Rama: The Omnibus
Page 179
Once outside, Sister Beatrice walked quickly toward the Outdoor chapel forty meters away, at the far end of the small island. Across the water was Hyde Park and the large tent city operated by Beatrice and the other priests and priestesses of the Order of St. Michael. The little island in the Serpentine was their private haven.
Beatrice knelt to pray in front of a crucifix and a smaller, wooden carving of a young man being consumed by a great fire both behind and above him. “Dear God,” she said as she did each morning, “help me today to do Thy work, to share with others Thy unconditional and everlasting love. In the name of St. Michael, who gave us the insight to understand Thy plan.”
She crossed herself and moved a few meters to the right of the chapel. On a patch of worn grass Sister Beatrice sat down in the lotus position. In front of her, in the distance, she could see some light reflecting off the tops of a few of the buildings of the city of London. Her breathing became deep and regular. She closed her eyes. As her meditation began Beatrice had a momentary vision of snow piled high in front of her childhood home in Minnesota.
At 0440 the tiny watch alarm sounded again, reminding Sister Beatrice that it was time to end her meditation. She stood up, stretched, and pressed one of the many buttons that encircled her computer watch. Her schedule for the day, February 22, 2141, appeared on the face of the watch. George Birthington‘s washday, she thought with a smile, recalling a humorous junior-high-school incident. She scanned her activities for the next seventeen hours. There was a meeting with London city officials on the Kensington Gardens expansion at 0830, a fund-raiser at 1400 in Esher, a talk at the Wimbledon training site before dinner…
Beatrice noticed the blinking light in the lower right corner of the display. It indicated that she had received a Priority B message during the night. At least it wasn‘t Priority A, she said to herself, remembering two weeks previous when she had been awakened at midnight to deal with a woman resident who had tried to kill her husband.
Beatrice activated the message display on her watch. The Priority B was terse. “Physical conflict between two young men, one Pakistani and one Irish, the Dell sector, 2225 last night. Both injured, one seriously. Hearing scheduled 1100. Sister Beatrice presiding.”
I hope this wasn‘t another racial incident, Beatrice thought with a sigh. She walked across the pontoon bridge that connected the Serpentine to the rest of the park. She wondered why suffering never seemed to increase people’s tolerance, as she thought it should. Beatrice remembered one of St. Michael’s sermons about fear and prejudice. “Being afraid brings out our worst instincts,” he had said. “It’s then we should remind ourselves that we’re little better than the monkeys, not little lower than the angels.”
Each morning, after her meditation, Sister Beatrice walked briskly around the fenced domain in Hyde Park that now housed seven thousand homeless people. The tent community in the center of London had first been established in a small portion of the park almost two years previously. Granting a religious order the right to operate such a community had been an act of desperation by the city. By the late winter of 2139, London, like many of the great cities of the world, had become completely overwhelmed by the consequences of the worldwide depression known as the Great Chaos. Thousands of homeless and unemployed were wandering the streets, creating social instability, spreading communicable diseases, and wreaking havoc on what remained of the economic structure. The cost of providing food, clothing, and shelter to these multitudes was beyond the capability of a city whose tax base had been severely reduced by the economic crisis.
At that time the Order of St. Michael of Siena, a splinter Catholic sect loosely connected with the church in Rome, whose adherents followed the tenets of the young prophet martyred in late June of 2138, approached the officials of London with a proposal to manage a community for the homeless at virtually no cost to the city. All that the Michaelites asked was that the city provide a reasonable location and protection from the bureaucratic inertia of local government. At first the city had laughed at the plan. Eventually, however, under pressure from the city’s economic leaders to do something about the alarming number of people loitering on the streets every day and night, the officials reluctantly permitted the Michaelites to establish a small, tent city in the center of Hyde Park.
What was initially viewed by the city as both a daring and dangerous experiment was successful beyond everyone’s expectations. The sect members, whose ordination vows pledged their lives to the service of their fellow humans, demonstrated both an unbounded energy and an uncommon sense of commitment. After some initial difficulties, the community became organized and produced outstanding results. Not only were many of the formerly homeless fed, clothed, sheltered, and kept off the streets of London, but also the positive attitude of the Michaelites, all working without any pay, fostered a spirit of hope in the homeless city that helped to dispel the miasma of desperation.
In the early months of the endeavor the Michaelites created an on-site employment agency to find work for the residents. Although at first most of the positions were menial and temporary, the jobs restored the self-esteem of many of the individuals living in Hyde Park. The employment agency soon expanded its efforts, cajoling nearby retailers into offering full-time positions to those residents with outstanding temporary work portfolios.
Sister Beatrice had been one of the half-dozen wide-eyed Michaelites who had had the temerity to propose the tent community to the city of London two years earlier. She had subsequently thrown all her energies into its organization, development, and management. It had been Beatrice who had originally suggested the idea for the Children’s Sector, as well as many of the other innovations that had been instrumental in the tent city’s success. When money had been needed for facilities and expansion, Beatrice had spearheaded the effort to obtain revenue by organizing support groups among the women of the London metropolitan area
Now, in the cold darkness of the February morning, as she took her daily walk around the perimeter of the tent community, the twenty-four-year-old, blue-eyed Beatrice was acutely aware of the challenges still facing their endeavor. At a knoll on Buck Hill Walk, which bisected the Children’s Sector on the western side of the park, Beatrice stopped and looked across an array of a dozen large tents that stretched across a broad field next to the water. We have over a thousand children on the waiting list, Beatrice reminded herself, and nowhere to put them. Most of them are still wandering the streets, sleeping on cardboard in the cold. She gazed across the pond into Kensington Gardens. Sister Beatrice could clearly envision the alterations necessary to change the region into the new Children’s Village. All we need is the space, she thought.
When she reached the northeast corner of Hyde Park, near Marble Arch, Beatrice bounded down a long set of steps into a lighted area below the surface. Before this part of the park had been turned over to the Michaelites, what was now their community infirmary had been an underground parking garage.
“Good morning, Sister Beatrice,” a doctor in a blue robe said as she walked into the reception room of the facility. He glanced at his watch. “Right on time, as always,” he said with a smile.
“How’s it going, Brother Bryan?” Beatrice said.
“Not too bad,” he replied. “We ahd a quiet night after the fracas.”
He handed her two sheets of computer output. “The Pakistani youth is in stable condition,” he said. “The knife cut deeply into his intestines. We transferred him to London Hospital after we stopped the bleeding.”
“And the other man?” Beatrice asked.
“Nothing serious,” Brother Bryan replied. “The usual lacerations and contusions.” He laughed at his own medical jargon. “Cuts and bruises,” he said. “We kept him overnight for observation.”
Sister Beatrice read the two sheets quickly before looking again at the doctor. “No new cases of tuberculosis?” she asked.
“Nope,” Brother Bryan replied. “That’s nine days in a row… We�
�re keeping our fingers crossed. It looks as if that intensive screening you ordered is finally paying off.”
At the cost of discharging over a hundred and fifty residents, Beatrice recalled grimly. Most of whom had not yet shown any overt symptoms of the disease.
“The epidemic in the city shows no sign of abatement,” Beatrice now said. “We talked with the London Medical Council again just two days ago. This particular strain is resistant to all the normal medications. The damp and cold only make it worse. We must continue to quarantine all the new residents until their test results are complete and certified.”
Beatrice said good-bye to the doctor and walked down a long hallway toward the children’s ward. She opened the door quietly. The large room was dark. A dozen beds were on either side of the central aisle.
Beatrice smiled when she heard the girl’s voice call her softly in the dark. “You’re awake early again today, Elise,” she said, taking the nine-year-old’s hand.
The little girl smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you. Sister Beatrice,” she said. “There’s something I want to ask you.”
“What is it?” Beatrice said.
“Are you sure that my face will be okay after the chicken pox goes away?”
“Of course, Elise,” Beatrice said. “I had a terrible case of chicken pox when I was five. I had sores all over my face… Now look,” she said. She shone the small flashlight from her pocket directly on her face.
“All right,” Elise said eventually, “I guess I’ll believe you.” She reached up and gave Sister Beatrice a hug.
“One more thing,” the girl asked a moment later as Beatrice started to leave. “Will you be singing at vespers tonight?”
“Yes,” Beatrice answered after a moment’s thought.
“Darn,” Elise said, shaking her head. “I won’t get to hear you, then. They aren’t letting me out of here until tomorrow.”
After leaving the infirmary, Sister Beatrice walked in a southeasterly direction, along the fence beside Broad Walk. On the other side of the tall fence, in the area of the park nearest to Mayfair, some early risers were exercising on the path known as Lovers’ Walk. It was one of the few sections of the park still open to all residents of London.
When she reached Serpentine Road, Beatrice checked her watch and began to walk more quickly. She entered a small fog bank that was hanging close to the ground. Beatrice loved the way the eerie, quiet whiteness of the early-morning fog transformed Hyde Park into an alien place, where trees and statues loomed and disappeared, like ghosts, as she moved along the path.
Ahead of her, on the right, hugging the lower branches of a large tree, Sister Beatrice noticed a strange geometrical pattern in the fog. From a distance, this ring of light looked like a giant doughnut. Its empty center hole was the size of a large person.
Curious, Beatrice slowed her pace, her eyes remaining glued to the peculiar pattern. When she drew closer, and one of the park lights was directly behind the large tree, each of the two thick concentric rings of the doughnut of light became clearly visible. The rings consisted of thousands of remarkable tiny white particles, like droplets, each of which appeared to be sparkling with its own light as it danced slowly about within the confines of the inner and outer rings.
So what can this be? the puzzled Beatrice thought. The unusual bright torus in the fog began to drift in her direction. She took two steps off the pathway, toward the particles dancing and shimmering in the morning fog. The motion of the ring of light abruptly ceased, and for a few moments hung suspended in the air in front of her. Beatrice, temporarily mesmerized by the dancing particles inside the pattern, gathered her courage and stepped closer. Instantly there was a burst of light so bright that she was forced to close her eyes for a fraction of a second.
When Sister Beatrice reopened her eyes, the fog around her was completely normal. She could see no bright patches, and nothing that even remotely resembled a doughnut of sparkling, dancing particles. In her mind’s eye Beatrice could still picture the instant she had closed her eyes. It had seemed as if each of the thousands of individual particles in the strange torus had suddenly exploded with light.
Sister Beatrice cast a sweeping glance around the park. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. After a few seconds she resumed her brisk walk toward the pontoon bridge that led to the Michaelite living quarters. Long before she reached the large bathhouse that was adjacent to their sleeping tent, Beatrice was already wondering if perhaps her active imagination had, by itself, conjured up the bright pattern in the fog.
2
“Every night, just before I go to bed,” Vivien said from the next shower stall, “I tell myself that I am going to set my alarm and make the early walk with you. I know it would be healthy for me. But the same thing always happens. I snuggle into my warm bag and think about how cold and dark it will be at four-forty in the morning…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Beatrice said above the sound of the running water. “As I’ve told you many times since we started working together, you really aren’t expected to accompany me until after six o’clock. And given your nature, even that represents considerable sacrifice.
“It sure as hell does,” Vivien replied, stepping out of her stall and grabbing a pair of towels from the stack. She dried her short hair vigorously. The two women were temporarily alone in the bathhouse. “You know,” Vivien said a few seconds later, “in my old life there were times when I didn’t even go to bed until after six in the morning… At least not to sleep.”
“Don’t remind me,” Sister Beatrice said, accepting with thanks the towel Vivien extended to her. She smiled warmly at her assistant. “Sometimes I find it incomprehensible that you ever decided to join our order.”
Sister Vivien laughed. “To me, it’s still absolutely mind-boggling. Each morning, when I put on my blue robe and that funny little headpiece, I ask myself, ‘Is this really me? Or some other person, not connected in any way to the Victoria Edgeworth raised at Woodrich Manor in Essex?’”
Vivien walked over to the only mirror in the bathroom, just outside the shower area. Beatrice was still drying her hair with the towel when her reflection appeared in the mirror beside Vivien’s. Beatrice’s pale white body contrasted sharply with the rich copper tone of Vivien’s skin. “Hey,” Vivien said teasingly, “you look great. If you ever tire of this religious crap, you could do fine.”
Sister Beatrice blushed slightly and moved away from the mirror. She was about to say something to Vivien about the bright formation in the fog when the outside door opened and two other Michaelite priestesses came into the bathroom. Beatrice decided to wait for another opportunity.
Vivien picked up a clean pair of long underwear from the bin marked MEDIUM, and a fresh blue robe from an adjacent bin. “I hope I didn’t offend you, B,” Vivien said as she rejoined her friend. “Sometimes I just can’t stand being so damn reverent all the time.”
“You’re not expected to be perfect,” Beatrice said, pulling her own clean robe over her head. She turned and looked seriously at Vivien. “But you are expected to remember who and what you are … and to set an example for others.”
“Uh-oh,” Sister Vivien replied, trying to defuse the reproach with humor. “I guess being a priestess of the Order of St. Michael means I can no longer admire the natural beauty of God’s creations.”
Despite herself, Beatrice smiled and shook her head. “Sometimes, my friend, you are incorrigible.”
“Then you’ve forgiven me?” Vivien asked. Without waiting for a reply, she skipped back over to the mirror to adjust her headpiece. “I wonder,” she said out loud, “how my Jamaican mother would wear this hat. The last time I saw her, at Christmas, she said that the robe was fine, but that the hat would have to go…”
The two women walked together across the pontoon bridge into the main park. They were headed for the tent city headquarters located in what had formerly been a police station before the park was turned over to the Michaelites.
Sister Beatrice approached a drab building set back off the pathway. She pulled a tiny, square identification card from its pocket on the back of her computer watch and inserted it into the reader just above the doorknob. The door opened and she entered a large room filled with computers, video monitors, and other electronic equipment. Sister Melissa greeted her and led Beatrice to a small viewing booth.
“Portions of the incident took place within the view of cameras number 407 and 408,” Melissa said. “I’ve queued up the edited sequence for you… Brother Thomas, from security, has studied it carefully and will narrate.”
An older man, with a Scottish accent, joined Beatrice in the booth. “The first pictures,” he said, pointing at the video monitor, “were taken at 2205. At that time Mr. Bhutto was sitting beside the waterfall at the Dell, talking to Miss Macmillan. You can see the two of them on the screen now. Bhutto is twenty-three and lives in Family Tent B-19 south of the Reservoir. He has been a model resident for six months, with an exceptional volunteer record and some solid Work credits. Macmillan, twenty-one, occupies a cot in Tent F-6, restricted to maiden ladies, just north of the Bandstand. She is a recent arrival.”
Although there was no audio track, Sister Beatrice could tell from the body language of the two young people that their conversation was friendly. The couple did not touch in the initial segment; however, a few of Miss Macmillan’s gestures and expressions were definitely flirtatious.
“There was no significant change in their behavior,” Brother Thomas said, “until ten minutes later, when they began to kiss.”