She glanced at the window and shivered. “Cold out there. All the leaves are off the trees. It could be a cold winter ahead.”
He stood and drew the blinds. “Winters are often cold here. But you must know that.” Reminding himself of the fact. “We shared the weather, if nothing else.”
He had seen Evelyn’s map of the United States, and the contours of the landscape were identical: the fingers of the Great Lakes, the coastlines and the rivers. Her map had been more crowded with roads and cities, and all the names had been ludicrously strange, but he supposed the weather in the Near West must have been the same. “Snow before too long,” she said. “Will that complicate everything? I mean, supplies and so forth?”
“The road from Fort LeDuc has been reinforced. We have mechanical ploughs.”
“I see.”
She seemed to want to linger. Maybe it was the sound of the wind in the eaves. The house was empty but for the two of them; it had become Demarch’s private headquarters. It was comfortable but large enough to be lonely.
He glanced back at the desk, at Linneth Stone’s typed pages.
Subject maintains that American Morality has always been a Battleground between contending Ideas of Liberty and Virtue. In the last Century—
But the last century could wait until morning. He was tired. He turned off the desk lamp.
“Come to bed,” Evelyn said.
Evelyn was passive in bed. Demarch preferred it that way. He was not a passionate or athletic lover. He never lost sight of the fundamental incongruity of the act—one of the several jokes God had played on Man. Evelyn’s motion under his weight was as delicate as a breath, and she sighed at the climax.
He was as fond of her as he had been of any of his occasional women. He liked her silences as much as her words. She knew when not to speak. She was quiet now, looking at him with sleepy eyes.
He kissed her and drew away. He had worn a fish-skin—what Evelyn called a condom, a singularly ugly word. He peeled it off and took it to the bathroom and flushed it away and came back to bed chilled by a tide of cool air. Evelyn was already asleep, or seemed to be. He adjusted the blanket over her shoulders and admired the terrain it made of waist and hips, so unlike Dorothea’s. He closed his eyes. The north-country wind rattled the window. She had been right about the snow. Snow soon, he thought.
His mind drifted back to Bisonette’s telephone call and Linneth Stone’s ethnological notes. He thought of the town of Two Rivers, dropped from the sky by an unknown magic; itemized, dissected, cataloged, ultimately to be destroyed. The Ideological Branch, an avant-garde of Christian probity, could not abide the prolonged existence of the town. It posed too many questions; it argued for a world even stranger and more complex than their celestial troupeau of angels and Archons. They hated especially the town’s mutant Christianity, a Christianity almost Judaic in its insistence on one Creator, one risen Christ, one Book.
And yet here was Evelyn, a heretic by anyone’s standard, though she claimed she had never taken religion “too seriously”; she was human, spoke English, was clothed in flesh not different from his flesh. He had felt her heart beating under the bump of her ribs. She was not a criminal or a succubus; merely a bystander.
One could not offer such arguments to the IB. They were more fascinated, more frightened, by the dome of blue light in the woodlands. It partook of the miraculous and was therefore, they reasoned, their property. Give credit where due, Demarch thought: some of the IB men were brave; some of them had walked into that light and walked out sickened or insane. Some had died, of what the doctors eventually called an irradiation disease. But the metaphysical puzzle was finally too much to endure. The town and all its inhabitants were malum in se and must be erased from the earth.
And how better than with Bisonette’s nucleic bomb? Which, in any case, would need to be tested.
But Evelyn. Evelyn was human. Evelyn would have to be taken care of.
He would have to look into that.
He had scheduled an interview the next day with Linneth Stone’s “Subject,” the history teacher, Dexter Graham.
The sitting room of Evelyn’s hostel made an odd reception for a lieutenant of the Bureau. Leafless tree branches tapped the high windows; the furniture was large and padded. A Persian carpet decorated the floor and a mantel clock ticked into the afternoon silence. A moat of stagnant time.
Graham arrived between two pions in blue winter vestons, escorted in from a cloudy cold day. There was frost on the schoolteacher’s shoes. He wore a gray windbreaker tattered at the seams and was more gaunt than Demarch remembered. He looked at Demarch without visible emotion.
The lieutenant waved at a chair. “Sit down.”
Graham sat. The pions left. The clock ticked.
Demarch poured coffee from a carafe. He had interviewed dozens of the town’s preeminent men in this room: the mayor, the city councillors, the police chief, clergymen. Their eyes always widened at the sight of a hot cup of coffee. Demarch was always scrupulously polite. But there was never a cup for the guest. Of such humble stones, the fortress of authority was built. He said, “I gather your work with Linneth Stone is going well?”
“It’s her work,” Dexter Graham said. “I work at the school.”
The insolence was amazing. Refreshing, in a way. The lieutenant had grown accustomed to the automatic deference of civilians, to the uniform as much as to himself. Dexter Graham, like many of the citizens of Two Rivers, had never learned the reflex.
Since the executions last June, many had acquired it. But not this one.
“Miss Stone arranged some liberties through my offices. She won’t be escorted by guards, for instance. Are you cognizant of the fact that this is a considerable generosity on my part?”
“I’m aware that it’s a little out of character.”
“I don’t want you to trespass on that generosity.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“In the course of the last several months we’ve had notable cooperation from the town’s responsible leaders, Mr. Graham—everyone from the mayor to your principal, Bob Hoskins.” Which was all true. Only the churchmen had been truly problematic, and Demarch had promised them they would be allowed to carry on their odd species of worship. Clement Delafleur had protested all the way to the capital. But it was only a temporary arrangement, after all. “You’re something of a pillar of this community yourself, Mr. Graham. I need your cooperation, too.”
“I’m not a pillar of anything.”
“Don’t be modest. Though I admit the record tends to support you there. Transferred five times in fifteen years for violations of school board protocol? Maybe you chose the wrong profession.”
“Maybe I did.”
“You admit it?”
Dexter Graham shrugged.
Demarch said, “There is an aphorism. One of our writers defined a scoundrel as a brave man without loyalty to his prince.”
“There aren’t any princes here.”
“I was speaking figuratively.”
“So was I.”
The clock rationed a few more seconds into the still air.
“We’ve done a great deal for the village,” Demarch said. “We’ve restored water. We’ve laid electrical lines all the way from Fort LeDuc fifty miles south. Those weren’t easy decisions. They were opposed. No one understands what happened in this patch of woods, Mr. Graham; it’s very strange and very frightening. Goodwill has been shown.”
Graham was silent.
Demarch said, “Acknowledge that.”
“The water is running. The lights are on.”
“But despite that generosity we still have reports of curfew violations. A man about your size and age was seen crossing Beacon Street after dark.”
“It’s a common size and age.”
“The curfew isn’t a joke. You’ve seen what happens to criminals.”
“I saw Billy Seagram’s body on a cart outside City Hall. His niece walked past the bod
y on the way to school. She cried for three hours in the classroom. I saw that.” He leaned over to tie a ragged shoelace, and Demarch was fascinated in spite of himself by the casual gesture. “Is that why you brought me here? To put the fear of God into me?”
Demarch had never heard the expression. He blinked. “I don’t think that’s in my power, Mr. Graham. But it sounds like a prudent fear.”
He was insolent, but was he dangerous?
Demarch pondered the question after Graham was dismissed. He pondered it that night as he climbed into bed with Evelyn.
She had been nervous about the interview. Demarch supposed she thought he was petty enough to hate Graham because Graham had been her lover. “Don’t get angry with him,” she said. Imagining that anger had anything to do with it.
Demarch said, “I only want to understand him.”
“He’s not dangerous.”
“You’re defending him. That’s a noble impulse, but it’s misplaced. I don’t want to kill him, Evelyn. My job is to keep the peace.”
“If he breaks the law? If he violates the curfew?”
“That’s what I mean to prevent.”
“You can’t frighten him.”
“Are you saying he’s stupid?”
She turned out the light. The temperature outside had dropped and there were fingers of frost on the windowpane. Dim radiance from a streetlight traced a filigree of shadow on the opposite wall.
“He’s not that kind of man,” Evelyn ventured. “He told me a story once. . . .”
“About himself?”
“Yes. But he told it like a story about someone else. He said, suppose there was a man, and this man had a wife and a son. And suppose he was always careful about what he said or did, because he might lose his job or something bad might happen to his family, and he cared about his family more than anything. And then suppose the man was out of town, and there was a fire, and his house burned down with his wife and child in it.”
“He lost his wife and son in a fire?”
“Yes. But that’s not the point. He said it was the worst thing that could happen to this man—a complete loss of everything at the center of his life. And he survived it somehow, he went on living. And then, Dex said, the man noticed a strange thing. He noticed that there was nothing left to hurt him. What could be worse than this? Death? He would have welcomed death. Losing a job? Trivial. So he stopped hiding his opinions. He told the truth. He got in trouble, but there was no threat that meant anything to him. No more terrors. For instance, he used to hate riding in airplanes, he was a white-knuckle flier—but not anymore. If the plane fell out of the sky and he was killed . . . well, that was territory his wife and child had already visited. Maybe he’d find them there, waiting for him.” She shivered. “You understand? He was brave almost by accident. It got to be a habit.”
“Is this a true story? Is that how he seemed to you?”
“Some of the edges have worn off. This was all a long while ago. But yes, that’s how Dex seemed.”
Brave, Demarch thought, but probably not dangerous. A man with nothing to lose has nothing to defend.
Later, on the verge of sleep, Evelyn said: “There are more soldiers around town. Another truckful came past today.”
Demarch nodded, not far from sleep himself. He was thinking of Dorothea. He was thinking of Christof’s small face, his eyes bright as porcelain china.
“Symeon? Is something bad going to happen to the town? When you were talking on the phone—”
“Hush. It was nothing.”
“I don’t want anything bad to happen.”
“Nothing bad will happen to you,” the lieutenant said. “I promise. Now sleep.”
In the morning there was half an inch of snow on the ground. Demarch’s boots crunched on the frozen paving stones as he walked to his car; wet snow tumbled from the branches of the trees as he drove to the heart of the town, where the dismantling of Two Rivers had already begun.
CHAPTER 8
The last of autumn was an unsettled time in Two Rivers.
Mornings were often achingly cold; afternoon skies were cloudy or a stark, brittle blue. Woodsmoke drifted through the commons. Women in the food lines wore down jackets or bulky cloth coats; men shuffled forward with parka hoods drawn or caps pulled over their ears. No one lingered in the streets.
Things were changing, people whispered.
For instance: every day now, between the hours of seven and eight in the morning, two or three militia trucks would come into town popping blue smoke from rust-caked tailpipes. The trucks were drab green and always manned by six or eight soldiers. A truck would park outside a building—most often a store or warehouse—and the soldiers would stretch and climb shivering down from the tailgate and file inside. Inside, they would box items and tag them and stack them for loading into the truck.
They took not everything, but each of a kind: one toaster, one television set, one of every variety of home and office computer. Nothing was spared this inventory of the town, not chairs or shoe polish or window shades; but special attention was devoted to technical devices, especially anything with a microchip or a memory.
It seemed to Calvin Shepperd, ex-charter pilot and watchful citizen—who made the trip to the food depot every three days because Sarah refused to suffer the indignity—that the soldiers must be taking all these objects to some gargantuan museum . . . a museum of notions and appliances, a kind of Noah’s ark of dry goods.
It was systematic looting, he thought, and it would take a while to complete, but eventually this work would be finished, the town would be cataloged and all its treasures itemized and locked away, and then . . . well, he couldn’t guess. He didn’t know what would happen then; he knew only that the idea of it filled him with dread.
On a cold morning late in the year, Linneth Stone gave Dex Graham a map packed in a cardboard tube.
He unrolled the document across the chipped Formica top of a table at Tucker’s. Tucker’s Restaurant had reopened in mid-October with the permission of the Bureau. The menu was limited to eggs, cheese, bread, coffee, milk reconstituted from powder, and a kind of chopped steak everyone had learned to avoid. Still, the opening had been a morale booster. Dex supposed it was meant to be.
Last night’s wet snow kept the breakfast trade at home. Dex and Linneth were alone in the diner. Linneth had disguised herself in a casual blouse and modest skirt, but she still looked odd here, Dex thought, misplaced in a vinyl booth. He tried to imagine what her natural setting would be. Someplace more dignified. Someplace with a carpet, not this peeling linoleum. Tablecloths, not Formica.
He used the salt, pepper, and sugar dispensers to peg down three corners of the map. Then he drew a breath and took his first comprehensive look at the new world.
The map shocked him, although he had anticipated much of what he saw. The shock came not from the novelty but the blunt declaration of it. The miraculous, in blue ink and fine print.
Linneth was patient while he stared. She said, “Tell me what strikes you.”
He put together his impressions. “The East is more crowded than the West.”
She nodded. “The East was settled first, of course. English and French colonies. All the old cities: Boston, Montmagny, Montreal, Manhattan. During the War of Brittany, the colonies declared their independence. The Republic was a consolidation of the fifteen eastern provinces. It expanded west as the aboriginals were killed or resettled. Obviously, a great deal of the Far West is still virgin land.”
He traced the blue snake of the Mississippi River from the province of Mille Lacs to the city of New Orleans. To the west was a grid of prairie and mountain provinces: Athabasca, Beausejour, Sioux, Colorado; Nahanni, Kootenay, Platte, Sierra Blanca, from the Beaufort Sea to the border of New Spain. New Spain was approximately Mexico, with a panhandle up the western coast as far as what would have been southern Oregon. There was no Canada. The Republic ruled everything north of the fortieth parallel.
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��The Spanish lands are disputed, of course. The war.”
“The whole map is less crowded.” Cities were sparse even as far east as the Great Lakes. “What’s the population of the world?”
She frowned. “I remember reading the estimate. Two billion?”
“Where I come from, it was nearer six.”
“Oh? I wonder why?”
“I don’t know. The two histories must be fairly similar. We speak the same language, more or less, and I recognize some of these names. If our histories are like a tree—one branched left, one branched right—it might be useful to know where they divided.”
Linneth seemed to concentrate on the idea. It was new to her, Dex supposed. She hadn’t been raised on Star Trek, the “parallel world” as a place where Mr. Spock wears a beard.
“If the histories ‘branched,’ as you say, it must have happened a long time ago. The religions are different.”
“But there are still parallels. We both have a prominent Christianity, even though they’re different in detail.”
“Considerably. Before Calvary, then?”
“Or not long after. First century, second century, say. Before the Romans adopted Christianity. Before Constantine.”
Linneth blinked. “But they didn’t. The Romans, I mean. There were no Christian emperors.”
Charlie Tucker brought two plates of bread and cheese, for which Dex exchanged a handful of food coupons. Charlie gave Linneth a long look. He had heard her accent. He looked worried.
She nibbled a wedge of cheese and waited for Charlie to wander back behind the cash desk. “Some of the Apologia are addressed to the Antonine emperors. Ecumenicists are always pointing to Clement, who gives a good impression of an erudite pagan. But no Roman emperor explicitly embraced the Cross. It’s an odd idea. So perhaps that’s the point of division—your Christian emperors.”
“Maybe.” Dex thought about it. And then he reminded himself why she was here. “Is this for your dossier?”
“History isn’t my subject. In any case, the Proctors emptied your libraries. They can ferret this out for themselves.” She added, “I would hardly dare counsel them on religious matters. This would all be very blasphemous if it weren’t a matter of record.”
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