A New Eden

by Quent Cordair

  The shoes were polished to a high shine, black edged and scuff free. There would be a square of soft cloth in his pocket for wiping away any dust and smudges, whenever a free moment allowed. It was an old trick that the more conscientious, dedicated Angels still used.

  Lundquist’s inspection came to rest on the young man’s face. Though a year younger than Skye, there was almost nothing left of the boy. His cheeks were concave, his jawline firm and refined, his eyes nearly set in stone. If Gideon wasn’t yet as tough as someday he would be, he was well on his way. He was hardening – a humble, disciplined soldier of Christ, with the grace, balance, and dedicated focus of a martial artist.

  The boy had always been a survivor. Abandoned as an infant by a drug-addicted mother who had no recollection of the father, he had been raised in the Church orphanage. Several sets of foster parents had tried to take him in, but behavioral issues had always resulted in his being returned to the orphanage, where the director and staff learned not to try to coddle him or get him to open up. Toughness and severity were what he responded to. Once the Angels took him in, he thrived.

  “Brother Cane, what are your responsibilities for Passion this year?”

  “Brother Johnson has put me in charge of garbage detail, sir.”

  “Very well. I trust that I’ll hear of no overflowing cans or litter blowing around the valley next week then.”

  “No, sir. God’s valley will be clean, sir.”

  Lundquist studied Gideon’s face once more before giving him a final head-to-foot review.

  “Palms, please.”

  Gideon’s focus still locked on the unseen horizon, he lifted his hands to waist level, forearms parallel to the ground, palms upward for inspection.

  “Over.”

  Gideon turned his hands over.

  The star-like scars, the size of small bullet holes, were still ruddy but well healed, on both sides.

  “Very good, Brother Cane. Have Brother Johnson call me when you next see him. Go forth and be the Sword of the Lord. You’re dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. The Prophet be praised, bathem.”

  “Bathem. On your way out, ask Brother Jonathon to come in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As he waited for Jonathon, the reverend turned his own palms up, and then over. The scars were long faded but still visible. They would always be visible. Most Obadites and Strays might reasonably assume that the reverend would rank as his greatest achievement the building of the great cathedral, or the establishment of the hundreds of worldwide missions, or the explosive growth of the Flock’s television viewership, or the best-selling book he’d written. But there could never be anything more meaningful to Cole Elias Lundquist than having been an Angel and bearing the scars of Christ. It was the closest thing to pride he would allow himself.

  He picked up the kitten from the corner of the desk and, in his nail-scarred hands, squeezed the clay back into an unrecognizable lump.

  “Thou art the only Creator, dear Father in Heaven, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and Omega. . . .”

  He dropped the clay into the wastebasket, where it landed with a soft thump on the face of Denver Fleming.

  Seven

  Paige had found an empty seat in a pew near the center aisle of the auditorium, ten rows from the front, between a singularly plain looking woman, her hair in a tight bun, and a family of seven, the youngest of whom was being repeatedly urged by his mother and older sisters to sit down and keep quiet.

  She hadn’t heard from Ian again, Friday night or all day Saturday. She stopped by the gallery again Saturday evening, but he was busy with customers. She had lingered, making another tour through the rooms, but when she circled back to the front, he was discussing a painting with another young woman. From across the room, he acknowledged Paige with a nod and a polite smile, but whether he was truly pleased to see her, she couldn’t tell. She stepped out and went down the block to a dress shop where a summer frock had caught her eye. The fabric was a light floral print, a delicate coral on white, more feminine than anything she’d worn since she was a teenager. She tried it on. It fit beautifully, the cut accenting her waist and hips, showing off her legs. It wasn’t on sale. She bought it anyway and asked to have it sent up to the hotel.

  Returning to the gallery, she paused to admire the sculpture again in the front display – her sculpture. He saw her through the window, his glance lingering, but he was on the phone. She waited. And waited longer. She would wait for only so long. She walked back to the hotel.

  Sunday morning dawned bright and clear. It would have been another perfect day for riding. She was considering calling the concierge to see if a horse might be found for her when her eye fell again on the Angel’s card on the side table. Her curiosity was getting the better of her, her reporter’s reflexes firing again. She donned the new frock – her Sunday best – and took the hotel shuttle across town to join the well-washed masses thronging to their place of worship.

  The cathedral of the Church of the Flock of the Prophet Obadiah was easily twice as large as any Catholic cathedral or Muslim mosque she had visited. The hexagonal structure’s lower third was built of quarried stone; the upper two thirds were skinned with smoked glass, rising in canted quadrilaterals and triangles lifting the eye to the towering steeple and its gleaming cross high above, raised between heaven and earth. The front steps, eighty feet wide, led to a bank of glass doors twelve across, which this morning were flanked by a pair of unobtrusive, observant Angels nodding perfunctorily to the occasional greeting from an attendee. In the bright morning sun, their sunglasses seemed appropriate enough, but given the addition of the earpieces, Paige wondered if they didn’t fancy themselves the equivalent of Secret Service agents.

  Though she had put on only the lightest makeup and worn no jewelry that morning, she still half expected to be stopped at the door: the hem of her new frock was several inches above the knee, well short of the Flock standard; her bobbed hair was surely an arch violation. But if it mattered to the Angels or to any of the other adults, they were careful not to show it. Some of the younger girls examined her longer, if furtively. Some of the boys longer yet, less furtively. She was greeted warmly enough inside by an usher handing out programs.

  The outer foyer was a great glass-ceilinged ring around the auditorium, with wide, curving staircases leading up to the mezzanine and balcony levels, into which the current of Obadites divided and flowed. Paige continued straight ahead on the main level, past a bank of elevators and through the central doors. The scale of the space inside stopped her in her tracks.

  The auditorium was configured like a sports stadium, though rather than individual seats, there were long pews flowing up in tiered sections from the main stage, higher and steeper on the two levels above. She estimated it could seat at least ten thousand. In a glassed booth at the rear of the mezzanine level, technicians wearing headsets and microphones worked at sound and light boards. Remote-controlled video cameras were mounted along the mezzanine’s rim and the lower side walls, with three larger, manned cameras positioned at the rear of the main level. The sweeping, curved stage was bookended with tall stacks of speakers and flanked by two enormous video screens. Supplementary screens and speakers were suspended from the ceiling for the benefit of those with more limited views, seated higher and farther away. Front and center on the stage stood a simple, old-fashioned pulpit. Little more than a rectangular wooden box with a slanted top, to Paige the pulpit seemed out of place and scale on the broad stage, amidst the cathedral’s otherwise long lines and modern décor. Its wood had darkened with age. The edges were dented and worn. Carved into the pulpit’s front, with the first letters aligned vertically, were the words –

  Blessed

  Are

  the

  Meek

  “BAtheM” – the word used by the Angel who had stopped her on the darkened street. She had brought the Angel’s card along in the event she needed an invitation for entry. />
  Well behind the pulpit was a trio of chairs, the center chair high-backed, set against a low wall separating the main stage from long tiers of choir risers, eighteen rows high. Behind and above the choir risers, flights of majestic silver organ pipes rose in terraced ridges to a summit, above which, suspended on the wall, was a life-sized wooden cross. Like the pulpit, the cross contrasted severely with the general décor; it was made of two square-hewn beams of an unfinished pale wood, notched and pegged together, the edges and ends rough and pocked. Its face was worn smooth and mottled, as though it had been stained by a dark liquid. On a nail near the cross’s top hung a crown of woven thorns. The image gave Paige a shudder, but she had a hard time taking her eyes off it – the lines of the auditorium’s design all lifted, pointed, and ended at the cross. The lighting further accentuated the object as the focal point of the entire space.

  It was good that she had arrived early. The auditorium was filling rapidly. The little boy of the family she was sitting next to had worked his way down the row of sisters and was now sitting next to her, looking up at her shyly. She exchanged smiles with him, wishing she had a toy or picture book to help keep him occupied.

  All but a scattered few of the attendees appeared to be Flock. In their greetings and conversations with each other, most were interacting with considerable warmth and animation, whether with friends or strangers – and there seemed to be no strangers. It felt like an extended family reunion, the hum and tone of the atmosphere reaffirming and mutually supportive. Next to every exit was positioned an Angel, each wearing an earpiece. Paige noticed a slight bulge beneath the arm of one as he turned towards the source of a laugh that had risen above the general volume level. She wondered if the other Angels were armed as well, though she couldn’t imagine why it would be necessary in a place as peaceful, remote and safe as Aurum Valley.

  The video screens were showing footage from previous services – the choir singing joyously, speakers speaking passionately, the audience responding enthusiastically – wide-angle and panning shots intercut with close-ups of individual worshipers. The production values were high, the editing excellent. Paige thought the piece might have been created for television advertising. All of the individuals shown were reacting with emotive release of one form or another, from beseeching prayer, with clenched fists and pleading tears, to ecstatic praise, with hands lifted and eyes raised. The sequences were interwoven with glowing testimonials about what God and the Church meant to a range of adults and adolescents of both sexes and of varied races and ages. There was no mention of the sect’s prophet – only of God, Jesus, and the Church.

  At several minutes past the time when the service was scheduled to start, the video screens went blank and the sound stopped. A hush fell over the crowd. A deep baritone voice broke the silence, booming out, permeating the space, vibrating through Paige’s body.

  Unto you this day a child is born. Unto you this day a son is given. . . .

  All of the house lights went down. Except for the glow from the emergency-exit lights above the doors, all was dark. Despite all the exterior glass, there were no windows in the auditorium itself; as in a theater, the lighting was fully controlled.

  Some in the audience began to whistle and applaud, to call out. A full thirty seconds passed in darkness with no sound but the occasional complaint or question from a child. A baby began to fuss and cry, but was quickly hushed.

  Long lines of robed, ghostlike figures, barely visible, had begun filing into the choir tiers behind the stage. The tension and anticipation in the auditorium was building. Finally, a sequence of notes from the organ began to play, at first softly, then more loudly and in increasingly quick repetition. The crowd began to erupt in exclamations of “Hallelujah!” “Praise Jesus!” and “Glory to God and the Prophet!” The video screens flickered on, showing a still image of a cross on a hill. Fanned rays of white laser beams swept the room, front to back and side to side. But suddenly – the sound, lasers and screens all snapped off again to darkness and silence. Eager murmurs and titters and even laughter rustled in waves across the room. Paige felt goose bumps on her arms and down her back.

  Whoever was directing the production was teasing them. Paige had been to enough music concerts and sporting events to recognize it. The audience knew it too – and loved it. She glanced back to the control booth, where a production director, wearing headphones and a microphone, was relaying instructions to the cameramen and the lighting and sound techs. Someone in the audience began to clap very slowly, loudly, deliberately. The clapping was joined by others, then gradually by most, in unison, the tempo and volume increasing until twenty thousand hands were coming together in the rush of a monsoonal downpour. All had risen to their feet. Paige had joined them. She was looking back to watch as the production director, with a smile, raised an open hand and proceeded to fold his fingers down, one at a time, in a deliberate countdown. On zero, he pointed emphatically at one of the techs.

  The video screens came on, brightly, with a view that was gliding through the air, quite low over the earth, skimming over desert scrub, turning through desolate canyons, the visuals accompanied by rising symphonic strains. The authoritative voice boomed forth again, vibrating the cathedral’s bones:

  My children, my children . . . did I not bring you out from the place in which you were persecuted? Did I not bring you into this, my promised land? Did I not carry you safely across the rivers and the deserts and over the mountains, away from those who despised you and into this valley of safety and plenty?

  The view on the screen turned and swept into Aurum Valley from the south, gliding over the alkali flats and above the southern end of the town. It slowed as it reached the church, to circle around and above the sunbathed, shining cathedral.

  And did I not give my prophet the faith and strength to be your light and to show you the way? Have I not given you this, your home away from home, this shelter in the storm, this cradle in which my flock flourishes until I come again to take you away?

  The flight continued on, gliding across the river, over the plaza and Old Town. As it reached the base of the hill and passed over The Sophia, it began to climb, the chords of the music rising and ascending with it. On the summit above, a blinding whiteness shimmered and shone, reflecting a light that parted the clouds above in a great burst of rays.

  And when the prophet’s suffering was through, did I not take him up unto me as a sign of my love and of my promise to you that you are my children, that you are my anointed lambs and that I am watching over my flock, that I am with you and will always be with you, and that all will be well – that I, your Shepherd, will return to take you home – as my sign and my promise that I will return to take you home. . . . As my sign and my promise . . . As my sign and my promise . . .

  The choir picked up the repeated phrase. Their voices lifted and carried the words in a melody of yearning and devotion to the deepest and highest corners of the cathedral. The camera view had continued rising up the hill until it had gone fully into the light, with only the shimmering brightness still emanating from the screens. As the volume of the singing rose, the godly voice faded and from out of the whiteness a live view emerged from within the cathedral itself. With the lights coming up on the choir, a camera was moving across the multitude of berobed bodies, their voices strengthening. Two men with shoulder-mounted cameras roved near the corners of the stage. A camera on a suspended wire above tracked from one side of the auditorium to the other. The view on the screens cut to close-ups of the singers’ sincere and earnest faces before cutting again to a slow pan of the full choir, and then further out to a framing of the choir in all of its glory, with the small orchestra and the organist to the choir’s left. The house lights were coming up. Cameras panned the audience. The director intercut with close-ups of individuals, all still standing, most with their hands and eyes raised in worship as they sang along with the choir. The words of the song scrolled in caption, helpfully, across the bottom of the
screens –

  As my sign and my promise to You, dear Lord,

  I give You my life and my all,

  You gave Your dear Son to die for my sins

  With thanks on my knees I do fall. . . .

  The second and third verses, with themes of forgiveness and redemption, were sung by all with growing conviction. As the song concluded, the organist and choir shifted seamlessly through a key change to a quicker, more uplifting, joyous refrain, the audience clapping to the rhythm. Ten thousand souls, singing and clapping in impassioned unison, with amplified choir and instrumentation – the sound penetrated Paige’s core. This was an entirely different experience than any religious service she had ever attended. The atmosphere was more like a hybrid of a college football game, a rock concert and a political convention – but it was something deeper still, something stronger, more essential.

  During the third song, which to Paige sounded like an old slave spiritual – a simple but memorable tune about praising Jesus morning, noon, and night – two men and a woman ascended the steps from the stage’s left and made the long walk to the center. The men were smartly dressed in gray suits. The woman wore a light-green skirt with a high-collared, long-sleeved white blouse. Her up-do was heavily sprayed. The younger of the two men, dark haired and very fair complected, stopped in front of the chair on the right. The older gentleman, tall and eagle-featured, carried two well-worn, clothbound books beneath his arm. He stopped in front of the high-backed center chair. The woman proceeded directly to the pulpit, where she joined in the singing. Clapping and gesturing, she urged the audience on to even greater enthusiasm and volume. When the choir director brought the song to a resounding, trumpeting close, the whole of the auditorium erupted in praise, worship, and prayer: cries, moans and shouts overlapping and repeating. It was a cacophony with a harmonic undercurrent, a great wave coming onto the shore – rising, crashing, lingering, ebbing, only to surge and rise again.