The Birth of a new moon

by Laurie R. King

  Ana walked into the dining hall the next morning and found the community restored to itself, voices raised in a wall of sound, dishes clattering, excited teenagers calling to each other across the room. The energy embodied in the TRANSFORMATION mural no longer seemed unlikely.

  The hub building, too, was transformed. What had yesterday been a half-empty nursery school was now a purposeful seat of learning. Halfway through the morning Ana was dragged out of the office to help Teresa with her fifteen eleventh and twelfth graders, who were finding it difficult to settle back into the classroom after two days of freedom.

  "I just need another adult today," Teresa told her as they hurried around the circular hallway. "You don't need to do anything—they'll settle down if you just go and stand next to them while I'm trying to teach."

  Not a terribly flattering judgment of Ana's abilities, perhaps, but it was true that the repressive presence of an adult—any adult—goes far to smooth down youthful high spirits. Ana dutifully stood, and drifted, and saw the classroom gradually cool off from the near-boil. By lunchtime, concentration had been achieved.

  The kids exploded out the door, and Teresa dropped down into her chair with her head thrown back. Ana noticed idly that despite Carla's version of the community regulations that specified no jewelry, this woman too (whom Ana would have classified as an ardent follower of rules) was wearing a necklace, in her case a delicate gold chain. Teresa sat forward and the chain disappeared under her collar. Perhaps the rule meant only no necklaces on top of clothing?

  "It is always so difficult for them to focus when they have been away," Teresa said. "I've come to dread field trips."

  "Sitting in a bus for all those hours," Ana said. "Maybe they need some 'sweat meditation' when they get in."

  Teresa looked surprised, then thoughtful. "You could be right. Perhaps I'll mention it to Steven."

  "Do you have any idea when he'll be back?"

  "It was supposed to be tomorrow, but we heard this morning it will be three or four days. Well, let us go and have some lunch."

  Three or four days. Ana was seized by an abrupt spasm of boredom at the thought of it, because it would then be three or four more days while the great man settled in and found the time to exchange a few words with the newcomer, plus two or three more before the community got back into its normal functioning.

  She told Teresa she had things to do, and excused herself from lunch, going instead to her room to change into her oldest clothes. She spotted the silver moon that she had bought in Sedona and obediently removed the night before, and after a moment she picked it up and dropped it over her head, tucking it under her shirt. She felt obscurely comforted by the small weight, and by the minor rebellion against the rules.

  Rocinante's cupboards provided some stale bread and a piece of cheese for lunch, and soon Ana was elbow-deep in the bus's engine, red-faced and muttering, with the ancient, much-taped-together repair manual propped open at the heater section. Forty minutes into it she heard footsteps approach and stop behind her; she looked around and saw Dulcie's serious and disconcertingly familiar face.

  "Hello, Dulcie. I wondered where you'd gotten to. I think you must be my good luck, because I just this minute found what's wrong with Rocinante's heater. You see this little switch? Well, you can't tell it's a switch, but the book says it is, and says it's supposed to flip on to let the heat in, and it isn't. You probably shouldn't touch it," she said, drawing it back slightly from the child's inquiring finger. "It's really filthy. So am I, in fact. How've you been? How's the rug coming along?"

  "Can you fix it?"

  "What, the rug? Oh, you mean the switch. I don't think I can fix it, but now that I know what the problem is, I can buy another one and replace it. I hope."

  "Why do you call your car Rosy Nante?"

  "Rocinante? That's her name. Have you ever heard about Don Quixote, the Knight of La Mancha?" She rolled the name on her tongue with magnificence and raised her eyebrows at the child.

  Dulcie shook her head.

  "Don Quixote was a great man, although he was a little bit crazy." Ana reached for the small screwdriver and settled herself into the story while she put the engine back together.

  "Don means 'sir', or 'lord', so it's like calling him Sir Quixote. Anyway, Don Quixote lived a long time ago, in a country called Spain, where he spent all his spare time reading exciting adventures about knights who rode out and rescued maidens and punished bad guys. Could you hand me that roll of skinny black tape? And I promise not to bite it with my teeth." Ana pulled her head out far enough to exchange grins with the child, accepted the tape, and returned to her task. "Where was I? Oh yes. Don Quixote loved to read stories about knights and their squires—that's the person who helps the knight, bringing him food and polishing his armor. Are you reading yet, Dulcie?"

  The child nodded. Ana paused to scrabble through the toolbox for a stub of pencil she kept there, and printed the name QUIXOTE in clear letters along the upper margin of the manual on repairs, saying the letters aloud as she wrote them. She dropped the pencil stub into the fold; many weeks later Glen McCarthy would find the tattered manual, open it at the pencil, and wonder over the inscription.

  "That's what it looks like, with a Q and an X, which aren't letters you get to use very often. Anyway, one day Don Quixote got it into his head that he, too, would be a great knight. He was by this time more than a little bit batty from all his reading, so he really believed that he could do this. He made himself a helmet out of an old bucket and climbed onto an ancient old nag of a horse he called Rocinante, imagining it to be a magnificent steed trained as a warhorse. He talked one of his neighbors, a man named Sancho Panza, into becoming his squire by saying that he would make Sancho the governor of an island when they returned, and Sancho believed him.

  "Now would you hand me the crescent wrench? It's that flat metal thing with the shape like a moon on the end. No, I think I need the bigger one. Thanks.

  "Don Quixote and Sancho Panza rode forth, Don Quixote on his bag-of-bones Rocinante, Sancho on a donkey, and the first thing they did was come out onto a flat plain, where they saw two or three dozen windmills. Do you know what a windmill is?" Dulcie looked uncertain. "There's one here, though it's a very modern one. You know that thing on the high tower up on the hill past the barns, with little arms that turn really fast when the wind blows? That's a windmill for making electricity; these windmills Don Quixote saw were shorter but wide as a shed, and instead of little metal blades that fly around fast, they had four huge arms stretching almost to the ground, made out of wood and cloth like the sail of a boat, and they went around and around slow and strong, turning a stone that the people used to grind their wheat into flour."

  Most of this would be beyond the child's comprehension, but that didn't matter. Ana stuck her head back into the engine and went on with both repairs and story.

  "The windmills that poor old confused Don Quixote saw looked to him like an army of giants, each of them with four enormous arms turning around and around. Of course, Don Quixote immediately decided that he would attack them all, wiping this scourge of giants from the face of the earth. Can I have that smaller crescent wrench now, Dulcie?" She waited a minute, caught in a tricky bit and unable to look around. "Do you see it? The one on the top?" she prompted, and was preparing to back out, when the wrench nudged her outstretched hand. She wrapped her fingers around it and continued.

  "Don Quixote pulled down the visor on his bucket helmet, stretched out his lance, and jabbed his spurs into poor Rocinante's sides. Off they pounded, straight at the nearest windmill, while Sancho Panza sat on his donkey and covered his eyes so he didn't have to watch.

  " 'Cowards and vile caitiffs,' shouted Don Quixote." Ana stuck her arm out behind her to gesture swordlike with the crescent wrench, then reapplied it to the task. " 'One knight will conquer you all!' And he flew across the field at them and charged into the nearest giant. The wind was turning the sail, and it caught Don Quixote's lance
, broke it to pieces, and flipped both Don Quixote and his horse over and over, rolling across the ground.

  "Sancho was so frightened. He came running up and helped Don Quixote to his feet. 'Master,' he cried, 'what are you doing? These are not giants, they're windmills. You can't destroy them!' And Don Quixote, groaning from his injuries, looked again and saw that they were indeed windmills, and he shook his head 'My great enemy, the magician Preston, has robbed me of my victory by turning these giants into windmills before our very eyes. But never fear, dear Sancho; my sword will prevail.'

  "And off they went to the inn, to bind their wounds and eat their supper."

  Ana had timed her conclusion carefully, to coincide with the end of the temporary repair. She emerged from the engine, dropped her tools into the box, closed Rocinante's engine cover, and turned to look in triumph at her audience.

  Except that her audience had grown, and was no longer just a quiet five-year-old girl. Standing behind Dulcie was a dark, well-muscled, devastatingly good-looking young man with his hands in his jacket pockets and suspicion in his eyes.

  "This is Jason," Dulcie said proudly.

  Ana felt simultaneously fourteen and eighty-four, clumsy, awkward, stupid, and ugly, and could only hope that none of it showed on her face. She picked up the screwdriver and tape and dropped them into the box, got to her feet, brushed off her trousers, removed her fingerless gloves and looked at the state of her hands before deciding that she ought not to inflict her grease on the young man. He looked nothing like Dulcie, except perhaps the eyes. His hair was as black as her tangled mop, but his lay slick against his head, gathered into a short ponytail at his neck, and his skin was a couple of shades lighter.

  "Hello, Jason, I'm Ana. I heard that Dulcie had a brother. Did you have a good time down in Tucson?"

  "It was okay," he said, a typical teenager's reaction, and although it was not accompanied by a shrug, something about the gesture made Ana wonder if he wasn't younger than the eighteen or nineteen he appeared.

  "You're an artist, I think Carla told me," In an instant, she could see it was the wrong thing to say: His face, already closed in, went completely blank. She hastened to create a diversion by clearing up the tools and chattering. "I was in the shop in Sedona and bought a coffee mug, and Carla told me that Dulcie's brother had sketched the bird on it. My favorite cup got broken when I had to slam on my brakes the week before—I got coffee all over the car and broke the handle off the cup, but I missed the deer,"

  She pushed the tools down and snapped the top shut, flipped the manual closed, and put tools, book, gloves, and ground cloth into their place beneath Rocinante's seldom-used passenger seat.

  "I think I better go clean my fingernails before I offer to help with dinner. Good to meet you, Jason. See you later, Dulcie,"

  "Good-bye, Ana. Bye, Rocinante," said Dulcie. Her hand snuck out and surreptitiously stroked the bus's faded paint, and then she and her protective, self-contained, aloof, unconsciously handsome and unbelievably sexy older brother walked away up the road to the main compound.

  Ana let out a deep breath as she watched them go. He walked like a young athlete, or a street tough, with straight spine and a slight swagger to his hips. However, his head was ever so slightly bent to listen to the now-chattering Dulcie, and when the child's hand came up to his, he allowed it to stay there.

  Again, Ana wondered how old he was.

  That night after dinner a basketball game was held in the dining hall. While the pans were being scrubbed and the smallest children put to bed, the tables and benches were pulled back to the walls and two men with a roll of masking tape measured off the sidelines and laid out two keys around the baskets that other men were bolting to the walls. It was a practiced exercise, finished before the cleanup was, and when Ana came out of the kitchen, she stepped into a basketball court compete with a facsimile of bleachers and two teams of wildly mixed players warming up by doing passes and lay-up shots. One of the players was Jason.

  Ana worked her way around the room to where Dulcie sat.

  "Hey there, Sancho," she said. "Why aren't you out on the court?"

  "Hi, Ana. They said I could stay up to watch my brother. Do you want to sit down?"

  The woman at Dulcie's side stared at Dulcie, stared harder at Ana, and turned to whisper to the woman next to her. Ana joined them and sat down.

  "How is Rocinante, Ana?"

  "My trusty steed? Ready to tilt at a hundred windmills, Dulcie. Hey, I forgot to tell you something. You know how I said that Don Quixote thought of himself as the perfect knight. Well, a knight has to have a lady to defend and to dedicate his victories to. And do you know what the name of Don Quixote's lady was? Dulcinea. Dulcie."

  The child thought about it, and after a minute she ducked her head and said to Ana in a voice almost too low to hear, "My name isn't really Dulcie."

  Ana answered in a near whisper out of the corner of her mouth, "That's okay. Don Quixote wasn't really a knight, either."

  Dulcie wriggled her body in a settling-in gesture and ended up leaning into Ana a bit more than she had been. After a minute, Ana placed her arm gingerly around the child's shoulders and turned her attention to the players on the floor.

  The game was a contest between the students wearing T-shirts in various shades of yellow and the men of the community in green. At first glance this division seemed unfair, since the men were taller and heavily muscled, and presumably the pick of adult players came from a larger pool than that of the teenagers.

  The kids were good, though, and fast. Of the five on the starting team, two were as tall as the biggest adult, four were unusually muscular for teenagers, and all of them looked like they wanted to win.

  The two teams assumed their positions in the center of the court, the referee tossed the ball up, and the lanky blond boy rose up and tapped it into the waiting hands of the shortest member of his team, who immediately shot it over to Dulcie's brother. Jason pivoted and began moving down the court in an odd hunched-over stance that looked clumsy but moved him along faster than anyone else on the court. A guard in green swooped up in front of him and without a break Jason switched hands, ducked under the man's outstretched arms, and accelerated for the basket. Up he went in a sweet, easy lay-up shot seven seconds into the game, and the cafeteria erupted. Everyone in the hall was on his feet shouting, Ana no exception. Even the foiled guard grinned and slapped Jason's shoulder as they jogged back up the court.

  Jason heard none of it. A glance at the man was his only acknowledgment of anyone outside his own skin, although he was quite obviously aware at any given moment just where his teammates and his opponents were on the court.

  So it went for the whole game. Other players laughed, grimaced, raised a fist in a victory punch; Jason did his job, scored his points, and turned his focus onto what came next.

  It was a shortened game, four ten-minute quarters, and from the first play, Ana could not take her eyes off Jason.

  He was a superb player, shambling along in that deceptive way like an elongated chimpanzee and then suddenly shifting gears to streak through the crush near the basket, fast and slippery and untouchable, rising up free of the guards to nudge the ball in with his fingertips. Time and again he did this, and the men in green seemed unable to come up with a strategy to counteract him.

  He was no team player. He hunted up and down the back of the court like a lone wolf until he either saw an opportunity to snatch the ball from a green player or until one of his teammates could get free to pass to him, then he was off. Only once did he voluntarily relinquish possession of the ball, when he was trapped in the corner and time was running out before the half was called. The pass he made, a single bounce beneath the flailing arms of the tallest man, was successful, but the boy he passed it to, the lanky blond kid who had jumped at the game's opening, took three steps and had it snatched in mid-dribble. The only emotion Ana saw him show the whole game was right then: a twist of irritation passed over Jason's face,
more at himself, Ana thought, than at his teammate, and then he was back to his normal unruffled, ruthlessly focused self.

  After halftime a pattern began to develop out on the court, or perhaps Ana was only now beginning to see it. The blond kid, whose name was Tony, had apparently had enough of Jason's successes and decided to start keeping the ball to himself. Four times in the third quarter he ignored obvious opportunities to pass to Jason for an easy score. Twice his strategy succeeded. The third time an opposing player snatched the ball from midair and barreled down the court to score. The fourth time, with Jason, two other players, and most of the audience screaming "Pass it!" Tony chose for a long shot, with the same result. Most of the audience was watching the middle-aged English teacher take off down the court for his two points, but Ana glanced over at Jason and saw the narrowed eyes of a pure, cold rage, so instantly wiped away that she had to wonder if she had actually seen it.

  She leaned over to ask the woman on the other side of Dulcie the question that had been puzzling her all afternoon. "Do you by any chance know how old the boy Jason is?"

  "Fourteen," she said promptly.

  "Fourteen? No."

  The woman shrugged and went back to her conversation with her neighbor. Dulcie took her eyes off the game long enough to tell Ana, "He had his birthday just before we came here."

  Good Lord.

  Jason now had the ball and he was moving back and forth outside the key, watching and waiting for the opening he needed. He had taken the ball from Tony (whom Ana could easily imagine behind the wheels of a series of stolen cars, grinning in the pleasure of the joyride) and was waiting for the stocky kid to delay one of the guards and open the key. (That boy, on the other hand, had a mean streak, and used his elbows when the ref wasn't watching. He would be the perpetrator of harsher crimes, and on his way to being a career criminal.) Jason would be too serious to joyride, too cautious to commit the obvious crimes.

  Perhaps, she speculated, it would be that brief, white-hot rage that was Jason's downfall, a sudden and disastrous loss of control resulting in a vicious and no doubt very efficient act of violence, instantly over, constantly guarded against. Would he regret it? Perhaps, perhaps not, but certainly he feared it. Clearly, too, Carla and the other women were a little bit intimidated by him, Carla with her loud and uncomfortable laugh when Ana had suggested that Jason might be her son, the dryness in Dominique's voice when she spoke of him. The only person Ana had met who did not seem slightly uncomfortable around the boy was Dulcie, and Dulcie, Ana felt sure, need never fear her brother's anger.