back through the main foyer and into the school offices. She had been around the school long enough to know the handful of places where a door to the basement might be hidden. It was not in any of them: not in the back of the storage closet in Teresa's office, not in the men's rest room, not in the cluttered depths of the janitorial closet. She rather doubted that the entrance would involve ripping up the carpeting or rotating an entire wall with a secret switch, but she found herself pushing at the spines of the books on Teresa's shelves, just in case the switch was hidden there. She made herself stop that pointless exercise: It was nearly three o'clock, and Change with its combination of rural demands and long-distance workers began to stir by five. She had no time to waste, and it did not seem that the entrance was here.

That left either the meditation hall or upstairs, and she had no wish to venture up among the sleeping authorities. She went back out to the school entranceway and from there into the great circular hall, and stood playing the beam of her light over the walls, thinking hard. After a minute, she started to climb the platforms up the side of the hall. At first she looked closely at the walls, but then she stopped that and just climbed straight for the top, to the single seat that was higher than Steven's, the platform she had never seen occupied. And there it was, a narrow rectangle built into the wall and concealed by the dim lighting, the wall hangings, and the reluctance of the Change members to venture beyond their proper places.

It was locked, but before climbing down to retrieve the key ring Teresa kept in her desk, Ana looked around for the equivalent of the key-under-the-doormat, and she found one, under Steven's thick meditation pillow on the next step down. She used it to unlock the door, then put the key back where she had found it and pushed the door open.

If it was dark in the meditation hall, the doorway was a black pit. She gingerly stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and switched on her flashlight. The steps were slightly tapered, narrower at the inner side to fit into the circular wall, but otherwise even and perfectly sound. They continued on, featureless, past the place where she estimated the floor of the hall lay, a gentle spiral leading into the depths. There were lights, but she stuck to the flashlight—no telling what else the light switch would turn on.

The stairway ended at another narrow wooden door, this one unlocked. She nudged it open, and stepped into a medieval laboratory into which a computer had been dropped.

The room seemed to be the same shape and size as the meditation hall overhead, but it seemed smaller because the ceiling was so low: If Steven were to give an uncharacteristic leap of enthusiasm down here, he would brain himself on the rough beams. The room was strewn with worktables and cluttered with equipment that ranged from shiny new glass beakers to crude redbrick furnaces with huge bellows leaning against their sides, but at the moment what took Ana's attention was the object at the precise center of the circle and hence directly below the black pipe that rose out of the hall floor.

It was a shiny, pear-shaped, potbellied… thing nearly the height of the room and perhaps six feet across its thickest part, made of some shiny metal like stainless steel or polished aluminum. Its smooth sides were punctuated by six large oval designs that did not quite meet, looking vaguely like seams. She examined the thing closely and decided that whereas five of the circles were indeed laid-on welding, the sixth one was meant to give way: there was a small, sturdy latch on the right-hand side.

She pulled the Kleenex out of her pocket and, using it to keep her fingerprints from the shiny surface, wiggled the latch until it gave. The door drifted inward. She leaned inside and saw the same ovals repeated there. A large circular pad took up the middle of the object's nearly flat bottom, but as far as Ana could see, there was no source of light.

She bent over to thread herself through the door, and straightened up inside. "Ommm," she tried softly, and the noise hummed and echoed around her. She smiled. This was, she guessed, a variation on the sensory deprivation tanks so popular with the human potential movement, although she had never before seen one that didn't use warm salty water to induce the hypnotic feedback of the mind denied external stimuli. She had spent any number of hours in such tanks, finding them slightly claustrophobic but immensely restful.

She climbed back out, refastened the latch, and made a circle of the room.

Evenly spaced around the silver tank were the six small redbrick kilns or fireplaces. Their flues joined together in a six-pointed star just at the pear-shaped thing's top—the source, no doubt, of the heat she had felt coming from the pipe the night Jason was missing. Next out from the furnaces were three long, battered workbenches, each with two workstations and situated so a person could move easily between bench and furnace. The benches were strewn with the ancient tools of a metallurgist or chemist: alembics, yes, as well as retorts and scales with weights ranging from the minute to the massive, mortars and pestles of various sizes and composition, scoops and pipettes, funnels and mallets, long-handled pincers and galvanized buckets, heavy gloves with high gauntlet tops, and an assortment of jewellers' loupes, hammers, and tweezers. Actually, she realized, she had seen something very like it before, somewhere in Europe—Heidelberg, was it? Or Köln?—where an alchemical laboratory had been recreated for the benefit of the tourists.

One section of wall had a bookshelf, sagging under the weight of numerous thick volumes. Some of them were merely bound photocopies of books attributed to "Hermes Trismegistus", "Miriam the Jewess", and other well-known alchemical authorities. Other volumes were ancient leather-bound tomes that looked original. Ana winced to think what someone had paid for them, only to have them stored in a dusty environment where the only climate control was in six coal-burning fireplaces.

And then there was the computer. Ana's hands itched for it, but it was not a kind she knew well and she doubted that on a strange machine she would be able to hide her footsteps, were anyone to wonder if unauthorized persons had been perusing its electronic innards. Reluctantly, for the time being, she left it alone.

Beyond the bookshelves were supply cabinets with jars and canisters, all labelled. Ana had not done any chemistry since high school, but she could identify that the vials of mercury and the jars of sulphur were what they said, and the blue packages of ordinary table salt, looking peculiarly homely and out of place, still bore their factory seals. She didn't know what antimony, saltpeter, or half a dozen other labelled substances ought to look like, but she could think of no real reason to doubt that they were what they said. A large bowl contained an incongruous heap of dried half-eggshells; a topless shoe-box sagged out under the burden of twenty or so large lead fishing weights; and six small stoppered test-tubes held granules of what appeared to be silver.

She searched the back of each shelf with her light, careful to move nothing. Everything was dusty, the disused substances at the back more so, until she got to her knees to check the contents of the very bottom shelf, and noticed a small box, nearly hidden behind some stoneware mortars, that seemed remarkably dust free. Taking note of its precise location, she reached in and eased it out. It was a grocer's package of ordinary blocks of paraffin wax.

She ran a thumb thoughtfully over the cool, slightly greasy surface of the wax block, struck by the combination of pushed-to-the-back abandonment and its cleanliness. After a minute, she began to smile.

A useful substance, wax. Children made strange, amoeba-shaped candles on the beach with it and handymen rubbed it onto sticking drawers. Ana's mother used to pour a thick layer of melted wax onto the top of her jams and jellies, and Ana could recall the childhood magic of pushing down on the round wax plug and having the other side rise up to reveal the sweet preserves underneath. Wax was useful, too, in molding itself around a shape, in providing weight and bulk to a hollow core—or, conversely, in obscuring whatever it surrounded.

She bent down and carefully put the box back into its original place. One of the commoner tricks of the alchemical charlatan, according to one of Glen's books, was to soften a lump of dirty gray wax and wrap it around a piece of gold. When the resulting "lead" was heated in its glass alembic, the wax burned away as black smoke, miraculously revealing a puddle of pure gold.

The word "sincere" literally translates "without wax", Ana mused, brushing the dust from the knees of her sweats. Unadulterated. Pure. The presence of cere in this laboratory was very interesting.

Although she would have sworn that Steven truly believed that he himself had actually created gold.

She glanced at her watch: nearly 4 A.M., and time to leave. She walked a last time around the man-sized alembic in the center of the room, and suddenly knew where she'd seen the shape before: as an aura, surrounding a meditating figure at the end of the TRANSFORMATION mural in the dining hall.

She closed the laboratory door behind her and hurried up the steps. At the top she paused to catch her breath, and then cautiously pulled the door open. The hall was still dark; her straining ears could make out no noise. She stepped out onto the platform, closed the door, and stood rigid for a long time before she was satisfied that the hall was empty but for her. She switched on her flashlight, retrieved the key, and used it to lock the door, then replaced it just as she had found it, tugging the corners of the pillow to straighten the cover. She retreated down the platforms to the shadowy floor and out of the first set of doors into the hall's small foyer, and was just reaching out to push open the doors to the school entranceway, when she heard voices. She snatched back her hand and turned to leap back into the hall before she caught herself: to be caught in a panicky retreat would be the worst possible thing. She lived here at Change, and if she felt like meditating at four in the morning, so what?

Still, she couldn't quite bring herself to walk brazenly out to the voices, and in the end it was just as well that she did not, because the two men—it was Steven, his low voice shockingly loud as he came into the entranceway—did not enter the hall. Instead, his voice faded in the direction of the school offices, saying, "I'll go make the call; you see if you can find some milk in the kitchen."

There was a swishing noise as the office door shut; it was followed by the distinctive click of the main entrance. Ana pulled her own door open a fraction of an inch, fully expecting the two men to be standing there ready to pounce, and looked out onto emptiness. She counted out thirty seconds, which was about seventy heartbeats, and pulled the door open all the way. She walked briskly through the hallway and slipped out into the cold night air.

Chapter Twenty-one

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

A few hours later, Ana staggered out of bed and drove again to Sedona to pick up her new bridge. Two different people threatened to come with her, but she managed to put them off by simply offering to do their tasks for them. The solitude within Rocinante's thin walls combined with sleeplessness and the exhilarating feeling of Having Gotten Away With It was a heady mix; she spent most of the trip down singing old rock-and-roll songs and grinning widely at the passing cactus.

The intoxication lasted through the dental visit. The new bridge settled into the front of her mouth as neatly as the old one had, restoring a sense of security to her face. She smiled at the dentist, the nurse, and at everyone she passed on her way back to Rocinante, where she found not Glen, but a tourist brochure for The Chapel of the Holy Cross tucked under the windshield wiper. None of the neighboring cars bore them. She folded it into her pocket and went on to the post office, where she collected two imaginary bills forwarded by her Boise mail service and the heavy parcel she had agreed to fetch. She left the parcel in the bus and walked a few doors down to a stationers' shop to buy the supplies she had been asked to get, and incidentally to copy the recent diary entries on the shop's photocopier. It did not, of course, contain the details of the previous night's excursions, but it gave in great detail her conversations with Steven.

After all that busy work, the day's bubble began to go a bit flat. She was aware of being very low on sleep, and her hand ached, particularly as the day was turning cold. Still, she was alive and free, and was about to have a conversation with Glen that might help her make sense of the situation. Euphoria faded, inevitably, but she remained what in her long-skirted youth had been called "mellow".

She drove out of town on the Phoenix road, past the pseudo-Mexican shopping center that contributed mightily to the Sedona tax base and through an area of carefully scattered homes and looming rock buttes to the turnoff to the chapel, and found it as she remembered, a blunt, angular block of glass and concrete that some woman had commissioned to be jabbed down among the lifting, organic shapes of the rock, back in the days before planning commissions.

There were half a dozen cars parked in the marked area and tourists wandering up and down the steep hill. Ana joined them (feeling tired now, and distinctly underdressed without a camera) and pulled open the heavy door of the chapel. Inside, she found Glen disguised as a tourist, complete with video recorder and even a wife in the shape of Agent Steinberg, whom Ana had last seen leaving the museum rest room in Phoenix.

Ana sat down in the pew behind them and waited for two elderly women making the rounds to struggle their way out the door.

"Hello, Glen," she said over the back of the pew. "You look like a real sunbird, down from Nebraska for the winter."

He shifted sideways and gave her a lopsided grin that went with the image. He didn't have a cowlick but he looked as if he did, and Ana was briefly visited by the memory of Antony Makepeace's disparaging remarks concerning Glen's undercover abilities. "Howdy, ma'am," he said. "You know Agent Steinberg. My right-hand woman."

"We met. Do you have a first name?" she asked the woman.

"Rayne."

"Originally Rainbow?" Ana ventured.

Agent Steinberg actually blushed, an endearingly human reaction that caused Ana to wonder how far the woman would get in the agency. She was about the same age that Abby would have been, and for a moment Ana played with the amusing idea that one of the many hippie babies she had known named Rainbow might have become this young woman. "Never mind," she told her. "None of us are responsible for our parents. Anything new from your end, Glen? You heard from Gillian, or that Dooley woman in Toronto?"

"Gillian has nothing new to offer—she's got a loaded desk at the moment and has put the Change case onto the back of it. And the Toronto situation is… frustrating. The woman's community where she's supposed to be is bristling with lawyers and there's no way we can get a warrant to talk to her if she's not interested. Rayne went up last week to have a try, and they just told her that they have too many women hiding out from their abusive husbands to want the FBI poking their snouts in. I quote."

"Is that why Samantha Dooley is there? Is she in hiding? And if so, from whom?"

"Who knows? There's nothing on the books connected with her name, here, in Canada, or in the U.K. She just doesn't want to talk to us, and so far we haven't been able to find someone in the community who will. We'll keep trying, of course."

"Good luck. I, on the other hand, have had an interesting time." She took the photocopies out of her coat pocket and handed them over the back of the pew. "Why don't you two take a look at what I've written first? Save me going over it twice."

Glen turned his back to her and unfolded the sheets. Ana leaned back and closed her eyes. She should have had something to eat back in Sedona, she thought; it might have helped boost her blood sugar. She would stop off and get a large coffee before driving back, and buy something to eat then. Maybe that café next to the bookstore. Which reminded her, she had to pick up the Lewis Carroll book for Dulcie.

Pages rustled in front of her as Glen passed each one over to his assistant. The chapel was cold and a far cry from the old wooden building where she sometimes went with Antony Makepeace and his wife, Maria, for the Quaker services that passed for worship. Ana's own rather more complicated relationship with God was personal, both spiritual and intellectual, with little room for the formal and liturgical. However, this place was too cerebral even for her.

Glen finished reading. She heard him shift on the seat, imagined his elbow coming over the back of the pew, felt him looking at her, but she did not move. She had gone as lethargic as a snake in winter, and wondered idly if she looked as decrepit as she felt.

"Alchemy," Glen mused.

" 'S a funny old world, ain't it?" she replied, and opened her eyes to find him looking at her worriedly.

"Are you really feeling okay?"

"Ah, Glen, it's a young woman's game. Time to give it over to young Rainbow, here."

Curious, she thought, how it was only during these odd moments in the course of an investigation that she actually liked Glen McCarthy. They smiled into each other's eyes in brief but perfect understanding, and then she pulled herself upright and leaned forward, speaking quietly.

"I'd swear that Steven truly believes he created gold, but I know he also uses trickery to make his initiates think they're doing the same thing, only with silver."

"Why do you say that?"

"I saw the strings and mirrors. Or in this case, the wax."

"Would you say he thinks he's encouraging lesser minds?" Glen wondered. "Or just stringing along the marks?"

"Maybe a little of each. But he himself believes it is possible, that he and others have actually made silver and gold. That's how I read him, anyway."

He looked down at his knee and nodded. Rayne tapped the photocopied pages straight and folded them, but did not look around. Ana felt the tug of dread pulling at the edges of her mind, and sighed. "Okay, Glen, what's going on? Why have you brought your assistant all the way out here instead of using the man I met in Prescott, and why are you bugging the phones? Is it this thing with the two children in England?"

"I don't know what the hell's going on in England. As you know, communication with foreign police departments isn't always what one might wish, and in England something like this falls into the spaces between departments even more than it does here. So far it's just the local Somerset police involved, and I don't have any personal contacts on that force." He shook his head: "No, the problem's in Japan. A kid in the Yokohama Change center died about three weeks ago. You probably don't want to know his name?"

"Not unless I have to."

"I don't think so. Anyway, we just found out about it on Monday and had the autopsy report faxed over and translated. They're treating it as a mugging—he was a mass of bruises, found dumped by the roadside."

Ana heard the emphasis on "they". "You don't agree that he was mugged."

"All the boy's bruises had diffuse edges—no sharp-edged marks such as you'd expect to find after someone was struck with, say, a bat or a board or kicked by a shoe. Most of the bruises were along the sides and back of his upper torso and head, with a concentration on his shoulders. He may have been naked when the injuries occurred, because there were no marks on the skin from fabric or seams or buttons. His legs were not bruised other than his hips and knees, but his feet were badly damaged—he had three broken bones in his left foot. No defense marks on his arms, but all the fingernails on both hands were broken and bloody. Actual cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage caused by the blows to the head."

Ana did not hear the final sentence. The image of those destroyed fingernails, the clear picture she had of the Japanese boy clawing at something, kicking and throwing himself violently and repeatedly at some smooth, hard surface, rose up inside her and blotted all else out. All the blood in her body seemed to turn around and flow backward. She felt like vomiting, her head buzzed as if she were about to faint, and she stood up and stumbled rapidly away, unseeing, just to be moving.

She felt Glen's hand on her back, felt his solid presence by her side, and wanted either to turn to his arms for comfort or beat at him for putting her there. He was saying something in a low, urgent voice and she was looking through the window at the hills beyond the cross, and she shuddered.

"God. I've got to get out of here, Glen. I need air."

It was better outside, seated on a bench overlooking the world, with the clear desert breeze sweeping away the nausea and light-headedness and with Glen and Rayne standing between her and the curious tourists. Glen saw her begin to shiver and he took off his heavy jacket and wrapped it around her.

"I saw a death like that once," he said quietly. "A kidnap victim closed into a shipping crate. Differences, of course. What did Change lock that boy into?"

"I don't—He's—Oh Christ." Ana sat perfectly still for a long moment with her eyes clamped shut, and then sat up straight, took a deep, steadying breath, and, addressing herself to the red rock cliffs, summoned the analytical words of Anne Waverly.

"As I told you, the doctrine of Change is based on alchemical beliefs concerning transmutation of substances into higher forms. Whether or not Change as a whole believes in the actual production of gold is still open to question. But in its metaphysical form—the transformation of human beings—it permeates the Change creed.

"The alchemist believes that a person can transform base matter using heat and pressure, as a means of speeding up the normal processes of nature. The matter being worked on is closed inside…" And gulped and started again. "Inside a hermetically sealed vessel. An alembic. It is heated on a furnace and, if the alchemist does it right, it passes through a defined series of stages to become gold or alternatively a tincture or "philosopher's stone" which, added to a substance such as mercury or lead, changes it into gold.

"This paradigm of heat-generating transformation is used by Change to effect the transformation of the human spirit as well. Their mantras—meditational chants—often concern the benefits of heat and pressure. Psychological pressures are positively welcomed, on individuals and on the community as a whole. Members are taught to welcome intrusive outsiders, hard physical labor, unpleasant tasks. When I was hurt at the museum the other day, it was a direct result of Steven's instructions that two antagonistic boys be forced to spend the entire day in close proximity. When one of the boys, Jason Delgado, snapped and struck out—the other boy was insulting his sister. Dulcie. When Jason—" Ana stopped, her jaws clenched. In a minute she continued. "When Jason lost control, Steven took him away for two days."

"That was when you came to town with Dulcie. What do you mean, 'took him away'?"

"I mean that early on the morning following the museum trip, Jason was removed from the room he shares with Dulcie. The men who led him off are two of Steven's closest associates. And Dulcie was told that Jason was 'helping Steven with his work'."

"But he's back now? Unharmed?"

"He was returned during the day while Dulcie and I were here. I've barely seen him since then, but he looked…" How far could she expect Glen to understand? "Jason looked changed. Exhausted. Depleted. Fulfilled. I'd say he had some fairly profound experience.

"Glen, you remember those drawings that Gillian sent me? There was one of a child's nightmare, a man trapped—" She paused to swallow. "A man in what I took to be a giant pear, or a raindrop with two monsters outside. Glen, I think Change uses an alembic big enough for a man as part of their process of transformation. Steven called it 'the power nexus of our Change'. I think they shut people in there, an alchemical version of a sensory deprivation tank, as a means of applying pressure. I think the child's drawing is a textbook illustration of the hallucinations a person experiences under enforced, long-term sensory deprivation. Probably not the child's own experience, since the drawing was of a man with a beard, but possibly that of a father or friend who talked about it in the child's hearing, and frightened him. I think… I believe that Steven shut Jason into the alembic that's in the basement under the meditation hall, and I think there's a good possibility that the Japanese boy died in one just like it."

"Hell. Have you seen this thing?"

"Last night."

"Where did you say it was?"

"In a locked room underneath the meditation hall. You enter it by a door off the highest meditation platform."

"Damn it, Anne, what were you doing there?"

"I wanted to see if Steven had some kind of alchemical laboratory in the basement. That's what I found, a complete alchemical workshop out of the Middle Ages. Plus a box of paraffin wax. There's also a computer in there with a modem, in case any of your pet hackers want to play with it."

"You didn't open it up?"

"I didn't touch it."

"No sign of anything else in that lab?"

"No dismembered clocks or clippings of wire, no nice, labeled bins of Semtex, or even fuel oil and ammonium nitrate. Those two harmless ingredients when combined had proved spectacularly deadly. No heaps of pretty little balloons or scatterings of mysterious white powder, no distinctive smells other than sulphur, and the lab equipment I saw couldn't possibly have been used to process any drug I know. Sorry—no bombs or drugs that I could see."

Glen stood up and looked out over the rocky valley for a minute, thinking. Four days ago Ana had struck him as being far more healthy-looking than he had expected to find her, and he had been unable to get that unnatural cheerfulness out of his mind. It had not been like her, and this sudden venture into derring-do was not like her either. Besides which, the vulnerability and emotional involvement sounded more like Anne than Ana; it was all very worrying.

"I don't like the sound of any of this, Anne," he said abruptly. "I'm pulling you out,"

"My name is Ana, and it's gone too far for that, Glen," she said flatly. "The only way you can keep me from going back to Change is if you get out your handcuffs," She looked at him, and Rayne was amazed to see on her boss's face a thing that on anyone else's she would have called a blush. She dismissed the unlikely thought immediately.

Ana turned back to the landscape while Glen thought about this unexpected shift in authority. When he spoke again, it was in a voice gone dead with the realities of his profession. "Did you see any evidence that the boy Jason was locked into the thing against his will?"

"No,"

"Would he or anyone you can think of be willing to testify?"

"No," said Ana. "No," God, she felt like moaning aloud at the thought of that beautiful, strong boy stuffed into a dark, smooth space with the door shut behind him, and here was Glen thinking about warrants and rules of evidence. She dropped her face into her hands and scrubbed at her skin, which felt thick and insensate. "Jesus, you're a cold son of a bitch. No, there's no justification for a raid. You could argue that Jason is too young legally to have given his permission, but I'm sure you'd find he would refuse to testify. Nothing's changed, except a boy in Japan is dead. I'll go back to watching and listening, and if I need anything, I'll develop problems with the tooth and make another appointment with the dentist," She felt so tired, and old, and sick. "Go away, Glen. Christ, go away before I throw up on your foot,"

She tugged his coat away from her and held it out without raising her head. It was taken from her, and a hand rested briefly on her shoulder—Glen's hand or Rayne's, she could not tell—and then she was alone at the side of this sharp-edged concrete-and-glass building set down among the round red hills of Sedona. She leaned up against the side of the building, and in the darkness behind her eyelids she saw the dining hall mural, which held it all: The progress from the prime matter of the desert on the left to fully actualized human on the right, and in the middle, looking like an elongated version of a Native American bread oven, the power nexus, the instrument of the proclaimed transformation, an alembic. What she had taken for a symbolic journey was physical and literal, an actual vessel in which sensitive human beings were subjected to the pressure of their own undiluted minds.

Still, now she finally knew the shape of this community, the essence of belief that lay at its core. Knowing, she could watch over the two children; at least she could do that.

Ana opened her eyes, got to her feet, and trudged down the hill toward Rocinante.

Chapter Twenty-two

Request for Child Emergency Assessment, signed May 14, 199-

It was difficult to return to Change. It was difficult that night, when she dozed off over the wheel and nearly overturned into a stand of cow-tongue cactus, but it was worse the next morning, when she had to force herself to walk to the dining hall, to eat breakfast, and to speak in her normal manner to Suellen and Dominique across the table from her. To her relief, Steven did not happen to cross her path, because she was not certain that she could conceal the violent agitation of her feelings about him that had been set off by the death in Yokohama—or by the image of Steven in meditation while below him Jason sweated and confronted his inner demons in the prison of the dark alembic.

Was it child abuse? Yes—but. But there was no sign of physical injury on the boy. And manipulation of belief is monstrously hard to prove compared with overt aggression or abuse. And even fourteen-year-olds have freedom of religion in this country. And despite any apprehension he might have felt when the two men came for him, Jason came out of the experience a willing participant.

Yes, but. Even at the moment when the truth of the alembic's purpose first struck her, she had known that a prosecution based on that alone would be futile and short-lived. Certainly if she informed the local Child Protective Services of what was happening with one of their charges, it would set Change on its ear, and might even lead to the end of the fostering program, but was the responsibility for that a price she wanted to pay? She loathed the idea of doing nothing, but she knew without question that if she were to stay on with this investigation, she had to accept that Steven had the right, not to lock Jason into the alembic, but to ask Jason to submit to it.

Still, she needed a day, or perhaps a bit more, to assume this attitude. She could sense Anne Waverly stirring in the back of her mind, wanting to step in, sweep aside Ana Wakefield's natural diffidence, and set things right. That would be disastrous, and she remained grateful as the day wore on and she did not meet Steven. She didn't even want to see Jason or Dulcie until her fury had a chance to subside.

Steven believed, she told herself time and again; therein lay the difference. She reminded herself of that until she nearly believed it, and thought that she might look at Steven again with equanimity.

She got through her teaching day, distracted but functioning, but as soon as school was out she fled for the solitude of the desert. This time she took a bottle of water and a wide-brimmed hat, and she sat among the rocks, listening to the wind blow.

Late in the afternoon, another human being entered the landscape in the form of a desert rat whom Ana had seen two or three times before, once close enough to exchange a brief greeting. He was a prospector of some sort, she supposed, since he carried with him a small rock pick and a canvas sack. Perhaps he was gathering arrowheads or small petroglyphs to sell to tourists and collectors. He looked, however, like any of the other desert creatures she had seen—dull, dusty, leathery, and intent on his own business—and seeing him working his way along the hillside a mile off was like watching any other wild creature going about its business, unaware of being observed.

It was restful, leaning up against some rocks in the shade of an ironwood tree and following the man's mysterious progress, his bendings and straightenings and the occasional long period when he stood, bent over something he had found, before either placing it in his sack or tossing it over his shoulder.

She could feel the tension ease from her body, the clamor in her head go quiet. She may even have slept briefly, or retreated into that inner place where there is no time, because she came out of her reverie to realize that the shadows across the dry wash were immensely long and the prospector was no longer there.

She stretched luxuriously and took a long drink of warm water, and then tentatively, as if touching a finger to a wound, she brought Steven to mind.

She still felt empty, but at some point in the last hours the feeling had changed slightly, turning from confusion and turmoil into a cool, focused determination, from bleakness to calm. The death of the Japanese boy might even have been an accident, she finally admitted, and his being dumped on the road the result of panic. Stupid, but human.

The desert had done its work. She would now be able to look Steven in the eye without flinching.

There was a new man at dinner.

In itself this was not unusual, but this was no visiting newcomer. On the contrary, he ate surrounded by a knot of high-ranking initiates, who hung on his words and gave all the signs of knowing him well. Ana had little doubt that the man wore a silver necklace beneath his shirt, if not a gold one.

"Who is that man?" she asked Dov over the warming tray of baked potatoes.

"That's Marc Bennett. He used to lived here for a little while, taught science until Dennis came and then he went back to England. He's a close friend of Jonas—Jonas Seraph, the founder of the English community. Sort of his right-hand man. An important man in Change, anyway."

"You'll be glad to have him back, then."

"Oh, Marc's not staying. It's just a short visit."

Ana moved to a nearby table and watched Dov return to the group around the newcomer. A short visit might mean recreation or family matters, or peripheral to some kind of business trip. It could also be the work of a courier.

Steven did not lead the meditation that night, which had happened only twice since Ana had been there. Instead, Thomas Mallory took the central position, stumbling and stuttering his way with even more awkwardness than he normally displayed in public speaking. Marc Bennett was seated at the highest level of the row of meditation platforms across the hall from Steven, who sat unmoving the entire time. The whole Change community left the meditation hall unsettled.

She spotted Steven the next morning, too, still looking distracted, even troubled. He was walking with his hands locked behind his back and his head bent. Mallory was following him at a distance, also looking upset. As she watched, a third figure appeared: Jason on his morning run. Steven's head came up and he thrust out a hand to beckon Jason over to him. They exchanged a few words, Steven clapped Jason on the shoulders, Jason resumed his run, and when Steven turned to watch him go, Ana's silent presence must have caught the corner of his eye. He swivelled to face her across half a mile of scrub and rock and stood intent for what seemed a very long time. Then he half raised his left hand in a gesture of greeting, or benediction, and continued his walk. She ignored Mallory's glare and set off in a different direction.

A high initiate, a close friend of one of the original four Change founders, arrives from England; Steven is troubled. Had Glen's phone taps been discovered, or even suspected? Or had Steven just then learned about the Japanese boy's death from this old Change member, sent to bring him news too sensitive to be overheard?

It fit all the circumstances, and Ana knew that she would have to get word to Glen of the possibility. The knowledge, even a strong suspicion, of official scrutiny would have powerful repercussions in the community; it was exactly the sort of paranoia trigger she dreaded. She reminded herself, too, that the general anxiety did not necessarily mean they feared her in particular, that she must take care not to be a victim of her own paranoia. That time in Utah she had given herself away, but those circumstances did not apply here. Change had a long way to go before its instability escalated into violence. This community was not about to turn on her.

She did not sleep well, but over breakfast she discovered that no one looked particularly rested, that all the adult faces revealed a heaviness and degree of preoccupation that she had not witnessed there before. Talking to the other members and listening carefully, though, she did not think they knew of a specific problem, simply that Steven, their center, was out of sorts, and therefore Change as a whole was unbalanced.

Rumors began to circulate. Steven was leaving Arizona. Steven was not leaving, he was ill; no, he had simply received bad news from his family. Steven and Marc Bennett had had a raging argument; Marc had slammed out furiously to return to England; Marc had not slammed out, he was scheduled to go back anyway.

Ana had the fact of the argument between the two men confirmed by Dominique, who overheard the raised voices if not the words, but she could find no truth in any of the other rumors except that Marc Bennett had left. The whole Change compound began to feel as if somewhere on the horizon a storm was stirring, making the inhabitants feel prickly and on edge.

So it was with great relief that after Ana's last class, when she was sitting at her desk doing paperwork and thinking that she ought to go by the kitchen and put in some time there chopping vegetables or at least setting out plates, she heard a light tapping noise at the door and looked up into Jason's face.

He looked as old as Glen, this kid of fourteen. "Jason, how are you?"

"Okay. How's the hand?"

In answer, she held it out and curled the fingers up until they touched the palm, then straightened them out again. The swelling was almost gone, the tenderness bearable unless she smacked it against something. She noticed that, half hidden by the doorjamb, his left arm cradled a basketball, and he was wearing sweats.

"Going to shoot a few baskets?"

"Yeah. It's warm enough now to use the outside court, so we don't have to quit every time people want to eat."

"Maybe I'll come down and watch for a while."

She wasn't sure, but she thought he looked pleased at the prospect. She doubted that was why he was there, but he seemed disinclined to say anything else, so she tried to bridge the gap by asking him, "How are you enjoying the mural? Has your teacher got you painting yet?"

She had thought it a harmless enough question, given the interest and talent that according to Carla he displayed, but she seemed to have hit it wrong again. She looked at his abruptly closed face, his eyes that had gone to study the corners of the room, and she sighed.

"I can't paint," he finally muttered.

"Maybe not, but that sketch of the quail on my coffee cup shows that you can certainly draw."

"I mean I can't. She won't let me."

"Your teacher? Why on earth not?"

"Steven thinks it's a good idea if I lay off drawing and stuff for a while. But it's okay, really. It's just a stupid mural, anyway."

"I beg your pardon," she retorted in mock resentment. Til have you know, the mural was my idea. Don't call it stupid." She laughed at his expression and waved away his embarrassed attempt at backtracking. "But look, Jason, let me get this straight: You like drawing?" He nodded. "You're good at it." A shrug, of course. "And you'd like to help on the mural but Steven said no." A convulsion of the shoulders and head that Ana took for a combined nod and shrug. "Did he tell you why?"

"Sacrifice." He looked at her and misread the expression on her face. "That's what he said."

"Not punishment?"

"He didn't say so."

Heat and pressure, and if a child with great potential and few outlets likes to draw, you take that away from him to increase the pressure. What was next: no basketball and a cancellation of all morning runs? And his only advocate another newcomer who was in no position to raise a stink. Dear God, what an impossible situation.

"Well," she said, "it seems like a massive waste to me. I know my classes could sure use some help in sketching things out—I'm actually the best artist in the bunch, heaven help us." Jason seemed relieved by her willingness to let the subject slide. "You going down to the courts now?" she asked. "I'll probably see you there."

"Okay. Look, I just wanted to say," he began abruptly, then stopped. "Um, I mean, the other day, I don't know why I told Dulcie to come to you. It wasn't your responsibility. It's just that, well, she likes you, and I couldn't think of anyone else in a hurry. So, thanks for taking care of her. I hope she wasn't too much of a pain."

"I was happy to help, Jason. Dulcie's good people. But I hope," she added deliberately,"that it doesn't happen again for a while. She was very upset."

"I know," he said with a grimace. "She's having nightmares again. Look, I've got to go. They're waiting for me."

Nightmares, again? "Right. I'll come down in a bit."

She did not manage to make it to the kitchen to help prepare for dinner that afternoon.

Marc Bennett was gone by dinnertime, and that evening Steven returned to his central position in the meditation hall. Ana could feel the relief washing around her when he rose from his second-highest platform and started confidently across the walkway to the leader's perch. He seemed restored—a degree more intense, perhaps, but back in control of himself and his community. Change breathed a sigh of satisfaction and stepped back into its former path.

Ana did not. Perhaps her equilibrium had been too disturbed, reminding her what she was actually doing there; perhaps it was just the residue of her own inner tension, but she could still sense the storm in the distance.

It came, sooner than she had expected, and in a form she could not have anticipated.

The next morning when she took her walk, Steven was there. She had gone west this time, up to the hills on which the high wind-run generator stood, on the opposite side of the compound from the red rock platform where she had met him before. He was seated to one side of the path, his face raised to the growing sun. Mallory was nowhere in sight.

She hesitated. When he gave no sign that he had noticed her, she decided to continue on her path. She drew even with him and was starting to pass him by, when he spoke.

"Good morning, Ana of the Sunrise. Strange, to be a child of the West, where the sun sets, and yet be so drawn to the early manifestations of light."

"Well," she said, not quite sure how she wanted to respond. He went on regardless.

"What do you make of your reading on the philosophy of chemistry?"

"The philosophy—? Oh, alchemy." She raised her eyes to the distant hills, and thought briefly how fortunate it was that people saw only what they expected to see. Steven had no idea. She looked down at him again and smiled, then sat down on a relatively flat place a few feet away from him, her legs out straight, leaning back on her hands.

"Most of the things I've been reading raise more questions than they answer. If, as you say, it is possible actually to make gold, then why did the science fade into a mere quest for spiritual growth, and then die out entirely?"

"Disbelief breeds failure," Steven said promptly. " 'Crush a fool in a mortar with a pestle, yet his folly will not depart from him.' Everyone knows that men can't possibly walk on red-hot coals without burning their feet to the bones, but people do. I did. And men can't transform one substance into another, but they do. If, however, the person trying to firewalk is afraid, if he does not believe he can do it, he will indeed lose his feet.

"Alchemy was the beginning of scientific method, and the great irony is that the more the alchemists discovered about the nature of matter, the more improbable the whole thing seemed. Belief became divorced from intellect, and they have continued to move further apart. Until the two are rejoined, the Philosopher's Stone remains an impossibility."

"You seriously think that the scientist's state of mind affects the result of an experiment?"

"It is not an experiment," he said sharply. "It is a process. A Work. Ana, all matter is related. This is a thing the ancients knew and we Westerners rejected in our single-minded quest to take things apart. We are reaping the results now, in a world poisoned by our convenience products, in children distorted by our providing them food and no wisdom. The only hopeful trend of the last thirty years is the faint stirring of realization that everything is interconnected, that the ozone layer over Australia is depleted by air conditioners used on the other side of the world; that the prisons are full because kids in the ghettos don't have basketball courts and trips to the beach; that women die of cancer because their mothers took the wrong kind of drug when they were pregnant.

"Ana, look: The medical world has admitted that a person's attitude has a strong bearing on how he or she fights off a disease. Alchemy says precisely the same thing: that the material in the vessel needs to be healed of impurity by a person whose mind and heart are both turned in the same direction."

Ana had been caught up in far too many sophomoric arguments on religion to fall into the temptation of pointing out his glaring flaw in logic, but it was not necessary, because Steven was off and running, and she had only to sit and feel the warmth of the sun on her face and chest.

"The alchemist was regarded as mad precisely because of this singleness of intent. His family went hungry, his clothes turned to rags, while he stared into the glass alembic and waited for the nigredo to give way to the peacock colors of transformation, through the white albedo to the glorious red of the final stage. 'I blew my thrift at the coal,' George Ripley wrote, 'my clothes were bawdy, my stomach never whole.' It would all be worth it if he could only reduce the universe, all the millennia of creation, into this alembic in front of him. It is a feeling like no other. It is like being God."

This was the first glimpse of the fanatic she had seen in Steven Change: it brought a sudden chill to the morning. Her words were impulsive and her voice harsher than she intended.

" 'Behold,' " she quoted at him, " 'I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem as men gather silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin into a furnace, to blow the fire upon it in order to melt it.' "

"Ezekiel's God is an angry God. Remember, also, that 'the city was pure gold, clear as glass'."

"The God of Revelations can be angry, too. 'I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire.' "

To Ana's surprise, Steven threw back his head and laughed. "I know. I would make a lousy messiah. I'm far too softhearted. "Which is why," he said before she could react, "my dear Seeker Ana, I am sending you on a journey.

"In the very first conversation we had, you and I, I wondered aloud whether or not you had the commitment you needed to transform yourself. It was a natural enough question—most of the people who come here are so taken up with the pursuit of comfort and instant gratification that they will never go beyond what they are, will never learn that 'No birth without labor' and 'Great heat, great gain' are more than slogans. Most of the people who come here are content to warm their toes at the fire. They will never tear off their shoes and walk on the coals, because they are unwilling to submit themselves to the hotter, harder disciplines that Change requires.

"You are surprised that I am so blunt," he said, as indeed she was. "It is my job here to help people along the path to Change, yes, but it is also my responsibility as an adept to seek out those with greater possibilities than the masses, those with iron already in their spines. Teresa was one of those. The boy Jason Delgado is another, a young man with enormous potential. And you, Ana Wakefield. It is not my habit to speak like this to a person who has not been through the Work, but you have a natural affinity even without the experience. And not just intellectually—I feel in you a person who has been through the fire more than once, and has been strengthened by it. I feel in you the willingness to be worked and tried, to submit to the refining fires and be pounded into shape. To be transformed.

"I hesitated because I thought you were too frivolous for The Process. It is a long, hard journey. It has broken men and women before this." (Was it just her imagination, Ana wondered, or did she hear sorrow in his voice? At the nameless Japanese boy's death, perhaps? Or a different loss?) "I want you to begin your Change. I want you to set off on your journey, and to do so, I will send you on an actual journey, not one that is 'simply allegorical'. I am sending some of our children to our sister community in England. You will go with them, as a teacher, and as a student."

"What?" Oh shit, she cried to herself. Oh shit. I'm nowhere near ready to pull out of here, I can't give Glen what he needs yet, and Jason—and Dulcie, what the hell am I going to do, oh shit—

"To England. I like you, Ana. I can't teach someone I like. I may be further along in my journey than you, but I am not yet purified enough to overlook my own affections. It is one of the reasons we have more than one community, in recognition that none of us has attained our pure state. I want to send you to my own teacher. You will find Jonas, our Change leader in England, considerably higher on the Path than I am. I want to send him you and Jason and one or two others whom I cannot teach properly. He will help you."

"Jason," she repeated, grasping the name like a straw. "What about Dulcie?"

Steven sighed. "Jason is not ready to move away from her. His sense of responsibility is admirable, but it distracts him. He must concentrate on his own transformation."

"He's only fourteen."

"There is never time to waste."

"Is that why you've taken his art away from him? His 'sacrifice'?"

Steven's face darkened. "He should not have spoken to you about his Work. It is his alone."

"I wanted to draft him to help with the school mural; he had to tell me why he couldn't. Why take that from him?"

"I think you know, Ana."

"Heat and pressure, right? And the last time you put pressure on him, look what happened. My hand is still sore."

"He has to learn to direct his energies."

"Steven, how many alchemists were killed by explosions when they misjudged the pressures inside their vessels? More to the point, how many of their students did they take with them?"

So there was a degree of uncertainty in him, she thought, seeing his face. However, he said merely, "He will learn. Jonas will direct him."

Ana did not much like the sound of that, but Steven had at least opened a door. She could stay with the community as a whole and with her job. And with Dulcie and her brother. Glen would have a stroke, but if she chose, she might just stay long enough to give him a complete picture of Change. Going by what Steven just said, the center was in England, anyway.

(But—in England, where she had no authority, no Glen, no alarm bell or automatic pistol hidden inside Rocinante? No backup at all, in fact. She would be alone, and with two children on her hands. God, Glen wouldn't bother with handcuffs—he would just straight out murder her for even considering it.)

"When do I need to decide?"

"The tickets will be purchased tomorrow morning. The name of the passenger needs to be on them."

"And when would we actually go?" she asked, reassuring herself that the end of the school year was still a long way off.

"In three days," he said. "You do have a passport?"

Two days later, she drained Rocinante's refrigerator, disconnected the propane tank, gave her knee enough cortisone to keep it numb for weeks, and spirited away the gun and cortisone needles from the hidden compartment to bury them in the desert. Before she pulled the tarpaulin over the bus, she stood looking at the "medicine pouch" that she had made from the objects in her past that meant something to her: the hairs from two dogs, the stone from her creek, and Abby's red bead. She reached in to remove it from the rearview mirror, and slipped the smooth leather cord over her head and around her neck, where it lay beneath her shirt like a talisman.

She did not manage to speak to Glen before the plane left, although she did rip out the most recent pages of her diary and put them into an envelope addressed to "Uncle Abner", dropping it surreptitiously into a mail slot at the airport. On the last page she scribbled a note:

No time to contact you, surprise trip to England with some kids being transferred there. I'll write you from the UK when I can. Do we have any family members in the area I can look up while I'm there?

--A

V

Separatio

separate (vb) To set or keep apart; to make

a distinction between; to sever conjugal ties or

contractual relations with; to isolate from a mixture

Separation doth each part from the other devide,

The subtill fro the gross, fro the thick the thin.

Chapter Twenty-three

From the journal of Jason Delgado

The seats had been booked too late to enable them all to sit together, so Ana, in charge of Dulcie, Jason, and a boy not much older than Dulcie who was going to join his mother in England, sat apart from Dov Levinski, a kindergarten teacher named Margit, and their group of three children, two of whom were Margit's. It suited Ana quite well, particularly as the little boy Benjamin was sweet-tempered, sleepy, and no trouble whatsoever.

The plane was scheduled for a three-forty-five takeoff. At four Ana took out the hardback illustrated Hunting of the Snark she had bought in Sedona and presented it to Dulcie. At four-ten the copilot came on the intercom and admitted that they were still on the ground, although the moment the deicer had been unclogged they would be away. By five-fifteen Ana had read Dulcie and Benjamin the Snark four times and most of the other books twice. At five-thirty the passengers heard a series of bangs and thuds from below, and those on the starboard windows were gratified to see the repair truck fill with men and drive away. In another three minutes the big jet lurched and began to creep backward, and Dulcie said she really, really had to use the toilet.

Ana had the child back in her seat and buckled in with twenty seconds to spare. They taxied and accelerated, rattling and roaring until the tons of metal and flesh gave its little hop and they were airborne. Dulcie did not notice, she and Benjamin being busy loudly discussing life in England across Ana's lap, but Jason's eyes shifted constantly, particularly upward to where the overhead baggage compartments were vibrating madly. If one of them drops open, Ana thought, he's going to land five rows back, taking his seat with him.

"Have you flown much, Jason?" she asked to distract him.

"Uh, no."

"Planes always look like they're about to shake themselves to pieces, but as I understand it, they build the flexibility and movement in. If everything was completely rigid and nailed down, it would be too brittle. Even the wings bend a surprising amount. Much safer that way."

"Oh yeah?" he said, looking dubiously up at the rattling bins.

"Actually, I don't have the faintest idea if that's true or not. It's just what I tell myself when I fly because it's better than believing the plane is about to fall apart."

That did distract him, to the point of making him meet her eyes and smile. He leaned back, looking less nervous.

The plane leveled off, drinks and peanuts were handed out, and then there was such a delay before the meal was served that Dulcie and Benjamin both fell asleep. They woke when the food trolley bumped down the aisle, picked at the strange food, eating the cake and some noodles, but Benjamin found the milk strange after a lifetime of goat's milk and Dulcie spilled half of hers. They then wanted to play together with the packet of games and colors the flight attendant had given each of them.

Ana got tired of the elbows digging into her thighs and the constant chatter of excited voices directly under her chin, so she changed places with Benjamin and allowed the two small kids to have the middle of the row, bracketed by her and Jason at the ends. The children colored and played with the headphones, Jason watched the movie, and Ana tried to read the Jung book she had bought in Sedona and tried not to think of Glen.

The movie ended, reading lights were dimmed, toilets were visited, and the two children attempted to get comfortable. A thousand squirms later Ana got out of her seat and arranged pillows and blankets for Benjamin over both seats. Dulcie put her head into Jason's lap, and Ana took her book back a couple of rows, where there were a few empty seats. To her surprise, after a while Jason joined her with his own book, The Old Man and the Sea. He smiled shyly and read six or eight pages before closing it with an audible sigh.

"Are you reading that for school?" she asked. She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her tired eyes, leaning her head back on the headrest.

"Yeah. It's really boring. Nothing happens."

"I remember. The old man talks to himself a lot and the scavengers eat his giant fish." There was no response. After a minute she opened one eye to see whether he had gone back to his reading, but he was looking at her with an odd expression on his face.

"What? Isn't that what happens?"

"Don't you like Hemingway?"

"Oh yes, Hemingway was an immensely creative and influential writer, but that's the problem. So many writers have tried to copy his style that the original has begun to seem like a cheap imitation. Unfair, but I find it hard to get past the sense of caricature."

This may have been the first time the boy had heard that there might be differing opinions about the great literary works he had been required to appreciate for the last few years of his life.

"Anyway," she said, closing her eyes again, I'd have thought the family Dumas more to your taste, or Dashiell Hammett. Someone with more flair and sense of romance than Hemingway. Romance in the sense of adventure—"she added in an aside—"not as in love story."

He said nothing, and she allowed herself to be lulled by the noise and the vibration, drifting into a light daze.

She woke and slept and woke, each time checking on her surroundings, on Jason, and on the forward row where she could see the top of Benjamin's head. Jason had abandoned Hemingway and was looking at Jung, reading at her marker. She slipped away a third time, and woke greatly refreshed. She stretched and looked around for an attendant, but the plane was still dim and quiet. Jason was awake, still working away at the alchemy essay. She glanced at the page, and saw that he was staring at the drawing of a fifteenth-century alembic.

"Jason," she said. He jerked and quickly turned the page.

"Jason, look—"

"I can't talk about it."

"I know it's part of the Work that Steven gave you, but—"

"I can't talk about it," he repeated brusquely, and started to lift himself out of his seat.

She laid her hand on his arm to stop him. "Okay, Jason, I understand. But can I say something? As a friend?"

He gradually subsided, and she took that as a yes. She thought for a minute, trying to find words that might open a door rather than shut him off.

"Steven is a good man," she said, "and he cares for you. There aren't a lot of people like that in the world, and when we meet someone like him, someone who really reaches us, our automatic response is to accept him fully, every part of him. Add to this the fact that no one your age believes that they have a lot of choices in life, and it is natural to think that you either have to accept all parts of Steven's belief system and teaching style, or reject him completely. You don't want to talk about what went on between you and him during those two days, and I respect that. I just want to say that if you have any doubts or even questions, if anything someone wants you to do doesn't seem quite right or fair, you can come to me and I'll try my hardest to keep an open mind. Okay?"

Jason gave his trademark shrug-and-a-nod, and she had to be satisfied with that. She reached down and unlatched her seat belt.

"I'm going to get a cup of coffee," she told him. "Can I bring you anything?"

He looked up at her, his face clearing with the relief of having gotten off so easy. "Can I have a Coke?"

"You can have anything you want except alcohol."

"I haven't had a Coke in three months."

"I haven't had a decent cup of coffee in five weeks. And four days, but who's counting?"

She found the attendants talking quietly in the galley. They exchanged a few words about the "cute kids" she was shepherding (Dulcie and Benjamin) and Ana went back to Jason with a can of Coke, a cup of ice, and two cups of stale instant coffee for herself.

"What else do you miss at Change?" she asked him when they were both settled in again with their drinks. "Your friends?"

"Nah. Most of the people I knew were jerks. I guess at first I missed all the normal stuff—you know, McDonald's and TV and music and everything. Ice cream—me and Dulcie both miss that. I kind of got used to the place, though."

"It's a different life. But, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if they have ice cream at the English house. I remember when I was in London in the dead of winter once, I was amazed at how many people I saw eating ice cream."

"I don't know, I hear it's a weird place. Not the whole country, just where we're going."

"What, the Change community? Weird how?"

"I don't know," he repeated. "There was a kid in my house who just came back from there. He said they never went anywhere and it was like living in a jungle."

Ana had to smile at the thought of a jungle set down in the civilized English countryside. "He's probably exaggerating."

"Maybe. Anyway, he's kind of weird himself."

Ana Wakefield and Jason Delgado sat elbow to elbow with seven miles of air between their feet and the ice-studded surface of the northern Atlantic Ocean, drinking their respective beverages. Jason poured the second half of his Coke into the plastic cup and glanced at the book she had stuck into the seat back ahead of her.

"Do you read of lot of stuff like that?" Jason asked with a gesture at the worn black cover. She was mildly surprised that he would raise an obviously forbidden topic, even obliquely, but she thought the best thing to do was just treat it as an innocent question. She had, after all, told him that it was up to him to talk about his experience in the alembic.

"When I'm living in the bus, I tend to read more demanding things such as that," she said. There just isn't room to collect masses of books. But when I settle down for a while, I usually go a little nuts at the local libraries and bookstores, catching up on all the novels I've missed."

"God, that must be so great, living in a bus. You can go wherever you want, eat when you want, pull over and sleep when you feel like it."

The wistful tone in his voice did him great credit: Most boys of fourteen, faced with the prospect of twelve years of responsibility for a minor sister, would feel more than mild regret.

"I have to tell you, Jason, how impressive your attitude toward your sister is. Dulcie is a sweetheart, but she's also a major burden. It can't be easy."

Praise on the basketball court was easy to ignore; from a person sitting at your side it was more difficult. Jason fiddled with the contents of the seat pocket in front of his knees for a moment, and then stood up to go check on Dulcie. He came back and continued on to the toilets in the far rear of the plane, where he spent a long time.

When he returned he paused by the seat, then walked forward again to look at the sleeping children. When he was finally in his seat he looked straight ahead at the rumpled white hair of the old man in the next row and he began to talk.

"Dulcie and me, we're not orphans, you know. Our parents are still alive. At least, I know my dad is—he's in jail, and last I heard Dulcie's father was around. He lives in Vegas, I think. Our mom is a crackhead—or, she used to be, until about a year ago she started shooting up, and things got a little crazy. She'd bring these really creepy guys home, real narfs, you know? and they"d… Well, anyway, I finally got pissed off and told her she couldn't do that, not with Dulcie there, and I… I kinda beat one of them up, so she started just not coming home. I had a job, just part-time at a building site, but I had to give it up because I couldn't leave Dulcie home by herself. I mean, I know people do, but she'd get scared, and when I got home she'd just be lying in her bed shaking, and she wouldn't eat her dinner. I used to wish Mom would get arrested so the city would step in and take care of things, but I couldn't go asking for food stamps or child care or anything because then I'd have to tell them why Mom wasn't the one doing the asking, and then she really would get arrested.

"I got… I don't know. I guess I get kind of fed up after a while, trying to do the school thing with Dulcie and no money. I thought I deserved a break. Some time for myself, you know? I mean, all the other guys I knew used to spend hours just hanging out, not dragging their little sisters to all the games and wondering where their damn mothers were half the time. I know most of them don't have fathers and a lot of them have moms who work or spend time in jail, but there's always grandmothers or the welfare or something. Dulcie and I just had us."

He turned and gave her a hard look. "I'm not complaining, you know? I'm just telling you. Okay?"

"I understand."

He looked as if he doubted that, but he continued.

"Anyway, I started to go out sometimes at night after Dulcie was asleep. I never went anywhere, not far, because I kept thinking, "What if she woke up and went looking for me?" or "What if there was a fire?" I'd just sort of hang out with the guys who lived around us, listening to music and stuff.

"And then one night… God, I still can't believe I could be so stupid. We hadn't seen Mom for about a week, and there was almost no food in the house, and school wasn't going too good, and—I don't know, a lot of stuff. So after Dulcie went to bed I went out with some of the guys. And one of them stole a car. And I went for a ride with him, and the stupid bas—he crashed the car.

"We were miles and miles from home, and it was about two in the morning, and all I could think of was Dulcie waking up, and I just kind of lost it and started beating on him. And"—he shook his head—"somebody called the cops. Probably a good thing, or I would've killed him, but instead of letting us go they arrested me, 'cause I was the one with blood all over my hands, and they took the kid who'd stolen the car off to the hospital.

"As soon as they closed me in the back of that cop car I knew I'd really done it. I had to tell about Mom, or else Dulcie would wake up in the morning and find an empty house and go nuts. She did go kind of nuts, I guess, with this strange woman showing up at the door with another cop and no brother in sight, because after a while they brought her to me to settle her down. Some psychologist came along and told them it'd be a bad idea to put her in a foster home by herself, so we got to stay together. We were in and out of half a dozen places, but for some reason nobody wanted a little girl who didn't talk and her brother who liked to beat people up, so we ended up at Change."

"Did you like to beat people up?"

"No! It's just, sometimes you don't have a choice, you know? I used to think that, anyway, but Steven's been helping me see that I really do have a choice, that I hit people because it's easier than not hitting them. Steven told me that sometimes what looks like being strong is really being weak, and what looks like weakness takes greater strength. There's some stuff in the Bible about it."

" 'If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.' "

"That's it. And if he wants to sue you for the coat off your back, give him your shirt as well."

A loose translation, she thought, but a happy one.

"He also talked a lot about what you said, about thinking before I get mad."

Ana took a deep breath. "Have you had a blood test, Jason?"

"A blood test? Oh, you mean because I was in that fight?"

"And the other one, with your mother's… friend."

"Sure. I had two, six months apart. I'm clean."

"That's a relief. I should tell you that I am, too. Your hand," she said when he looked at her, puzzled. "You cut your knuckle on my face. If I had HIV, you'd have been exposed. Something else to keep in mind next time you're tempted to pound some drug addict into a pulp."

"Yeah," he said. His face suddenly relaxed into a crooked smile that would have melted stronger women than Ana. "Next time I'll wear gloves."

She laughed. "So, do you like it at Change?"

"It's okay. There's a lot of rules, but I'm learning a lot. And Dulcie's happy."

Dulcie is happy, and Dulcie's brother shoots baskets and runs in the morning, and fantasizes about living the unencumbered life of a Gypsy, sleeping when he likes and surviving on Cokes and hamburgers.

"You know," she said after a few minutes, "I went to Japan one time. It's a very crowded little country, the cities anyway. When you get on the subway during rush hour, they literally push the passengers in the door to pack them solid. Traditionally the Japanese lived in houses with walls made out of paper, and right on top of each other.

"People can't survive like that, though, so they developed methods of achieving privacy for themselves when surrounded by people. Small areas, like a language that is filled with double meanings—they can say thank-you in a way that means "piss off" with nobody to know or be insulted. There are elaborate forms of politeness and dressing—all ways of hiding in a crowd. Even their art reflects this. In the West we've developed big, sweeping art forms, things that catch at you and won't let you walk by. Japanese art tends to be subtle and intense, so a person has to be looking for it to see the beauty of a teapot or a stroke of calligraphy.

"It's a little like that bird you did on the side of the mug I bought," she said as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her. "Controlled lines that say just what you wanted them to and no more, no less. The essence of 'quail'; with no superfluous decoration. I like that cup very much."

He nodded, a motion closer to a squirm. After a minute of staring off into space, he said casually, "Steven said I could draw again if I wanted to."

"Did he? That's good to hear. Do you generally do a lot of drawing?"

"Not a lot. Sometimes, when I see something I like. Once I… um. I made this book for Dulcie once, for a Christmas present. She wanted this doll, but there wasn't enough money, so I drew her a story about the doll, making it have all these adventures and stuff. She still has it somewhere."

"I'll bet she does." She probably slept with it. "The reason I ask is that Japanese idea of privacy. If you were gifted at poetry, I might suggest that you… oh, write a poem about how Bryan made you feel at the museum that day, for instance. Since your form of expression seems to lie in your hands rather than with words, you might think about using them to create a place that is all yours, a place that is Jason Delgado's alone. Small, intense drawings that capture how you really feel about things. You see, I've lived in communities like Change for a lot of my life, and although I do understand the importance of participating in communal life, I know also that if you don't keep a little piece of yourself apart, you go a bit nuts."

"Like you with your walks," he said. "Dulcie said you like to walk in the mornings, by yourself."

Ridiculous, the pleasure in knowing that the two children talked about her between themselves. "I do. I also keep a journal, with thoughts and descriptions and a few really clumsy drawings." Not, admittedly, that the journal she had going at the moment was much more than a sham.

"Can I see it?"

"What, the journal?"

"Not to read. I just wanted to see your pictures. Oh, never mind, it's not important."

"No, I'd be happy for you to look at my drawings, if you promise not to laugh at them." She reached into the nylon backpack at her feet and dug out the journal. He lowered the seat-back tray and put the journal on it, opening it methodically at the beginning, where Anne, still in her home in the mountains, had written:

Sedentary life does not seem conducive to keeping a journal. I finished the last one nearly 4 months ago, & have not felt the urge to open this one until today, when I noticed that a colony of bats has moved in under the eaves of the house.

The journal continued for half a dozen pages of purely imaginary non-events and the rough sketch of a nest with three eggs in it that according to the journal she could see from her bedroom window but which in truth was a long-abandoned nest brought to her by Eliot after a windstorm the previous fall, which she kept on her mantelpiece (empty of eggs).

Jason studied the delicate lines of the nest under the blue light of the overhead spot, while she sat back in the shadows and studied him.

When she first met him over the repairs of Rocinante's heater, he had worn his black hair long and slicked back into a short ponytail. A few weeks ago, the urban-shark look had been replaced by a short buzz-cut that looked less extreme and threatening but by its very lack of distraction served to emphasize the sharp edges of his nose and cheekbones. Even if he'd had an ordinary haircut flopping down in his eyes, though, she doubted that he would have looked like anything but what he was: a young man with the the eyes of a boy who had given up on hope and the expressionless face of a killer.

This Jason now sitting next to her was no longer that same young man whose devastating good looks and icy aloofness had sent such unexpected and disconcerting ripples down Ana's spine. He had matured dramatically in the few weeks she had known him, and paradoxically shed much of the hard defensive shell that made him appear so much older than he was. There was a boy in his eyes now—a wary boy, to be sure, ready instantly to snap back into his shell, but still a person who had experienced the first faint glimmerings of hope and who might, given time, come to believe in it. That this change had taken place despite the trauma of the alembic was eloquent testimony to his strength of spirit and the incomprehensible workings of the human mind. It was even possible, she had to acknowledge, that the change had been worked in part precisely because of the trauma.

Whatever the cause, and whatever the long-term effects on the boy, Ana was pleased to find that in recent days, a shift had taken place in her own perception of the boy as well. A month ago she would have been hard put to sit with her arm brushing casually against his, their faces eighteen inches apart, talking about Hemingway and drawing; the electricity of his taut personality would have left her as dry-mouthed and sweating as a teenager. On the other hand, it could simply be that familiarity had bred relaxation.

And she was relaxed with him now. She was still intrigued by him, amused and impressed and—yes—secretly in love with him, but her libido or hormones or whatever it was seemed to have rolled over and gone back to sleep, a condition for which she was truly grateful.

"How did you do this?" he asked, pointing to a drawing she had made of a tumble of rocks in the bright sun, a shape defined by its shadows.

"That's called negative space," she told him. "You use your pencil to draw around the object, treating the thing itself as minimally as you can without making it just a white blob, but working up the background and the shadows. You have to see it with your eyes out of focus, if that makes sense."

He nodded, cocking his head at the drawing before turning the page.

Ana tensed slightly as he approached the section where she had first written about him. One's own name had a way of leaping off the page to catch the eye, and she would rather he not read even the sanitized version of her reaction to him. But there was not a drawing on that particular page, and he turned past it, safely now into school and Steven territory.

When he had reached the end (a small horned lizard she had seen sunning itself the other morning) he handed it back to her.

"You don't have any drawings of people in there."

"No. People's faces are too subtle for me. Lizards are about the closest I come, and even those might not be recognizable to a herpetologist."

"The cat was good."

"Anyone can draw a cat."

"That's true," he admitted. He shifted in his seat, and Ana edged aside to give him a bit more room, under the guise of leaning forward to check on Benjamin. She sat back into the edge of her seat, and then saw that Jason was holding out something to her between the thumb and finger of his right hand. It was a very small sketchbook, about three inches by five, the wire coil of its binding bent and flattened, the green cardboard cover cracked and limp with long use. She took the artifact, opened it with the edge of a fingernail, then put it down on her lap and resumed her reading glasses, feeling around for the light button.

The drawings were necessarily tiny, the details often smudged by the treatment the book had withstood and by the graphite on one page rubbing off onto the facing one. Densely worked, the subjects varied from a figure out of some video game (horns, huge grimace, and exaggerated muscles) to a sleeping Dulcie who looked little more than a baby.

After a few pages she looked up. "Are you sure you want me to see these?"

"Yeah. I do."

She went through the book from cover to cover, seeing images of the Change compound worked into pages already containing drawings of an earlier time: A coiled rattlesnake had been fit into a blank corner next to the ear of a seated teddy bear, a spotted goat Ana recognized from an unsuccessful time in the milking barn appeared to be walking toward a futuristic airship belching flames from its engines.

She closed it and gave it back to Jason, who shifted again and made the small book disappear into an inner pocket of his jacket.

"I apologize," she said.

"What for?"

Teachers get into the bad habit of teaching all the time. You don't need to be told about making a personal space with your drawing. Sorry."

"That's okay." He squirmed again with embarrassment.

"And you draw mostly from memory."

"Yeah. You can tell?"

"In drawings this size it's easier to hide the fuzzy detail, but mostly it's that the outside objects like the goat and those dogs are more abstract than the things from your room or Dulcie. You're remembering how you saw them, not recording how they look. They're very beautiful. Some of them are very fine drawings. You should have some training."

He did not answer, and she bent forward to look into his face, which was blank.

"What did I say wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Please, Jason. Tell me."

"It's just something I do. It's a kid thing. Guys don't make, pictures."

She actually laughed aloud. "God, Jason, you have some learning to do about artists. Some of the randiest, most macho guys in the world make pictures. And earn an incredible amount of money doing it."

He looked at her sideways. "Really?"

"Really. Keep drawing, Jason. Even if you don't do anything with it professionally, it'll teach you to see the world."

"You should laugh more often," he said earnestly. "It makes your face relax." He then went scarlet with embarrassment.

"I used to laugh a lot," she said, keeping her voice light. "I'll work on it."

After a minute, he asked her, "Can you show me how to do the "negative space" stuff?"

Ana opened her own journal to a blank white page and found a pencil. "It's not so much a technique of drawing," she began, "as a different way of seeing and thinking about space."

VI

Albificatio

albedo (n. fr L albus, whiteness) Reflective power

or: Albion (n. L) Great Britain; England

It is of soft things induration of Colour white,

And conflxacion of Spirits which fleeing are.

Chapter Twenty-four

The single touchiest place by far in any "cult" situation involves children. An ex-member will come in~or worse, go directly to the newspapers-with a graphic report of child abuse, sexual or otherwise, Satanic rituals involving young children, the perverse habits of the leader and his closest associates, human sacrifice of newborns, you name it. There's no choice but to investigate it, obviously, even though any divorce lawyer can tell you how easy the accusation of abuse Is to make, how hard it is to fight, and how often it is completely without basis in truth.

People use children as tools, for petty revenge, for manipulating someone, to build themselves up in their own eyes and in the view of society as a hero, and basically because dragging in kids makes for the biggest splash. The judges trying a custody case, and the public judging a community in the papers, can't afford to ignore claims of abuse of minors.

You as investigators are not immune from the emotional pull of the need to protect our children. However, in investigating these claims, no matter now plausible they sound, how sincere the accuser, the chief thing I would ask you to remember is the cop's first and hardest lesson: distance. You must not feel outrage, not even with the most appalling accusations; you must not leap to action, even when immediate intervention seems to be absolutely essential. You have to bear in mind at all times that in the vast majority of these cases, these children are seen by their community as they are in any community: they are the future. If you reach out to touch their kids, they will strike back, and the kids and everyone else will get in the way.

Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the FBI Cult Response Team, April 27, 1994

They bent over her drawing pad for about half an hour before the flight attendants began to drag the carts up the aisles again. The smell of sausages and artificial maple flavoring floated through the cabin, and people began to stir. Benjamin woke, and then Dulcie, and Ana's brief idyll was over.

They were hours yet from London, their two kids bored and fractious with the need for exercise. Books and games and drawings and stories dragged on, until finally came the faint change of their angle of flight, heralding their descent into Heathrow only two hours late.

The great plane tipped, giving them a view of a vast expanse of red brick, black slate, gray tarmac, and a dollop of river, and then they straightened out and came in for a landing. They taxied, and they taxied some more; they came to a halt and they waited, half the passengers standing back to belly in the aisles for long minutes while the gangway was run out and first class was offloaded. Finally the jerk of motion as the aisles began to clear, and soon they were saying thank-you to the flight attendants and back on solid ground.

A lot of solid ground, carpeted and glassed-in and stuffy with the fumes of jet engines. After a hundred yards of skipping in joy, Dulcie began to lag; at two hundred yards Jason was carrying her, and Ana hefting Benjamin. She remembered Heathrow as endless, and it was.

The long, looping rows awaiting the immigration desks were next, and then the luggage hall, and both small children were limp now, stunned with exhaustion and strangeness. Ana and Jason were in a similar condition, although Dov and the others had slept and claimed to be refreshed beneath their ill temper.

Luggage piled on the trolley carts, steered through customs' gauntlet, where they all made it through undetained, around a bend and into an enormous echoing hall filled with electronic announcements and colorful motion, and there were two strangers greeting Dov, shaking hands, introducing themselves as Richard and Vicky, and taking over the baggage carts. A parking lot, windy and vast, a large van, child seats for Dulcie, Benjamin, and the other small child. Ana buckled in, checked to make sure she hadn't lost Jason, and gave herself over to the massive tiredness that crept into her very bones.

She slept across a large chunk of southern England.

Ana woke when the small bus descended from the freeway—motorway, it was called here. As cookies were called biscuits and tea was not just a beverage you drank but a meal you ate at six o'clock, and the steering wheel was on the right and roads had roundabouts instead of stop signs, a country where ordinary people did not have cheap guns in their bedside tables and the ordinary policeman was armed only with a stick, a radio, and an intimate knowledge of the patch he patrolled. There would be an equivalent to Glen here, who (if Glen was very persistent) might come to know of her presence, but Glen was a very long way off, and Ana was on her own.

But only for as long as it took her to read the signs here. (As Ana rubbed the back of her neck and shifted on the hard seat, she realized that she had clarified the decision in her mind, on the plane or while she slept.) She would finish her job, even on this strange ground, so that her report to Glen on the Change movement would be as complete as she could possibly make it. Two or three weeks ought to do it; after that she would seize Jason and Dulcie by the hands and remove them from the clutches of Change, even if it meant blowing her cover for good and throwing the Change community to the media, whose appetite for paranoid scenarios involving children was voracious. She would try very hard to take her two charges away quietly, but if she was forced to cling to the figurative gates of the American embassy under the glare of the television lights, so be it.

Then home in time for summer, with potentials and possibilities she wouldn't let herself think about.

Meanwhile, the countryside out her window was proving very compelling, lush, and vibrant with the fast growth of late spring. She had been to this country in the summer twice and once for a memorable week in December, but now she saw why the poets gushed and the painters invented new shades of green: May was incredibly beautiful, field and hedgerow and country lane bursting with the full, exuberant rush of life held in during the long, cold winter. Lambs actually did gambol, she saw in amusement as they drove past a field of bouncing white quadrupeds. A long-legged foal inquiring among the nettles at the base of a fence skittered away at their passing, his ridiculous stump of a tail flapping wildly. A neatly tended orchard of thickly flowering trees filled the low curve of a creekside hollow, giving the impression of a white cloud come to earth. They passed a small, perfect stone cottage set back from the road behind a low picket fence, its garden a riot of wildly mixed color. There were even two black kittens playing on the brick walkway leading to the rose-bowered front door, for heaven's sake. Ana raised her face to the soft air blowing in the window and felt like laughing aloud at the sheer glory of the place.

The first sign of wrongness Ana would have missed completely had she not been seated directly behind the driver. A police car was parked in a lay-by at the side of the lane. Ana might have dismissed it—a local patrol choosing a pleasant spot to have their tea break—but for Richard's vigorous two-fingered gesture at the official vehicle that punctuated his slowing, putting on the turn signal, and turning off through a set of electronically controlled gates and into a worn track so overgrown, it was more tunnel than drive. No one said anything, but Ana was quite certain that in England two fingers jabbed into the air was not a sign of "V is for victory."

They bumped along the track for ten minutes or so, waking up the little kids, but Ana had no ears for Dulcie's cries of protest, because near the beginning of the drive, off in the undergrowth near the gates, she had seen a man dressed in camouflage clothing; in his hands he held something very much like the bulky shape of a shotgun. She opened her mouth, and shut it, but when she looked up she saw Richard's eyes on her in the rearview mirror. She turned to soothe Dulcie with a story about the lambs and kittens she had seen, furry, warm things to counteract the sudden cold tendrils that had begun to unfurl along the pit of her stomach.

The van emerged from the undergrowth and lurched through a section of slightly better road with fencing on both sides before entering a graveled farmyard where the spring weeds were winning. The buildings showed signs of recent labor, new windows and paint renewed in the last two or three years. All of these seemed to be outbuildings, and indeed the van did not stop there but continued around and past some more fences until it pulled up at the towering backside of what looked like a large country home belonging to a slightly down-at-the-heels family.

Ana thought the building was probably early Victorian, a blunt, purposeful edifice built of a harsh red brick that a century and a half had not dimmed. The kitchen door was standing open and three or four dogs and a large number of cats were scattered about, looking vaguely expectant.

Dulcie made for the cats as soon as she was freed from the van. Jason stood gaping up at the vast and uninspiring redbrick wall that loomed above them, punctuated by four rows of windows and surmounted by a gathered stand of half a dozen chimneys. Ana waited until the driver was by himself at the back of the van, pulling out luggage, and then she approached him.

"Richard, was that man in the woods a policeman?" she asked.

"Better not've been. If he was, there'll be hell to pay. We keep them out—we know our rights, they know our boundaries. Doesn't stop 'em from sitting at the back entrance, writing down plate numbers and playing silly buggers."

"Oh. But I thought… He did have a gun, didn't he?"

"Keeps the rabbits down," he said dismissively, and then over Ana's shoulder he shouted, "Where do you want this lot?"

"In the dining room," a woman's voice answered. "We can sort them out from there."

The bags were whisked inside, followed by the people (Dulcie protesting when a cat was plucked from her arms). They passed through the long kitchen, immediately comforting in its familiarity and the post-lunch clutter, although to Ana's eyes the corners could have used a good scrub. She wished they could have stayed there for a while, been handed a stack of dirty plates for what she remembered the English called the washing up, but they were ushered straight through, past three kitchen workers who stopped to watch their passage. One of them was a tall, straight, blonde girl with a peaceful face and oversized rubber gloves on her hands. She openly watched Jason walk past her; he in turn ducked his head to say something to Dulcie; Ana smiled absently to herself.

There was no TRANSFORMATION mural in this dining room, just a lot of mismatched chairs and tables in states ranging from new and cheap to old and rickety. The room had probably begun life as a ballroom, a place for the Victorian father's numerous daughters to display themselves and catch their husbands, but the decorative wallpaper, velvet drapes, and gilt-edged mirrors had all long since been removed from the walls and the wooden dance floor was worn and speckled with white emulsion from a clumsy paint job. It echoed; the noise in there during a meal would be riotous.

Richard dumped the last of their things and vanished. In his place a familiar tall, dark-haired, ascetic-looking figure walked into the room. Ana had been correct to suspect, when she saw the way the Change members in Arizona acted toward him, that Marc Bennett held a high rank in the organization, because here he was to give them their welcome speech—although very little welcome did it contain. He waited imperiously for their attention before he began his carefully composed talk, delivered in portentous tones.

"Before today, you have known Change as through a glass, darkly. Here, you will see what Arizona will eventually become, years from now. You stand at the very center of the Change movement, and you will find things here very different from what you're used to at Steven's place." ("Steven's place," thought Ana; was it imagination, or had that phrase sounded dismissive?) The Change compound you're used to is just getting started, and it has a long way to go before it makes Transformation. We've been here almost three times as long. Steven began his transformation here before Jonas sent him to Arizona, and he comes back here to continue his own Work.

"Age, of course, is no guarantee of either wisdom or authority." Bennett flicked a brief glance across Ana, the oldest person in the room by nearly a decade, and she felt herself bristle at the implied judgment. "However, here you will find a degree of concentration, a level of physical and spiritual activity that the Arizona community cannot begin to approach. We have been here for twelve years, and not a day has been wasted time.

"Dov has been with us before, but the rest of you were chosen to come here because in Steven's opinion, each of you is worthy of our greater efforts, capable of faster progress than he could give you in Arizona. We are on the edge of a great Work here, and Steven wanted you to be a part of it.

"I don't think I have to tell you what that means in terms of daily life here. I assume you all know that 'Great heat, great hope' is more than just a saying." His eyes bored into each of them except for the small children, seeing comprehension in all, even Jason. Perhaps especially Jason.

Benjamin had clung to Ana during the disembarkation and as they passed through the house, and he still stood, clasping her hand and pressing his body up against her leg. The child seemed frightened of Marc Bennett. Behind Bennett a small cluster of men and women had appeared in the doorway, waiting for him to finish. One of the women moved slightly to see better, and Benjamin spotted her.

"Mommy!" he shouted, interrupting Bennett's dramatic monologue and startling them all. He flew across the wooden floor with his small feet pounding, missing a collision with the speaker by inches before he threw himself into the woman's arms, shouting his greetings and gladness, oblivious to everything else. His mother, however, was not. She tried to shush him, and when he would not contain his joy, she shot Bennett a glance of apology and more than a little apprehension before she ducked out of the door and away.

Bennett, expressionless, waited until the noise of their passing disappeared behind a closing door and picked up as if the interruption had not occurred.

"Here, 'Great heat, great hope' is an everyday reality. The pressures here are greater than you have known in Arizona. You were not ready for it there; now you are. It would have broken you there; now it will make you change."

Ana shifted from one flight-swollen foot to the other, wondering uncomfortably why she had heard none of this in Arizona, and also what it was about men of religion that made them so damnably long-winded. Immediately his hooded eyes flashed back to rest on her. This time the scorn in them was clear.

"I'm not going to lie to you: you will not be comfortable here. You will work hard. You will sweat and strain and come to hate us all, but you will stay because you will be able to see and feel the results of your Work. Some of you will stay," he added, and again his gaze touched Ana. She couldn't think what she had done to offend him, unless if, as she had come to suspect, there was rivalry between the two men, Steven's approval alone had condemned her in Bennett's eyes. Ah, well—all the better if she could turn his disapproving gaze from Steven's other protege, the teenager at her side. Even if Bennett was not the community's leader, he could make life difficult for Jason.

"I have nothing to say at the moment about the deeper implications of your life here. It is up to Jonas to set each of you on his or her Work, and tell you what you need to know. Jonas will speak to each of you alone over the next few days. If he thinks you belong here, you will stay; if not, you'll be going back to Arizona.

"In the meantime, let's talk about rules. Our pressures here are very intense, so it shouldn't come as any surprise to find that our regulations have to be tighter. It goes without saying that the same basic ground rules you had in Arizona apply—no drugs or drink, no music or distracting clothes, no personal possessions you're not willing to share, and absolutely no unauthorized jewelry. Beyond that, we have three requirements.

"One: Everybody works. If you're not carrying your weight, you go back.

"Two: No outside contact unless it's absolutely unavoidable, particularly in your first eight weeks here. In Arizona you welcomed outsiders, you came and went, you used the phone and wrote letters home, because you were at an early stage in your Work, where it didn't matter. Here we are higher. Because things are more concentrated, more delicate, outside interference can have terrible consequences. We have wrapped this estate around us to allow us to work undisturbed; none of us can endanger the whole by coming and going without supervision.

"Be aware, too, that the authorities are harassing us—issuing us with writs, plaguing us with financial enquiries, and just plain watching us. Some of you saw the panda car parked in the road, but they're a load more high tech when they want to be. Just assume that they're watching overhead at all times, and keep under cover whenever you can. When you're working in the fields, wear one of the hats we keep in the garden shed so they can't see your face. And never go near the boundaries—they have cameras." Ana found that she was standing with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She wished Benjamin had not deserted her. She wished she were holding Dulcie. Most of all she wished she knew what the hell was going on. Why, for one thing, was Marc Bennett standing there pontificating? Where was Jonas Seraph? Both Steven and Glen had led her to believe that Jonas was in charge here, and Bennett's words had indicated that Jonas was present. Was he ill, and capable only of limited, individual interaction with the new members of Change?

Whatever the explanation, she did not like this at all. Forty minutes earlier she had been laughing in quiet pleasure at the gamboling lambs and the kittens, and suddenly here she was, listening to a speech about the terrible threats of the outside world that could have come from the mouth of any of a hundred mentally unstable leaders whose names went on to make the headlines. Cameras and spy planes? The abruptness of the change was shocking, as if she'd been dropped into an icy lake. She began to feel dizzy. Bennett went inexorably on.

"And rule three: You're newbies. Assume that anybody here knows more than you, do what they tell you, and you won't get in trouble. Once Jonas has approved you, you're going to work long hours, you won't get much sleep, and the only time you'll sit down is to eat or to meditate. Or in school," he added in afterthought with a glance at Jason. "And God help you if you fall asleep during meditation, because Jonas sure won't."

By this time Dulcie was up in Jason's arms, hiding from her tiredness and confusion and the strange man's big voice. She cringed at his gust of laughter and turned a wary eye on him, but Jason was listening to Bennett with no small interest, and merely patted her absently.

"So," Bennett said. There"re the three main rules: work, apartness, and obedience. If you don't like it, tell us by lunchtime tomorrow, and we'll send you back to Arizona, nothing lost but a return ticket and a couple of days. Look around, talk to people, stay out of sight, and make up your mind. Steven sent you because he thought you needed the greater heat here to help your Transformation. If he was wrong, it's his fault, not yours." The prospect of Steven's being wrong obviously pleased him. "Any questions?"

Questions? Thought Ana. By God, she had questions, but they were hardly the sort Bennett would answer for her. Why hadn't she been warned? Oh yes, she'd been told that there were guns in the Los Angeles branch of Change and that a boy had been killed in Yokohama. But why had Glen neglected to mention the little fact that the English group was an armed camp run by a drill sergeant who saw camera lenses in the birds' nests? Damn you, Glen, she raged, though her face remained stiff and unrevealing.

She held the anger tightly, and fed it with the sight and sound of Marc Bennett and the thought of the flaying she would give Glen when she saw him next, and the anger was a relief and a bulwark against what lay beneath, trying to break through.

For underneath lay dread, the chill, memory-laden fear of the inevitable composed of images: Abby lying wrapped in Aaron's swollen arms on the hard-baked Texas earth; Calvin Vester in Utah, a friendly man who had cooked her breakfast, seen in Rocinante's side mirror with his gun coming up; Martin Cranmer with the Kansas wheatfields stretching out behind him, brutally knocking one of his followers to the ground, laughing. She could almost smell the burnt-steam stink of the ruptured radiator mixed with the hard, hot smell of her own blood; above all she felt the clear sensation of being trapped in a room filled with flammable gas and the only way out involving a lighted match—staying was unthinkable, leaving impossible. It was Texas, driving away from Abby and Aaron, only Texas with the foreknowledge of what her action would lead to.

Bennett ran out of words, nodded brusquely, and left the room, but Ana stood paralyzed and unseeing as the meeting broke up and people began to lead the newcomers and their possessions away. She watched Jason and Dulcie leave without a backward glance, and only gradually became aware of the plump, ordinary, sane-looking forty-year-old woman who was standing patiently in front of her.

"Hello?" The woman's humorous, questioning intonation indicated that she had greeted Ana several times already. This time she saw Ana focus on her, and she smiled. "Hi. I'm Sara. Shall I show you where your room is?"

"Sorry," Ana said. Her mouth felt numb, her voice not her own. She tried a return smile, apparently with success. "I was miles away. That would be good of you, thanks."

Sara picked up one of Ana's two bags and started briskly for the stairway, chattering in an enchanting English drawl about how "disorientated" jet lag left a person, and then about the weather. Ana followed slowly, only half hearing.

Don't overreact, she was telling herself; this is neither Utah nor Texas. You've spent weeks in the Arizona community and seen no signs of problems, and then you come here and take the rude gesture of one antiauthoritarian driver and the speech of a self-important member—not even the group leader—put them together, and build a toppling tower.

Calm down, woman. This is not Texas; this is not Utah. They'll ship you back to Arizona whenever you want, and there are certainly no jugs of poison waiting in the cellar; no one is about to run out with an automatic pistol to stop you from driving away. Just think of it as a brief enlistment with the English army.

The surface of her mind began to clear, so that by the top of the second flight of stairs she was paying attention to what her guide was saying about the recent spate of long, dry summers and the mixed feelings the entire country had about warmth in May.

Ana responded with a comment about how amazing the eyes found the rich green foliage that they had come through compared with the sparse, dry landscape, even in the rush of spring that they had driven through on their way to the airport in Phoenix. They talked while Sara marched her up to a small, cold, north-facing room with ill-fitting curtains and a lumpy mattress, showed her the bath, toilet, and linen room, and helped her make up the bed (Sara's half had tight, sharp corners) before leading her back down the stairs.

All the while, though, grinding down in the deeper reaches of her mind and repeating over and over was the thought: I should never have let Dulcie and Jason on that plane. Never.

Chapter Twenty-five

Jonestown began as an attempt to build a paradise in the wilderness, a garden of Eden carved out of the Guyana jungle, populated by multiracial refugees from the oppressive policies of the American system. A thousand people followed the Reverend Jim Jones into the wilderness, within a year, more than nine hundred of them would swallow poisoned fruit drink and lie dead beneath the tropical sun. However, one cannot explain away the suicide of Jonestown as merely a product of mass delusion and hysteria with a charismatic madman deliberately manipulating his gullible followers. This was a community of well meaning, deeply committed believers who saw the enemy at their gates, about to break in and break them apart. These were men and women willing to take their own lives, and the lives of their beloved children, rather than submit to the contamination of the outside world. When Jewish rebels gave themselves and their children to the knife in first century Masada, theirs became a cry of resolute freedom through the millenia, the followers of Jim Jones will go down as poor deluded losers

One obvious difference between Jonestown and Masada lies in the degree of actual threat involved. The Romans would indeed have executed some of the rebels and sent the others into brutal slavery, Congressman Ryan and his team were merely investigating, the first bureaucratic trickle in what would have become a deluge. To the minds of the two communities, though, the threat was identical, primarily because the residents of Jonestown were as isolated and pressured as the community over the Dead Sea was 1900 years before

Isolation and pressure are the two deadliest enemies of any volatile situation. Heat from outside, added to the heat generated from within, and kept under tight pressure by isolation (be it voluntary or enforced) is a sure recipe for disaster. Isolation by itself is a useful tool, if kept sufficiently low key, pressure too can be valuable, if a clear and acceptable (to the community) outlet is provided. Put the two forces together, though, and you have a pressure cooker waiting to explode

Excerpt from "Religious Communities and the Law: An Alternative Approach" by Dr. Anne Waverly (a publication of the Federal Bureau of Investigation)

But then the next morning Ana woke to the joyful noise of a thousand birds singing their hearts out, and the sound, shouting forth the magnificence of life and hope and normality, blended with the golden light pouring in and brightening the spare furnishings and the stained ceiling, and her heart was glad. Yesterday had been a dark dream plagued by a neurotic fantasy, created by pressures and anxieties and fed by jet lag, her personal history, and an accumulation of sleepless nights. Today she would start afresh, and give herself a chance to see this branch of Change with clear eyes.

Her wristwatch had suffered from the journey, though. Either that or she had made a mistake in setting it to local time, because although it told her that it was not yet five o'clock, her eyes and the birds outside insisted that the morning was well and truly broken.

She dressed and went out into the hallway, where she stopped, puzzled by the complete lack of activity. There were no plumbing noises, no voices from downstairs; surely someone would have mentioned it if Change rose with the dawn? However, when she got to the kitchen and found the only indicator of life to be the fragrance coming from the coffeepot, she took it as a sign that only early risers were about. Actually, if she thought it over, it was a twice-good sign: Here, it seemed, she would be allowed to start the day on something more powerful than a tea bag.

She looked around for a kitchen clock, and was chagrined to discover that no, her watch was not wrong. She had just forgotten how far north England was, how incredibly early it grew light there in the summer.

Well, she was not about to go back to bed, not with fresh coffee at hand and the glories of an English morning outside the door. She tried various cupboard doors until she found a mug, poured herself some coffee and added a splash of rich yellow milk from a glass jug in the refrigerator, and opened the back door.

And nearly whirled around and slammed it behind her, until her mind registered that the pack of baying dogs was not actually going for her.

"Quiet!" she ordered, and then "Shut up!" A simple "No!" seemed to do more than either of the first commands, so she repeated it sternly until the noise died down to a few growls and whiffles and her heart rate returned to normal. When most of the dogs were quiet, she lowered herself onto the top step and extended her hand for their examination. One or two seemed happy enough to adopt her as their own, two or three stayed well back, eyeing her suspiciously and grumbling to themselves, and the other half dozen, a motley collection that included a slim boxer very like Livy, sniffed her hand, accepted a pat, and then ignored her.

She would have to wait awhile before she tried to walk through their midst, though, so she settled down with the cup of coffee (which miraculously had not entirely sloshed over the steps when she was first confronted by the pack) and a pair of hairy heads immobilizing her feet, and breathed in the day.

Ana's previous trips to England had concentrated on the cities and on tourist sites. The closest she had come to a farmyard were one visit to a farm museum near Oxford and a night in a rural bed and breakfast when she and Aaron had been caught by night on a dark road somewhere between Stonehenge and Bath.

There was no doubt that this was a working farm; the very smell in the air told Ana that, even without the sounds of rooster and cow and the memory of three large tractors parked in the yard the afternoon before. The weeds might be thick but the fences were maintained, and although there had appeared to be a leak somewhere in the roof over Ana's bedroom, she would have bet that the barn was sound.

When the cup was empty, Ana figured that she had sat there long enough to become familiar to the dogs. She put her cup down onto the side of the step where no passerby would kick it, and got casually to her feet, standing for a minute while the dogs around the edges gave a few disapproving whuffs. Her two closest admirers waved their tails expectantly; the others waited to see what she had in mind. She addressed her companions.

"Want to go for a walk, guys?" she asked in a cheerful voice. "Yes? Okay, come on."

The disapproving ones started barking, which set off the middle-of-the-road members, but Ana merely slapped her left thigh encouragingly and strode off.

She ended up with five dogs in all, sailing back and forth across the gravel in front of her, but before she reached the end of the yard, she heard a woman's voice behind her, calling for her to stop and wait. She stopped and turned around to wait for the flustered young woman, who was securing a floppy straw hat onto her head with one hand as she ran and holding an identical hat in her other hand.

Hats—oh yes; Bennett had said that hats were to be worn out of doors to foil the intrusions of the telephoto lenses, spy planes, and satellites.

The young woman stopped in front of her, panting from the run, and held out the extra hat. "You need to wear this," she said. "You mustn't forget again, or Marc will get angry."

Ana looked at the hat. It was a ridiculous piece of headgear with a low, round crown guaranteed to shift around on the head surrounded by ten inches of soft, grubby, sweat-stained brim. The ribbons necessary to hold it in place were colorless with age and had been tied together in a couple of places. She did not want to have this disgusting object between her and the magnificent blue sky.

Ana, she told herself, in Israel you cover yourself neck to wrist to ankle even in August; in New York you cripple yourself with heels. Here you will wear a hat.

She clapped it on her head and thanked the young woman with as much good grace as she could muster, and without another word turned her back and continued on up the lane.

The wide brim and musty smell of the object on her head dimmed the morning somewhat, and when she reached the point where the road went into the woods, tempted by the thought that in there she might remove it, she paused. The vision of a man wearing camouflage gear was vivid. Perhaps until she knew the ground rules she'd better stick to the open fields, she decided, and turned left onto a muddy track that ran between a fenced field with half a dozen cows in it on one side and on the other a wild thicket of nettles, blackberries, and bushes where the woods began. It was not as nice as the lane, and she had to take care not to put her foot into a cow pat or lose her hat to a branch, but the dogs were pleased and her spirit was content.

It was a nice long circuit with many pleasing ins and outs and dead ends, but it was also a puzzling one. On her left for the entire time lay civilization in the form of cows and sheep, two massive draft horses and a well-populated duck pond, fenced pastures and vegetable garden. Extending out from the house was a twelve-foot-high brick wall lined with espaliered fruit trees, with a gap in the bricks revealing a glimpse of an acre or more of enclosed garden with a gleaming greenhouse, more trees espaliered against the wall, and rows of ruthlessly neat planted beds.

It was a beautiful farm, ageless in structure and vigorously modern in intent; it left Ana with a clear idea of just where all that hard work Bennett had referred to went.

The whole time, however, with the civil arts of the gardener displayed on her left, the right-hand prospect was nothing but a wall of overgrown shrubs, tangled vines, and impenetrable thicket. It was beautiful, too, in its wild way—magnificent, even, such as the huge rhododendron that had grown up and then toppled, rooting and resprouting where it lay until it formed a single plant nearly fifty feet long. Its clusters of red blossoms were fading now, but a few weeks earlier they must have been spectacular in spite of the heavy tangle of bramble that was clambering over the great bush. The rhododendron gave way to a wall of privet that cried out for the attentions of half a dozen strong men with chain saws; farther on, a tree three feet across at its base had fallen onto the lane and had its upper half cleared away while the rest of it was left to rot on the ground, after which a gate, so overgrown as to be unopenable with any tool short of a bulldozer, showed where a narrow lane had once joined with the home farm. So it continued, all the way around: tidy industry and the clean fragrance of grass on the left, a high wall of wild vegetation and the smell of rotting things on the right, hacked back as if a line had been drawn, untouched beyond that boundary. Order versus chaos: The early American colonies must have felt a little like this, settlements carved out of the wilderness. Or an enchanted castle, insulated from time.

From down at the bottom of the farm, the house was softened by the outlying walls and structures, its lower half hidden by trees. The top of it rose up, though, and Ana saw for the first time that it was not just a box, as it had appeared from the back door. The central portion of the main block stepped up, two or three stories higher than the sides, and that section was topped by the tangle of chimneys. It looked a bit like a flattened pear, an overripe Cornice dropped from a height onto its bottom, and would, she reflected, have been much improved had someone alleviated the unimaginative symmetry by propping a giant leaf up against the central stem of chimneys. She grinned at the whimsical image, and went on.

Back at the walled garden near the house, Ana turned to survey the gently sloping terrain down to the jungle, and was hit by its unlikely but striking similarity to another would-be paradise, the remnants of which she had once visited, a hortus conclusus whose inhabitants had tried to keep the outside world at bay while an ideal society was being constructed within the boundaries. Sealed in, like this place, by the hermetic walls of the jungle, with stringently limited outside contact and a strong sense of oppression, the pressure had built until it could be held no longer. People called it Jonestown—and why the hell, thought Ana, was she dwelling on that tropical, blood-soaked patch of insanity, here on this glorious morning on this piece of God's green earth less than three hours from the edges of London? Macabre thoughts had no business intruding, and paranoia was clearly a two-way street. Yes, it was a good thing that she would never do this for Glen again; academia was an outpost of rationality by comparison.

Still, as she looked back at the abrupt wall of vegetation she found that she was again wishing for the last two days back, so she could walk straight through the Phoenix airport and put Dulcie and Jason in a taxi and drive them straight to Glen or Agent Rayne Steinberg or even the FBI boy with the protruding ears in Prescott. Looking at the forest walls pressing in on her, she could not shake off the fanciful image of bringing Jason and Dulcie to be hermetically sealed into these green walls, awaiting Transformation. She shivered and pushed the idea away violently. Enough! Time for breakfast and human contact: The mind of the individual, like that of the community, needs contact with others to keep it balanced.

Life was stirring in the house when she returned. She removed her mucky boots at the kitchen door, carrying them inside for fear one of the dogs might take it into his head that they were chew toys, and propped them and the distasteful hat in a corner. She found a washroom and cleaned her hands, then presented herself in the kitchen.

"Good morning," she said to the room at large. "Anything I can do to help?"

There was.

Some years before, Anne Waverly had come to know a visiting pair of eminent anthropologists who were spending half a year at her university. Most of the team's publications were in the husband's name, but he freely admitted that a lot of the research, and indeed all of the research done into the women's side of the society being studied, was conducted by his wife, a frail, white-haired woman whom Anne had come to think of as the Ms Marple of the anthropology set.

The woman's approach was to present herself to their new society—be it in Africa, highland New Guinea, or northern Canada—as precisely what she was: a grandmother. Out would come the knitting and the photographs, the stories and the remedies for arthritis, and with the babies crawling around their feet and the pots bubbling in the background, the women would freely submit to having their brains picked and their communal souls bared. She was a formidable weapon in the anthropological array, and Anne imitated her methods whenever she could. A community's mind and pocket may be in the meditation hall and the office, but its heart and soul are found on the cooking hearth, and although Ana might not have snapshots of the grandchildren or a woolly sweater on her needles, she had found that a person could ask anything if she did it with her arms immersed in greasy soapsuds.

Until the schooling arrangements for the Arizona newcomers were straightened out, which according to Dov would take a couple of days, Ana had no responsibilities, so she washed pans and scrubbed shelves and peeled vegetables. And she talked blithely, and she listened to their complaints and their squabbles, and she wondered at the level of antagonism in the kitchen and at the plethora of convoluted difficulties they were having with health inspectors and school inspectors and social services inspectors and banks. She had thought the United States was drowning in bureaucracy, but it would appear that America had nothing on the United Kingdom. By the time the lunch dishes were cleaned up, she had a clear sense of the mental state of this community—which she found filled with sharp little tensions while maintaining a powerful sense of self-confidence in the face of the world's vexations—and had gained a basic idea of how the community functioned.

She was struck, first of all, by the extent to which Marc Bennett had been right: There were profound differences between Steven's compound and this one—differences that went far deeper than the presence or lack of a coffeepot. The English group was actually much smaller, though it was longer established, and because it did not import children for a school, the population was older. Also, although Steven had referred to Jonas as the leader here, the unseen figure seemed to occupy more a position of aloof but ultimate authority than being involved in the day-to-day operations of the place, which were firmly in the hands of Marc Bennett.

Bennett was not universally popular. In fact, two of the women agreed that they had seen a number of members leave over the last year or so, since he had assumed (or been assigned?) a greater degree of control. He was respected, though, and the general consensus seemed to be that whereas Jonas was incredibly wise and authoritative, he was too otherworldly to be burdened with lowly details. No, they were fortunate to have Marc Bennett to direct the daily operations of keeping Change together in a largely hostile universe.

During the course of the morning spent working with the women, it struck Ana how like Change was to a certain kibbutz she had spent some weeks with on the West Bank—surrounded by the enemy, committed to the way of life, unconsciously preserving the traditional gender-linked work roles, scornful of the soft life led by outsiders, and dependent solely on themselves for all the necessities of food, shelter, and defence. Change even had a system of pantries and storage lockers like that of the kibbutz, three great rooms loaded with airtight canisters of grain, plastic drums of dried fruit, and cartons of candles, toilet paper, and tinned meats.

Like the kibbutz—or very like the survivalists in North Dakota she had lived with, her very first job for Glen, when she had learned what it was like to breathe and eat with fear continually touching the back of her mind. This Change community was even populated by the same kind of people as both kibbutzim and survivalists: straight-spined militarists, tightly disciplinarian with their children, and energetic to the point of edginess. The closest she had come to finding a placid individual here was Sara, and even Sara had trotted briskly up the stairs and made her side of the bed with knife-edged corners. It was like being in a hive of type-A personalities, bristling and focused and extremely clear about what they were doing. And to think that in Arizona she had found Dov tight-assed.

She shook herself and reached out for the reason she had come into the storage room: a broom to sweep the crumbs from the floor of the dining hall. It was where she had been told it was, with a dustpan. She took them into the former ballroom and got to work.

It was an awkward job, since the broom was not the nice flat shape she was used to but rather resembled a janitor's push-broom, only smaller. The wide head caught at all the chair legs, and though it did not feel right to pull it, pushing it seemed even more awkward. Still, she fumbled and cracked her way through the room, pulling the debris into the dustpan as she went and using the time of uninterrupted, mindless labor to think about lunch.

Perhaps because this Change community was smaller, they all ate at the same time. At least, most of the members gathered together—she had not seen Bennett there, nor Jonas. She had not yet laid eyes on Jonas at all, in fact, although she had been watching for the bearded face from Glen's three-year-old photograph. She did not know if the higher echelons had their own dining area or even a separate kitchen, but she took it that here, rank's privileges held. Or maybe they were just too spiritually uplifted to eat.

At lunch she had seen Jason and Dulcie come into the dining hall, but she had also seen the blonde kitchen girl walk in with them, so she went to sit with Sara and tried to get her talking. It proved not to be difficult.

Sara had been with Change nearly four years, but as far as Ana could tell had not made much progress in her personal transformation. Certainly she wore no silver necklace. She seemed mildly aware of her failure but not very troubled by it, and Ana decided that Sara was a good heart but not a great brain—perfect for her purposes, although she would have laid money that Marc Bennett had little time for Sara other than her obvious willingness to work.

It was confirmed when Ana's tentative remarks about Bennett made Sara almost physically wince. Bennett, it seemed, made no effort to conceal the irritation and impatience Sara caused him to feel, so she tended to stay out of his way. Jonas, however, had once said something terribly kind and supportive to her (which she wouldn't tell to Ana because it had been a part of her personal Work), so although he usually wandered around the place too distracted by his great thoughts and meditations to notice someone like Sara, she still found him a paternal figure. Strange, slightly scary and awe-inspiring, but paternal nonetheless.

Before lunch ended, Ana had arranged to join Sara in the walled garden, where Sara was due to set out seedlings. They then went their ways, Sara to private meditation and Ana to the dirty dishes and then the awkward broom.

She found that she was quite looking forward to meeting Jonas.

In the meantime, she was enjoying the respite from people, working her methodical way down the still, warm room with its high ceiling and jumble of furnishings. The dust motes she raised hung in the shafts of sunlight that streamed through the wide, uncurtained windows, and the collection of bread crumbs and lettuce leaves in her pan grew.

When she looked up. Marc Bennett stood in the doorway watching her.

"I don't know if anyone has informed you," he said without preliminary, "but we do not welcome newcomers to group meditation until Jonas has spoken with them."

Ana opened her mouth to respond, framing the appropriately meek response of a novice to her master that would reduce some of the animosity he demonstrated toward her, but she found that the words would not come; her spine would not bend. Instead, her shoulders went even straighter and her face and voice clearly showed how unimpressed she was, and what came out of her mouth was simply "Yes, that's probably for the best." She went back to her sweeping, to all appearances completely indifferent to his presence.

A moment passed, and he gave a sharp laugh. "Steven thinks you're hot stuff. He says you know things before you've learned them. But then, Steven has always been gullible. That's why he's in Arizona."

"He's a good leader," she said easily, tipping a chair to reach a clot of dried mud next to its leg. He took her mild emphasis on the pronoun as a criticism, as she had intended. "You assume because he's in charge there, he's higher than I am? Think again, Ana Wakefield. You're not as clever as you think you are. Actually, you're here only because Jonas wanted to see the boy Jason, and you're the easiest way of prising him loose from his sister. You're not an adept; you're a glorified baby-sitter with a sore hand that excuses you from any real work.

"And," he added spitefully, "if I hear of you going out again without a hat, you're on your way home to Arizona."

She paused in her work and turned on him the haughty, professorial raised eyebrow that had intimidated furious thirteen-year-olds and irate FBI agents alike. She just stood and looked at him until he whirled and left her alone in the empty, sun-filled dining hall, sweeping the floor and thinking mordant thoughts.

Stupid. That was a stupid, stupid thing to do, she told herself—a newcomer who had yet even to begin her Work doesn't stand up to the second in command. Bennett could make a great deal of trouble for her, and the worst part of it was, she did not know why she had not simply put on her humble face and ingratiated herself to him. It would have been easy enough to do. She'd done it a hundred times before, but for some reason, the automatic response had been overridden by a pride that might cost her dearly.

Was it just another inconvenient intrusion from her past, because Bennett reminded her of Martin Cranmer, the Kansas wheat farmer she had chosen to pursue? The man Glen had dubbed the Midwest Messiah. Even physically they were similar, that same tall, thin build and deep-set, burning eyes. Cranmer had been easy to manipulate in some ways, because he did not expect opposition from a woman, but he was difficult in others, for precisely the same reason. He had gathered to himself a high proportion of women in Utah, along with a number of men with low sex drives who seemed happy to turn a blind eye on Cranmer's adoption of their wives. Fortunately, Ana had still been fairly gaunt, and her short-cropped hair and a lack of makeup, combined with a stubborn commitment to loose jeans and baggy men's shirts had kept her out of his grasp.

Not that Marc Bennett seemed to have made a private harem for himself at Change. Far from it; the most overt display of sexuality she had seen in the past twenty-four hours was the blonde girl's flirtatious laughter when Jason made a joke over the vegetable stew (which laughter had caused Dulcie to scowl).

Bennett wasn't actually anything like Cranmer, was he? Tall and pushy, sure, but that was about it. No, the problem was with her, Ana, and her inability to keep the door to memory shut. Something in the past twenty-four hours had jostled her badly—jet lag, perhaps, or something random like the chimneys on the house or the garden or Bennett's speech, maybe even the dog that resembled Livy—and the past was now scrambling back at her, lost incidents washing in with every new sight, repressed images pressing at the back of her retinas. Jonestown, Abby in Texas, the armed kibbutz and the encampment of survivalists—once a memory had its toe in the door, it dragged a dozen more with it. Dangerous, distracting, and distorting to judgment, it was equally difficult to suppress.

It had happened in the past, most strongly in her second case in Miami when the first stressful phase was successfully negotiated and her defenses had relaxed just a bit, and in swept all the anxieties and discomforts that were waiting at the gates like a horde of importunate peasants demanding audience. At home, when she was Anne Waverly and the ghosts crowded close to her skin and whispered just beneath her ability to hear, she had found that the only solutions lay in tranquilizers or alcohol, or long hours of exhausting labor.

The artificial controls were beyond her reach here, but she certainly seemed to be in the right place for hard work.

She reached the end of the room and carried the last dustpan load to the garbage can, then hung up the broom and pan where she had found them, retrieved her shoes and the loathsome hat from the mud room, and went outside to find her informant in the walled garden.

Chapter Twenty-six

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

Sara was in the greenhouse, rearranging flats of seedlings. Ana greeted her and looked over her shoulder at the plants.

"Broccoli?"

"Cabbage," Sara corrected her. "But close—they're hard to tell apart when they have only four leaves."

"Boy, I love these greenhouses. They look like something out of Kew Gardens."

"Aren't they beautiful? It took months to rebuild them, apparently, they were in such terrible shape. Now they look like a place you should hold a garden party. Here's a trowel. You'll find some gloves in the wardrobe over there."

Ana had noticed the object, a tall mahogany clothes closet more suitable for a cool bedroom than this hot, humid atmosphere. She wrenched open the doors with some effort and rummaged through the heap of mismatched gloves until she found two that fit and had a minimum of holes. Then she took up the trowel and a flat, and followed Sara out to the bed that had been set aside for the young cabbage plants.

"What a luxury to have the ground already prepared. And what gorgeous soil."

"We dug it over yesterday and let it rest. And yes, that's what soil looks like after five generations of care. Do you want a kneeling pad? I don't know about you, but I can't squat for two hours like I used to."

Ana didn't think she had ever been able to squat for two minutes, let alone hours, and accepted the offer of a peeling slab of thick, closed-cell foam rubber. She gingerly lowered herself onto her right knee and prepared to follow Sara's lead in planting.

For twenty minutes or more, the only sounds were the gentle, soul-satisfying noises of trowel parting rich earth and then tapping it down again. Marc Bennett faded in her mind, Martin Cranmer might have been a thousand years ago, but eventually, reluctantly, Ana stirred herself to work around to the questions that had brought her out there.

"Have you always been a gardener, Sara? Or just since you came here?"

"Oh, I always had at least a patch of potatoes and lettuces, even when I lived in the city."

"Was that London?"

"York. You know it?"

"I've been to the cathedral."

"York Minster."

"That's right. And that area around it with all the narrow alleyways. It has some funny name."

"The Shambles?"

That's right, the Shambles. York's a beautiful town. Do you have family there?"

"My ex-husband and daughter are probably still there."

"You're not sure?"

"It's been four years. Two since I heard from them, when there were some papers to sign."

"You haven't seen your daughter in four years?"

"Thereabouts. I think maybe come autumn I'll go outside and look her up."

Ana glanced at her, but couldn't see Sara's face behind the brim of the floppy straw hat.

"You like it here, then?" she asked.

"It's where I need to be," said Sara, which didn't exactly answer the question. "I am growing and fulfilling myself in a way I never could outside. That's worth the ache of not seeing my child."

"I just asked because it seems, I don't know, tense here somehow. Like there's a lot going on that people are worried about."

"That's always the case. But you're right, it's not an easy time for you newcomers to fit in. We're going through a difficult time with the Social Services—the people who oversee the schooling and welfare of our children. One of the boys who left earlier this year, poor misguided soul, is trying to get back at his wife by making her choose between her life here and her children. It's one thing to enter into it fully like I did with a nearly grown child, and quite another to be torn apart. A very difficult time all around," she repeated. She had briskly planted the last of her seedlings in neat rows, and got up to go to the greenhouse for another flat. Ana worked more slowly, and with less tidy results. The natural look, she told herself.

When Sara came back, Ana maneuvered the talk around to Marc Bennett, giving Sara a shortened version of what had happened between them in the dining hall. Sara shook her head.

"He means well, love, but even he feels the sort of pressure he's under. He hasn't been here even as long as me, you know, and it's a big responsibility he's taken on. Hardly surprising he's a bit techy, times. I know that "great heat makes for great growth", but Marc's not had all that much time to prepare himself for it. Jonas just saw him standing there and dumped it all on him."

Ana was astonished at Sara's loose tongue, under the influence of common labor and the warm sun, but she was more than willing to take advantage of it.

"Why? Who was doing all the work before Marc?"

"A lovely woman name of Samantha, called herself Sami with an I. She'd been here forever, far as I know, and then she upped and left."

Ah, thought Ana, at last, a trace of the elusive Samantha Dooley, whose main characteristic seemed to be her ability to slip away—from her family and Harvard University to India, from Pune to England, from Change to the women's community in Toronto. "Really? Why did she leave?"

"Ask ten people, you'll hear eleven stories, as my grandmother used to say. I do know that she and Jonas were having a lot of disagreements. About his Work, mostly. We were having a spell of difficulties with the county council around then, a building permit they were holding back or some such nonsense. Sami wanted Jonas to deal with some of the inspectors; he just said he had his Work to do and to let him be. There was a load of other stuff, I'm sure, but as far as I remember, that was the final straw for her. A few weeks later we woke up one morning and she was gone, she and a couple of other women who'd been here for a year or two."

That seemed pretty much a dead end, unless Sara had stood with her ear to the door during Sami's final conversations with Jonas, and a few more casual questions established that no, Sara knew nothing other than what she had already said. Ana had to move away from the topic before Sara began to wonder at all her interest in a woman she had never met. "And when she left, Jonas gave all her responsibilities to Marc. That was when?"

"Oh, last autumn. After the main harvest, before the frosts. October, maybe?"

"Jonas sounds like a real character."

"You haven't met him yet? Oh dear, I probably shouldn't be talking to you about any of this. You're not really one of us until you've talked to Jonas."

"Shouldn't you? Oh. Well, all right, but I'm not exactly new to Change. I've been in Arizona for a while, and Steven himself sent me here."

"That Steven's such a pleasant man. I don't think I'd mind too much if I was sent to Arizona, if it wasn't so terribly hot there."

Ana wiped the sweat off her forehead with the side of her glove and shoved her hat onto the back of her head. "Actually, it was cooler there when I left than it is here. It's up in the hills, so it doesn't get quite as hot as the lower desert. A very different kind of gardening, though, because of the shortage of water. Sparse, but beautiful. You'd like it, I think."

"Do you? I'll consider it."

"Jonas is Steven's teacher, too, isn't he? That's why Steven comes here so often. He must be terribly… wise,"

"Wise?" For the first time in their conversation, Sara paused in her quick, methodical actions, a tiny root ball cradled in one hand and the trowel in the other while she considered this description. "I suppose he must be. Most of the time he just seems, I don't know. Unreachable, maybe. Like he's so far above most people, he doesn't really see us. I mean it—Jonas seems to look straight through you, unless you happen to say or do something that catches his attention, or his imagination. When I first came here, it bothered me. I mean, it seemed a bit rude. I talked to Sami about it one day, and she said it wasn't rudeness, when he ignored you or said something that was kind of insulting; it was like a jolt he'd give you, to help you with your Work. Do you know anything about Zen Buddhism?" she asked unexpectedly, returning to her planting.

"A little."

"Well, you know how there were Zen masters who used to slap their students or clout them over the head with their staffs, and then the students would enter a state of satori?" Ana nodded, fascinated by this new side of Sara. "It's kind of like that."

"You mean Jonas hits people?"

"No, no, no. Oh, well, I suppose he does, times, but not very often. Only when someone is being particularly blocked by their mind's assumptions."

This sounded like a lesson learned—painfully, perhaps, taught by the flat of Jonas's hand? Ana thoughtfully dropped the last two plants into their holes and tamped the soil down, and as she went for a second flat, she made a mental note not to turn her back on Jonas if he approached her with a walking stick in his hand.

Sara helped her set out the last of the four flats of cabbages, and then they took two watering cans from the shed next to the greenhouse, filled them at the tap next to the house, and hauled them back and forth to water in the new roots. Apparently, English gardens did not have what Sara called hose-pipes, but relied on rain or muscle. At least, this one did.

They hauled water until Ana's shoulders burned, Sara making three trips for Ana's two, but finally she was satisfied, and the two of them stood looking at their handiwork, dozens of small, spindly green plants lying limply on the damp earth.

"They'll pick up by tomorrow," Sara predicted cheerfully. "And they'll keep us in soup all winter."

"Do you ever use vitamin B₁₂ to keep them from transplant shock?"

"Never anything but clear water and the earth they're put down in."

"You don't fertilize them?"

Sara turned to her, surprised. "Oh, no. This is an organic garden. The only things we use are Bacillus thuringus and sometimes a bit of oil spray when the whitefly gets too thick."

It was Ana's turn to be surprised. She would have sworn that Glen's information included a high use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the British Change compound. Or was that the Boston group? Damnation.

Sara gathered up the flats and put them to soak for their next use. They then began to clear out the side of the greenhouse that had nurtured the numerous varieties of plants now growing outside, stripping the growing benches of plant stakes, shards of broken pot, empty seed packets, and all the rest of the debris. It was not the time of day Ana would have chosen to work inside a glass house under the blazing sun, but when she mentioned the possibility of doing the job the next day while the sun was still low, Sara looked at her without comprehension and said she had something else planned for the morning. Ana shrugged, and sweated, and finished the job without complaining.

Afterward, the water that gushed from the tap was deliriously cool and sweet. And then they weeded for a while—in the shady areas—until it was time to pull some lettuces and wash the grit from them. As Ana carried the rich armful into the kitchen, she reflected that her afternoon in the garden had borne some thought-provoking fruit.

Perhaps it was only that Ana had spent the afternoon with her hands in the earth and her ears soothed by Sara's easy accents, but the kitchen staff seemed even more irritable than it had that morning, with pans slapped down smartly and very little of the usual boisterous conversation that kitchen work often gives rise to. Later in the dining hall, she found the same state. Unidentifiable currents and tensions ran through the room.

Not that people were openly irritable with each other; it might have been better if they were. Instead, they seemed grimly determined to remain calm. Residents presented one another with taut smiles, edged away when another person sat down too close, and listened politely with faraway gazes.

Even the children seemed either listless or fractious, with two separate incidents of tears before the meal was over.

Toward the end of the meal Marc Bennett presented himself at the door and waited for silence.

"I need you all to be sure you know where the torches are on each floor." Ana was struck by a brief, bizarre image of flaming brands stuck into holders on the wallpapered hallways until her internal dictionary reminded her that "torch" was simply English for flashlight. "The local utilities today informed us that as we may not be working to code, they may cut off our power. It is simply further harassment, and if it does happen, I am sure we will all use it to drive us a step further along on our Work. I am merely telling you so there will not be any panic as there was the last time the power went out."

He nodded and left, and behind him rose up a murmur of dismay and annoyance tempered by a surprising amount of philosophical acceptance. Another thing to remember, Ana thought: have someone point out the caches of flashlights.

After she had cleared her dishes she looked around for Jason and Dulcie, and found them sitting with three or four other teenagers. Jason was deep in conversation: Dulcie looked bored and truculent. Ana went over and sat down beside her.