Christmas Eve was dark and windy. Nine of us were ready—Carlos, Daraul, Gage, Gilbert, Hopkins, Masanva, Mery-Isis, Pond, and Utak.
Coningham was sick and had to withdraw, which saddened us, but opened a place to one of the reserve three—Azurara, Carlos, and Waters. None of them really wanted to go. Each gallantly insisted the other two should decide, making the rest of us very nervous. In time they tossed for it, and Clive Carlos won. That still left a problem. Using the code, Tari and Herbie questioned him to be sure he understood thoroughly and was really willing to risk it.
“Well, now,” he said, “you’ve got me hooked, haven’t you? I was never one for the chapel, but the way you put it there’s nothing else, is there? It’ll do my soul no good at all to stay stuck in Four, will it? You show me how to get to One, and I’ll do my very best!”
We used number-system for code to avoid squabbling over god-names. It was not absolutely accurate to the inner meaning of Number but it worked well enough. Each number had an exoteric meaning as a Common Ground principle for the benefit of the Horsfield staff, and a hidden meaning for our benefit, so that we could talk freely of escape while seeming to discuss Common Ground doctrine. The open meanings had been worked out in great detail at many seminars attended by interested Institute staff and outside experts who were all delighted that we should show such positive response to our situation… though, when in October we had first approached Piggot to tell him we wished to develop common religious ground amongst ourselves, with the aim of holding our first Common Ground service in the chapel on Christmas Eve, he had been somewhat shocked, demanding to know what was wrong with existing chapel services. Coningham had exploded most effectively at this, invoking the First Amendment, calling the Institute’s Christian-only services “a damned disgrace,” and telling the Director that “there’s as much spirit in that place as you’ll find in a bottle of Glenfiddich the morning after Hogmanay!”
All of which had been true. We had got our way. Now, on Christmas Eve, we were ready to celebrate the first Common Ground service. After it, also in the chapel, we would stage an entertainment, Impressions of 1984, which we very much hoped our invited guests from the Horsfield staff would attend and enjoy.
A midnight movie show was also arranged, in the library.
The code, in brief, as a matter of interest:
One in Common Ground meant God, secretly escape. Two was Duality, secretly Diversion. Three, Common Ground, secretly Circle. Four, the Material World, alias Horsfield. Five, Human Beings, or DTIs to us. Six, Perfected Mind, equalling Coordination of Escape Plan. Seven we explained to the experts as Fate, Luck, Chance, or Divine Guidance, depending how you looked at it, while among us it referred to these things but also to Invoked Circumstance, meaning certain ritual workings carried out on behalf of all by Mery-Isis and Masanva, in which not all of us had belief, as I have said. But Luck was with us, as events soon proved. Eight referred openly to Worldly Circumstance, alias Horsfield Security; while Nine, being of course those of us who were making the attempt, was explained as The Aspects of the Soul.
The preceding days and hours were a blur to me then and remain so now. Only particular events stand out. When Coningham fell sick I got permission to visit him in his room. This was rarely allowed, but we were known to be friends, and he was not well. We said little, yet I was glad we could say our (coded) farewell and godspeed face-to-face. He was a fine man, and made no complaints about his fate.
Also I recall our efforts to prepare the chapel for the service and the entertainment after, and the last-minute argument we had with Piggot about the Modern clothes we said we needed for Impressions of 1984. Lucie won that tussle for us, telling Piggot maybe it was ridiculous, putting Modern dress on over immunity-suit and helmet so she could play her twin role of Las Vegas hooker and Washington wife, but it would be even more ridiculous without it, and goddammit, what sort of creep was he that wouldn’t let a girl dress up at Christmas?
Yes, Lucie was a surprise to many of us, by no means a fluffyhead as I’d assumed, and in fact had done something which none of the rest of us ever managed to do—she made Masanva laugh. When we started planning seriously, Masanva began coming down from heaven more often to join us in Circle—so one night Lucie had put out a cartoon of grumpy Big Daddy on his mountainpeak smelling something good and coming running to join in the feast. This had created an expectant chill among us… but it had turned out well, improving our spirit.
And as for Masanva, by the time all was finally prepared, none of us were any longer in doubt of his strength and stability.
I remember eating the evening meal in my sterile room for the last time, both hoping and fearing. I remember staring through the window at the cold overlapping pools of floodlighting on the quadrangle, wondering how our ramshackle plan could possibly work, and realising how, even if we did get out, in a few short hours we might be done for, struck down by bullets or by the rapid onset of some virulent Modern disease. I remember in my nervousness I turned on the television, feeling some need to identify with what we were going out to join, but the quiz-show I saw began to make me doubt if One was really worth it, so I turned the thing off. I sat down instead, and relaxed as we joined in Circle calm, quietly to confirm in each other that now was no longer the time for mental pictures, but for physical action. Then, at precisely half past eight, we put on our immunity-suits, and called to be let out and taken to the chapel. The timing was most important. The tanks held four hours of air, but recently we had won agreement that we should never have to go more than three hours, or three and a half at most, without recharge.
It all depended on the timing.
(I forgot: Jim Gage was in Circle by then. There had nearly been trouble with Jud and Herbie’s friends who knew about it but who felt left out because they could not send or get the images. We had asked them into One, Tari making more of her apparently irrelevant remarks until they picked up the code. The interesting thing is this: once they no longer felt excluded, Clive and Connie and Jim Gage and Jim Guererro each began to send and receive, just a little, and likewise Brynjof and Thord when they were brought in to help with Two. Tari’s sympathy was remarkable, it awoke the best in people. Yes, I loved that woman, and I was not alone.)
That night the chapel was candlelit, beautiful, mysterious.
By day it was a plain little hall, about forty feet by thirty, with white plaster walls and uninteresting windows, and a screen of artificial wood behind the altar covering the dividing wall between chapel and library. There was an electric organ and a small stainless steel pulpit, both slightly in front of the communion rail and raised altar dais. The floor was of varnished wooden bricks; and the seating unfixed, consisting of collapsible wooden chairs. Of the three plain doors, the main one was at the south end, facing and about thirty yards from the main gateway. The others were to the left of the altar, one opening to the library, and the second, adjacent and close to the first, giving access to the east side of the quadrangle.
We had wrought change.
Over the windows were hangings on which we had painted golden circles with equal-armed crosses in each. The arms of the crosses were citrine, olive, russet, and black. The hangings were opaque.
Similarly painted cloth screens on wooden frames stood on either side of the altar, creating a backstage area for the entertainment. One of these screens hid the two doors from the audience.
Our request for incense—patchouli and sandalwood—had utterly mystified Piggot. (“But you can’t smell it in your suits!”—and Tari told him, “It is not primarily that we should smell it.”)
Now, as I entered the chapel among a group of others all converging, thin rich spirals of smoke curled up from shoulder-high three-legged wooden stands set in the comers and midway along the walls. Clusters of candles were also set and lit on these stands: the waitings of incense we could not smell coiled up through the soft warm tents of light and vanished into raftered darkness above: going we hoped to the nostrils
of what we called Seven.
The Christian altar and cross had not been covered over, but were as and where they usually were as we each took chairs and sat down wherever we would. We did not speak to each other, we waited very quietly, until, by nine o’clock, some forty-eight DTIs were gathered together in there: this being the entire number of us then in social circulation and considered “sane and rational within the context,” as I once heard it put. (Of others we never saw, like Othoon and Ekapalon, Circle had searched, and found that by mid-December sixty-one DTIs were alive, and that most of those kept locked up were in fact seriously crippled, in mind, body, or both. Othoon’s case I could understand, but why Ekapalon and two others who seemed sane and sound (another Japanese and another red man) we,re never let out I found hard to comprehend, though Jud called it “the same old shit.”) And of the forty-eight now gathered, twenty-eight knew the inside meaning of One. Fifteen, like Dion, and now, sadly, Ketil Blund, didn’t really know what anything meant. That left five we couldn’t trust. Juan Battista Fernandez was one of these. Herbie said he was a “stoolie,” and for tonight Azurara had promised to keep him out of our way, while the other four also had “companions” for the evening.
As we waited I caught Azurara’s eye. He nodded, very slightly. I wondered if he or I had made the right decision. I think nothing he had seen at Horsfield had suggested to him that Outside would be any better. He seemed happy to stay behind. Like John Kent and Jim Guerrero and Howell Rees, he was however willing to help us all he could. Others like Diarmaid weren’t interested even in helping, but neither were they interested in making trouble for us.
Just after nine, Director Piggot and a number of staff came in and sat at the back. We were ready to begin. There was a silence.
Then, one-by-one, whoever among us felt the urge stood up, and spoke their simple Word of Beginning, giving it to Common Ground:
In the beginning, said Azurara,
God created the Earth.
In the beginning, said Mery-Isis,
Atum spilled his seed.
In the beginning, said Masanva,
Void in the Mind of Taiowa.
In beginning, said Brynjof,
Ice. Snow. Cold. No life.
In the beginning, said Jud,
One helluva Big Bang!
In the beginning? asked Lucie.
How can anyone know that?
In the beginning, said Watanabe,
Illuminating Essence!
In the beginning, said Gilbert,
Was the Word.
In the beginning, said Pond,
ONE!
When this was done, Piggot and the staff left until later, save for a few discreet guards and observers at the back. Now began the succession of things. In that quiet dark place the atmosphere was strong between us. For the first and last time we were almost all together. Common Ground was no fraud. Outer veil masked inner purpose, yes, but that purpose depended on our unity now.
We cleared the chairs back and made a circle, gloved hands linked, and there we stood, for some time utterly silent, reflecting on all that had happened. Somebody began sobbing quietly, and somebody else too, and first we let this mood spread through us, all having much to lament. Some of us wept, and some stood quietly alone, and others embraced through the suits—we did each as we felt like, calling on our own lost gods if we wanted, all on Common Ground, briefly united in our differences, in our sorrow, from our ages. There was no dogma, yet there was a purpose, and the purpose was served, for our tension was eased, in those of us staying, and those of us going.
Slowly we rose from that mood to another, carried on our own wings and on the quiet river of sound that Jud now coaxed from the organ. At first it was gentle and faraway, but gradually the river ran more rapidly and became rhythmically compelling, with urgent variations of pace and flow to it that alerted the mind and body, so that some of us began beating time, to dance—but Masanva stood without moving—and it was then that Utak started a wild and wordless chant or ululation (“Like the howler monkeys,” he said later) in counterpoint to the organ, so that we found our energy, and started dancing and jumping about, with whooping and windmilling arms, myself too, though as I did so I thought how unutterably strange this would have seemed to me but a year of my life before, for what we danced was certainly no galliard or pavane, though perhaps it had some Pan-spirit of Mayday in it, save for the physical restriction of the immunity-suits—
The physical restriction of the immunity-suits—
In less than three hours from now…
Yes, we broke out of despair with wild emotion and increasing passion, until through the Circle ran the deep sure current of Masanva quietly noting that too much of this would excite and alarm our captors where tonight we wanted to soothe them, lullaby them, and let them know that our spirit was entirely pacific. So the raving organ struck braking backbeats and slowed, and Tari came in with a chant which slid in cool like silver, which Utak acknowledged, and thus we came off Utak’s burning height and went down a moonlit river instead.
After some time we were all silent and still again. Then some words were spoken about the meaning of the Numbers. We thought about this, then closing words were spoken among us.
We sat again in silence.
It was nearly ten o’clock.
We divided into five groups to prepare the chapel for the Entertainment and Impressions of 1984.
The first group, in many ways the most important, was the one that did nothing at all, and did not know it was a group. Azurara and Jim Guerrero and John Kent were among these people for us, making sure they continued to do nothing at all but at the right times.
Of the others, amid the bustle, one group curtained off the altar and set up lighting and in general managed the stage. The second lot got busy blowing up balloons and hanging coloured paper streamers all over the place, to add to festive relaxation. Several others went with two guards to the North Block to get the laundry bags which had a selection of discarded Modern clothes which Piggot had so reluctantly acquired for us, apparently from a Salvation Army Thrift Store. And the fourth group, also with two guards, went to the Institute canteen to pick up trays of prepared sandwiches, soft drinks, beer and other goodies for our guests, plus some tubes of squirtfood-and-drink for our own suited selves. All this was set up on trestle tables covered by white linen, and also there were bowls of flowers from Florida. It was not a feast that would have satisfied Falstaff, but the best we could get out of Piggot having told him it was for himself and the Institute staff.
The clothing arrived. The Entertainment players were most eager to turn from setting up the stage and see what Piggot had provided. Lucie, Herbie, Tari, Jud, Connie, Clive, and yours truly—we were quick to open up those laundry bags. We had asked for wigs, but there were none, as we found, yet the rest of the clothing was sufficient for nine at least. Some of it was almost new, though the variety and mixture of styles was amazing.
We wished to begin at ten-thirty, and there was no time to waste. We were all somewhat nervous, save for Tari, as calm as ever, and also Masanva, who sat doing nothing more conspicuously than anyone else, on a chair amid all the bustle and flurry with hands on knees and feet apart and back straight and eyes fixed straight ahead. We pushed and pulled Modern clothes over our immunity-suits, some being too baggy about the body to permit such an operation with ease. Yet we did it, and had to laugh at each other. Wearing a business-suit with shirt and tie that ballooned over the contours of immunity-suit beneath, and a porkpie hat taped to the top of my helmet at a jaunty angle, I looked no more ridiculous than some of the others. Yet my nervous hilarity was mixed with doubt as I went to check on several matters, according to my agreed responsibilities. Six guards supervised us—five men, one woman; four whites, two blacks—all in their thirties or forties, in grey uniforms, not wearing white-suits, their guns concealed. They were relaxed and not suspicious, for my appearance amused them. This was satisfactory. I entered the library.
I found Kazan Watanabe on the lower floor, setting up screen and equipment for the musical extravaganza to be shown at midnight, a movie called Mary Poppins. He eyed me in shock at my disguise, then bent over in a fit of the giggles, silent save for a “sssszz-sssszz” that escaped him. “Sir,” I said with what dignity I could muster, “we met well on Common Ground, and may Seven make this evening happy for us all! Is everything ready here?”
“Gilbert-san… sorry I laugh… but you…”
He went off into another fit of “sssszz-sssszz-ing,” before managing to inform me that he had his responsibilities under control, at which point I was able to laugh with him. I returned to the chapel. All seemed ready. Masanva’s eye caught me and held me for an instant, and I felt steadied as I went to the south door near which stood Brynjof and Thord. Blund was there too, but he had the eyes of a heifer.
“Ah! Englishman!” barked Brynjof, blue eyes fixing me from his leather face, “Modern this night, eh? You look that you walk on breaked glass!”
“I am ready for play. And you, Norseman?”
“Yes! Yes! I like to play!” He took both my shoulders in his meatloaf hands and squeezed, and even through his suit and mine I felt it. “Not to fear, Englishman! We know how to play!”
Then, with dry mouth, I told one of the guards that we were ready to begin. The time was twenty-five minutes to eleven.
22. “…The Japanese Never Made Nothing!”
Impressions of 1984 was not a success. We stumbled through our silly sketches, forgetting our lines, unable to concentrate on the business of making people laugh. Our audience out there in the dark between the candlelight clusters were politely amused to begin with, but soon the increasingly cold silences told us we would never hold the attention of our Institute guests until eleven-fifteen, as we had planned. The joke of Modern clothes over immunity-suits quickly wore thin, while Lucie’s saga of the progress from Las Vegas to Washington of a lady of easy virtue seemed to cause more embarrassment than amusement. We held a backstage council-of-war, then abandoned the programme, and Tari called for impromptu tricks and turns from DTIs and staff alike. Then followed an uncomfortable ten minutes. Herbie told bad jokes, then John Kent recited a poem called “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” but the audience was very restive. It was Norman Ernstein who saved us, for suddenly he came up on stage, grinning, and asked for an assistant, and with his parlour-magic carried us through the next fifteen minutes in a good mood.
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