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 un-detained, 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 children. 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 van 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.
Ana would have missed the first sign of wrongness 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 rear-view 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, blond 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 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 t
hem 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 them there; now you are. They would have broken you there; now they 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, and 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 protégé, 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 writs, plaguing us with financial inquiries, 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 an
swer 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 wheat fields 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?”
A Darker Place Page 29