The Birth of a new moon

by Laurie R. King

  The theme of the painting was proclaimed in foot-high gold letters smack in the middle: TRANSFORMATION. At the left side of the mural a highly realistic portrayal of the untouched desert that Ana had contemplated from her high perch that morning gradually gave way to the gentle civilization of fields and crops from which tumbled baskets of fruit, tomatoes, eggplants, and grain that spilled into the central image, the kitchen. Five figures stood with their backs to the painter and their arms raised, giving praise to a fiercely glowing homo, the womb-shaped bread oven found behind native dwellings throughout the Southwest, its top slightly elongated by the artist's perception into something closer to a pear in shape. To the right stretched an abundance of cooked dishes, breads, casseroles, and pots of soup that nourished a long row of identical people, again shown from behind, and then a row of people marching renewed to the fields while in the background children played on a slide and a set of swings. The people were followed by a jagged, half-raised circular stone building, and finally, seated in a lotus position, a meditating man surrounded by a shimmering golden aura.

  Ana laughed in pleasure at the sight of it, and felt that really, she might as well climb into Rocinante and ride away: Any group with sufficient sense of humor and sheer exuberant joy to paint that mural above the entrance to their communal kitchen was not about to twist itself in self-loathing or paranoia.

  She walked with Teresa and Dominique to the schoolrooms in the central building. On the way she looked curiously at her surroundings. The buildings were impressive and original, massive circular objects slapped together of rock and cement that somehow managed to look crudely primitive and wildly modernistic at the same time.

  The garden, however, was the real delight. Xeriscape landscaping at its most austere, the carefully scattered cactuses, boulders, and desert plants had the look of modern sculpture in the courtyard of an art museum, softened only by the rises and falls of the ground and the sprinkled clumps of delicate grasses. There was even, Ana was charmed to see, a boojum tree at least twelve feet high, its glorious blue-gray trunk straight and tall in its cloud of tangly, tiny-leafed branches.

  "For the Snark was a boojum, you see!" she exclaimed. Teresa looked at her as if she were mad, and Dominique blinked. "A poem," she explained. "By Lewis Carroll."

  "Ah," said Dominique.

  Ana decided not to attempt further explanation, and as they continued on she turned her attention to the buildings themselves. All of these in the central compound were made in the same fashion, comprising great, rough-hewn hunks of rock held together by reddish concrete. The rocks were not laid so much as tumbled, with the spaces filled by the concrete varying wildly and including a lot of gaps. It was a pleasing technique, looking both massive and delicate, but Ana had to wonder if it wouldn't fall in on itself in an earthquake.

  "I don't think I've ever seen buildings like this," she commented.

  "Then you haven't been to Taliesen West."

  "Frank Lloyd Wright's place? That's in this area, isn't it? No, I haven't been there."

  "It's down near Scottsdale. Beautiful. Inspired. Needs a lot of muscle, though. We build the forms, lay in miles of reinforcing bar, heave in the rocks—we have a forklift for the bigger ones—and shovel in yards and yards of very stiff concrete. After a couple of days we take the forms down and do the next section.".

  "That explains the muscle on the men in the dining hall," Ana commented.

  "Steven calls it 'sweat meditation'," Teresa volunteered seriously.

  Ana decided that this was one Change member who had not contributed to the humor in the TRANSFORMATION mural, but she said merely, "I'm looking forward to meeting Steven," and followed the two teachers into the central building.

  Ana spent the morning with Dominique, exploring the classrooms, shelving books in the nascent library, helping fill out a stack of evaluation forms, all the endless process of running a legally recognized school under the state's watchful eye. They took lunch in the hall, where Ana met more strong, happy young men and women than she had seen gathered together in one place for a very long time. Then, in the afternoon, Ana met the children of the Change community.

  Many public schools, Ana knew, had gardens for the students, "life labs" where the elementary classrooms' bean-seed-in-a-milk-carton could be carried through to its fullness, giving the children actual edible beans to harvest. Concepts of biology and ecology were given solid form, and the students learned cause-and-effect by seeing their own plants wither or thrive.

  The students here were put in the gardens for pedagogic reasons, but also as a basic lesson in responsibility. Change was as nearly self-supporting as a desert community could be, and the earlier the children learned to become active contributors to the whole, the better, for themselves and for the community.

  Today was dedicated to the beginning of the year's cycle. Ana was assigned to a group of six five- and six-year-olds, and the subject was the planting of beans. Instead of small waxy milk cartons salvaged from the lunchroom and bags of sterilized potting soil from the local hardware store, they used rough pots formed out of recycled newspaper and scoops of rich, fragrant soil from a compost heap mixed with the sandy earth of the desert, but other than these surface differences, the effect was the same as any other classroom bean-planting. Clumsy fingers, chubby still with baby fat, spilled more soil than the pots received and either thrust the beans so far into the soil the seeds would be hard put to reach the light or else left them so close to the surface they would be unable to stand upright. Each child then drowned his seeds with water. Muddy, wet, and thrilled, they placed each already disintegrating pot onto flats, and then she herded them out of the potting shed toward the beds where the beans would be planted when the survivors had their first three leaves.

  These children knew what was going on, that was clear, even if few of them could handle the gardening implements with any dexterity. They squatted down along the side of the weedy bed and plunged their trowels enthusiastically into the soil as they tried to emulate Ana, who was loosening the soil with a garden fork before she pulled the weeds and tossed them into a nearby bucket. Most of the children overestimated the motion required, and clots of dirt and weed flew all over.

  Ana kept them at it for twenty minutes, abandoning the bed with the ravaged edges only when the next group stood waiting to take over the trowels. They then went to scrub hands, brush ineffectually at knees, and gather eggs at the henhouse.

  She began to relax in their company. She had only experienced one bad moment, a brief blink of an eye when she seemed to be standing not in Arizona, but long ago in Texas, and it was Abby digging at her side with similar enthusiasm, unearthing an enormous worm and holding it up in triumph. But the memory was gone in an instant and she was again Ana Wakefield in Arizona, and the worst part of meeting the children, the early moments of extreme vulnerability, were past, she was sure of it. Now she could get on with the business of saving them.

  Once the kids were delivered, tired and dirty, back to the schoolrooms, Dominique took Ana back in hand. They wandered through the farm sheds and admired the goats, looked at the ongoing projects in the crafts barn, the pots, mugs, and weavings due for sale in the Sedona gallery, saw the bare orchard and the plowed fields and the wide, mulched-over vegetable beds, mature brothers of the beds the students played at, which in the summer would surely resemble the left-hand side of the TRANSFORMATION mural.

  At about three o'clock, Dominique excused herself, saying that she had her meditation period now. Ana went back down the road to the dull guest quarters, but stopped there only long enough to fetch her camera and her journal, and took them up to the red-rock perch above the compound.

  It was only to be expected that a woman like Ana Wakefield would keep a journal, the daily thoughts and meditation of a life-long inhabitant of the New Age, her inner thoughts, reflections, and a record of her dreams. In it she recorded descriptions, personal details, speculations, and interesting asides. She could even make d
etailed if amateurish sketches of her surroundings, and anyone going through her things would see only an innocent diary of events. In truth, it was Ana's means of reporting to Glen.

  It was small enough to take with her at all times, and she tended to stick it in a pocket and leave it there even when she had no intention of writing or sketching. That way she would have it with her on trips to town, where she could divert into a library or copy shop and in minutes have the pages photocopied and either into a stamped envelope or faxed to Glen and discarded, before anyone noticed she was gone. She felt like a teenager sometimes, but she kept a diary.

  The climb up the hill was not much easier the second time, but she had at least discovered some of the hazards among the boulders, and this time she located a natural seat, shaped for comfort. She took a few photos with her trusty old 35mm, then opened the journal.

  Over the years she and Glen had developed a series of code phrases, words that could be used naturally in the journal or a postcard to "Uncle Abner", or even in a conversation, but which had specific meanings to indicate, for example, that things were going either so slowly or so smoothly that she thought Glen might as well go do something else for a while, or that she needed someone to hang around the prearranged meeting place until she could get free, or that she was feeling nervous and wanted to get out soon.

  The word used to show this first state of affairs was, appropriately, "placid", and she used it now, twice, in describing the compound with a third of its population missing and then on the following page in speaking about the goats in the field. She did not know if Glen would appreciate the nuances of the mural (though he sometimes seemed to have a sense of humor), so she spent some time on that, reflecting on its hidden meanings without giving too much away herself. She closed the entry immediately after the second "placid", for emphasis, read what she had written (checking to be sure that she had not by accident made use of other, contradicting code words), and climbed back down the hill to see if she could lend a hand in the kitchen.

  After dinner, when the dishes were clean and the small children in bed, Ana was invited to join the community in its group meditation. She accepted with the appropriate eagerness, hung up her damp dishtowel to dry, and waited while her new friends Laurel and Amelia checked on the breakfast provisions and shut down the lights. They took coats from an entire room dedicated to rolling metal clothes racks hung with hundreds of bent metal hangers, and bundled up fully before stepping out into the frigid night air. The three women walked quickly from the dining hall to the hub building, their breath steaming clouds around their heads, and joined several others just entering the foyer.

  This time, however, instead of going left into the school offices or right into the circular corridor that connected all the classrooms, Ana followed the others straight ahead, through a set of double doors that looked so like the walls around them as to be invisible, given away only by the slight discoloration of the wood where a hundred hands every day pushed them open. Inside the doors was another, smaller foyer, this one with a solid wall on the inward side and swinging doors to the right and left, forming a baffle to keep those outside from seeing in. Amelia went through the right-hand door, Laurel through the left. After a moment's hesitation, and aware that Laurel was standing and waiting for her, Ana followed Amelia.

  Her first thought on setting foot into the circular meditation hall was how amazing it was that such a room could be concealed in plain sight, surrounded as it was by one of the busiest, most public places on the entire compound, the school.

  There were two stories to this building, the school below and the residences of Steven Change and his oldest companions above, but the domed roof made this central part taller yet. The top of the circular skylight was nearly forty feet above the floor. The actual diameter was not great, but full use had been made of the volume by the simple, dramatic device of a pair of circular ramplike steps winding up the walls, forming an external double helix of platforms, each roughly four feet square, many of which were occupied already by seated figures, settling into poses of meditation. Some of the platforms were empty, at irregular intervals, but mostly in the middle section, which made Ana wonder if perhaps the seats weren't specifically assigned, and their owners absent.

  That was later, though. At first all she noticed was the sense of constricted space below, underscored by the near-black carpeting on the floor and the sheer, high walls rising on all sides that gave way to warm reds and gathered light above until at the very top, where outside spotlights shone down through the glass, there was an explosion of warmth and movement and golden light.

  Just under the glass was suspended a shimmering golden cloud, a sparkling, breathing entity made up of dozens of fine gold rods held horizontal to the floor and turning freely in the rising air. Ana had seen something like it once in a San Francisco cathedral. That sculpture, though, had served to evoke the cool splendor and ethereal magnificence of the Holy Spirit. This one made a person yearn to be closer, to rise up from the dark commonality and strive for light and entrance to the dazzling gold cloud.

  Ana was not the only one to feel the pull. She was bumped twice in the jostle near the door as others paused to throw their gaze upward. For some there was awe, for others an almost ritual throwing back of the head that reminded Ana of the pause at the font when a Roman Catholic entered a church. She watched two of the ritualists, both of whom came in the right-hand door, and saw them climb the rampways to take up seats raised above the rest. Among them, she saw, were Amelia, Suellen, and Teresa. Teresa's platform was high up enough that it would have given an acrophobe problems. Ana settled into a place on the floor with her back against the wall, tucking her knees in with care, and gave herself over to a close examination of this holy of holies at the very center of Change.

  The golden mobile and the double helix of meditation steps were not the oddest thing about this room, although they were the most immediately impressive. In their shadow, an observer could easily overlook the peculiar structure that took up the center of the hall, forming a sort of axis device around which the circular room might be visualized as turning.

  The axis rose out of the floor in what Ana had no doubt was the precise center of the hall, a dull black pipe about fifteen inches in diameter that ran straight up and through the middle of a circular fireplace with an overhanging hood until it divided into a Y about two-thirds of the way up the hall's height. The two arms disappeared into the dome roof just below the edges of the skylight. In the arms of the Y a circular platform had been set, connected to the walls by six narrow walkways.

  The more Ana looked at this weird structure, the stranger it seemed. It was as if some mad engineer had decided to cross a huge chemical apparatus with the rat-guard of a ship's ropes and turn the result into a tree house. That it was deeply symbolic for the builders she had no doubt—nobody would go to that amount of work for mere decoration—but what that symbolism might be, and if it had any actual function aside from holding the fireplace to heat the room, she could not tell.

  What she did know, what she hadn't been sure of until she had walked into this room, was that behind all its apparent oppenness, Change was full of hidden secrets.

  The room began to quiet, until Ana could hear the low crackle of the fire burning behind its circle of screen. After a minute, high over her head, a man stood up. His was the highest occupied platform on his run of the helix, although three higher than his were unoccupied. (Steven and his right-hand man, Mallory, Ana wondered, off in England? And what of the third one?) This man now picking his way cautiously along the nearest walkway to the central platform was someone Ana had met during the day, in the workshop where he was working on a set of chairs. David Carteret, his name was, a big man with scars on his face that looked as if he'd gone through a window. He seemed to be in charge of leading the meditation from his high perch directly above the fireplace. Ana wrenched her mind from speculation and her gaze from the extraordinarily beautiful cloud of gold, and p
repared to give herself over to meditation.

  David began with a greeting sent from Steven and a couple of brief announcements from the English sister house. He then moved quickly, and with the relief of a person taking refuge from public speaking, into a chant Steven had set for them. "I am Change," said David; "Change am I."

  Ana dutifully joined the others, listening to how the voices rose and rang through the dome overhead, hearing the hundred voices slowly become one. It had been a while since she had joined in a group meditation, and it took her some time to immerse her voice in the others, to lose herself in the words. Gradually, imperceptibly, she let go, and as the chant evolved from two statements into the slow two-beat rhythm of "I am change am I am change," she moved along with it.

  Silent meditation followed, although by this time the protests of Ana's knee were loud and interfered with the purity of her contemplation. The ninety minutes seemed endless, and when finally people began to get to their feet, she followed them out gratefully, stumbling down the road on a leg that felt as if hot gravel had been inserted into the joint. All she could think about was a shot of cortisone from Rocinante's locked cabinet, a jolt of whisky from her illicit stores, and many hours stretched straight in bed.

  An ancient school bus rumbled past her as she approached the guest quarters: the older children and their teachers returning from Tucson. She wished them a silent good night and took her creaking middle-aged body to bed.

  Chapter Eleven

  From FBI documents relating to the Change case