The Birth of a new moon

by Laurie R. King

  Ana, she told herself, in Israel you cover yourself neck to wrist to ankle even in August; in New York you cripple yourself with heels. Here you will wear a hat.

  She clapped it on her head and thanked the young woman with as much good grace as she could muster, and without another word turned her back and continued on up the lane.

  The wide brim and musty smell of the object on her head dimmed the morning somewhat, and when she reached the point where the road went into the woods, tempted by the thought that in there she might remove it, she paused. The vision of a man wearing camouflage gear was vivid. Perhaps until she knew the ground rules she'd better stick to the open fields, she decided, and turned left onto a muddy track that ran between a fenced field with half a dozen cows in it on one side and on the other a wild thicket of nettles, blackberries, and bushes where the woods began. It was not as nice as the lane, and she had to take care not to put her foot into a cow pat or lose her hat to a branch, but the dogs were pleased and her spirit was content.

  It was a nice long circuit with many pleasing ins and outs and dead ends, but it was also a puzzling one. On her left for the entire time lay civilization in the form of cows and sheep, two massive draft horses and a well-populated duck pond, fenced pastures and vegetable garden. Extending out from the house was a twelve-foot-high brick wall lined with espaliered fruit trees, with a gap in the bricks revealing a glimpse of an acre or more of enclosed garden with a gleaming greenhouse, more trees espaliered against the wall, and rows of ruthlessly neat planted beds.

  It was a beautiful farm, ageless in structure and vigorously modern in intent; it left Ana with a clear idea of just where all that hard work Bennett had referred to went.

  The whole time, however, with the civil arts of the gardener displayed on her left, the right-hand prospect was nothing but a wall of overgrown shrubs, tangled vines, and impenetrable thicket. It was beautiful, too, in its wild way—magnificent, even, such as the huge rhododendron that had grown up and then toppled, rooting and resprouting where it lay until it formed a single plant nearly fifty feet long. Its clusters of red blossoms were fading now, but a few weeks earlier they must have been spectacular in spite of the heavy tangle of bramble that was clambering over the great bush. The rhododendron gave way to a wall of privet that cried out for the attentions of half a dozen strong men with chain saws; farther on, a tree three feet across at its base had fallen onto the lane and had its upper half cleared away while the rest of it was left to rot on the ground, after which a gate, so overgrown as to be unopenable with any tool short of a bulldozer, showed where a narrow lane had once joined with the home farm. So it continued, all the way around: tidy industry and the clean fragrance of grass on the left, a high wall of wild vegetation and the smell of rotting things on the right, hacked back as if a line had been drawn, untouched beyond that boundary. Order versus chaos: The early American colonies must have felt a little like this, settlements carved out of the wilderness. Or an enchanted castle, insulated from time.

  From down at the bottom of the farm, the house was softened by the outlying walls and structures, its lower half hidden by trees. The top of it rose up, though, and Ana saw for the first time that it was not just a box, as it had appeared from the back door. The central portion of the main block stepped up, two or three stories higher than the sides, and that section was topped by the tangle of chimneys. It looked a bit like a flattened pear, an overripe Cornice dropped from a height onto its bottom, and would, she reflected, have been much improved had someone alleviated the unimaginative symmetry by propping a giant leaf up against the central stem of chimneys. She grinned at the whimsical image, and went on.

  Back at the walled garden near the house, Ana turned to survey the gently sloping terrain down to the jungle, and was hit by its unlikely but striking similarity to another would-be paradise, the remnants of which she had once visited, a hortus conclusus whose inhabitants had tried to keep the outside world at bay while an ideal society was being constructed within the boundaries. Sealed in, like this place, by the hermetic walls of the jungle, with stringently limited outside contact and a strong sense of oppression, the pressure had built until it could be held no longer. People called it Jonestown—and why the hell, thought Ana, was she dwelling on that tropical, blood-soaked patch of insanity, here on this glorious morning on this piece of God's green earth less than three hours from the edges of London? Macabre thoughts had no business intruding, and paranoia was clearly a two-way street. Yes, it was a good thing that she would never do this for Glen again; academia was an outpost of rationality by comparison.

  Still, as she looked back at the abrupt wall of vegetation she found that she was again wishing for the last two days back, so she could walk straight through the Phoenix airport and put Dulcie and Jason in a taxi and drive them straight to Glen or Agent Rayne Steinberg or even the FBI boy with the protruding ears in Prescott. Looking at the forest walls pressing in on her, she could not shake off the fanciful image of bringing Jason and Dulcie to be hermetically sealed into these green walls, awaiting Transformation. She shivered and pushed the idea away violently. Enough! Time for breakfast and human contact: The mind of the individual, like that of the community, needs contact with others to keep it balanced.

  Life was stirring in the house when she returned. She removed her mucky boots at the kitchen door, carrying them inside for fear one of the dogs might take it into his head that they were chew toys, and propped them and the distasteful hat in a corner. She found a washroom and cleaned her hands, then presented herself in the kitchen.

  "Good morning," she said to the room at large. "Anything I can do to help?"

  There was.

  Some years before, Anne Waverly had come to know a visiting pair of eminent anthropologists who were spending half a year at her university. Most of the team's publications were in the husband's name, but he freely admitted that a lot of the research, and indeed all of the research done into the women's side of the society being studied, was conducted by his wife, a frail, white-haired woman whom Anne had come to think of as the Ms Marple of the anthropology set.

  The woman's approach was to present herself to their new society—be it in Africa, highland New Guinea, or northern Canada—as precisely what she was: a grandmother. Out would come the knitting and the photographs, the stories and the remedies for arthritis, and with the babies crawling around their feet and the pots bubbling in the background, the women would freely submit to having their brains picked and their communal souls bared. She was a formidable weapon in the anthropological array, and Anne imitated her methods whenever she could. A community's mind and pocket may be in the meditation hall and the office, but its heart and soul are found on the cooking hearth, and although Ana might not have snapshots of the grandchildren or a woolly sweater on her needles, she had found that a person could ask anything if she did it with her arms immersed in greasy soapsuds.

  Until the schooling arrangements for the Arizona newcomers were straightened out, which according to Dov would take a couple of days, Ana had no responsibilities, so she washed pans and scrubbed shelves and peeled vegetables. And she talked blithely, and she listened to their complaints and their squabbles, and she wondered at the level of antagonism in the kitchen and at the plethora of convoluted difficulties they were having with health inspectors and school inspectors and social services inspectors and banks. She had thought the United States was drowning in bureaucracy, but it would appear that America had nothing on the United Kingdom. By the time the lunch dishes were cleaned up, she had a clear sense of the mental state of this community—which she found filled with sharp little tensions while maintaining a powerful sense of self-confidence in the face of the world's vexations—and had gained a basic idea of how the community functioned.

  She was struck, first of all, by the extent to which Marc Bennett had been right: There were profound differences between Steven's compound and this one—differences that went far deeper than the presence or lack
of a coffeepot. The English group was actually much smaller, though it was longer established, and because it did not import children for a school, the population was older. Also, although Steven had referred to Jonas as the leader here, the unseen figure seemed to occupy more a position of aloof but ultimate authority than being involved in the day-to-day operations of the place, which were firmly in the hands of Marc Bennett.

  Bennett was not universally popular. In fact, two of the women agreed that they had seen a number of members leave over the last year or so, since he had assumed (or been assigned?) a greater degree of control. He was respected, though, and the general consensus seemed to be that whereas Jonas was incredibly wise and authoritative, he was too otherworldly to be burdened with lowly details. No, they were fortunate to have Marc Bennett to direct the daily operations of keeping Change together in a largely hostile universe.

  During the course of the morning spent working with the women, it struck Ana how like Change was to a certain kibbutz she had spent some weeks with on the West Bank—surrounded by the enemy, committed to the way of life, unconsciously preserving the traditional gender-linked work roles, scornful of the soft life led by outsiders, and dependent solely on themselves for all the necessities of food, shelter, and defence. Change even had a system of pantries and storage lockers like that of the kibbutz, three great rooms loaded with airtight canisters of grain, plastic drums of dried fruit, and cartons of candles, toilet paper, and tinned meats.

  Like the kibbutz—or very like the survivalists in North Dakota she had lived with, her very first job for Glen, when she had learned what it was like to breathe and eat with fear continually touching the back of her mind. This Change community was even populated by the same kind of people as both kibbutzim and survivalists: straight-spined militarists, tightly disciplinarian with their children, and energetic to the point of edginess. The closest she had come to finding a placid individual here was Sara, and even Sara had trotted briskly up the stairs and made her side of the bed with knife-edged corners. It was like being in a hive of type-A personalities, bristling and focused and extremely clear about what they were doing. And to think that in Arizona she had found Dov tight-assed.

  She shook herself and reached out for the reason she had come into the storage room: a broom to sweep the crumbs from the floor of the dining hall. It was where she had been told it was, with a dustpan. She took them into the former ballroom and got to work.

  It was an awkward job, since the broom was not the nice flat shape she was used to but rather resembled a janitor's push-broom, only smaller. The wide head caught at all the chair legs, and though it did not feel right to pull it, pushing it seemed even more awkward. Still, she fumbled and cracked her way through the room, pulling the debris into the dustpan as she went and using the time of uninterrupted, mindless labor to think about lunch.

  Perhaps because this Change community was smaller, they all ate at the same time. At least, most of the members gathered together—she had not seen Bennett there, nor Jonas. She had not yet laid eyes on Jonas at all, in fact, although she had been watching for the bearded face from Glen's three-year-old photograph. She did not know if the higher echelons had their own dining area or even a separate kitchen, but she took it that here, rank's privileges held. Or maybe they were just too spiritually uplifted to eat.

  At lunch she had seen Jason and Dulcie come into the dining hall, but she had also seen the blonde kitchen girl walk in with them, so she went to sit with Sara and tried to get her talking. It proved not to be difficult.

  Sara had been with Change nearly four years, but as far as Ana could tell had not made much progress in her personal transformation. Certainly she wore no silver necklace. She seemed mildly aware of her failure but not very troubled by it, and Ana decided that Sara was a good heart but not a great brain—perfect for her purposes, although she would have laid money that Marc Bennett had little time for Sara other than her obvious willingness to work.

  It was confirmed when Ana's tentative remarks about Bennett made Sara almost physically wince. Bennett, it seemed, made no effort to conceal the irritation and impatience Sara caused him to feel, so she tended to stay out of his way. Jonas, however, had once said something terribly kind and supportive to her (which she wouldn't tell to Ana because it had been a part of her personal Work), so although he usually wandered around the place too distracted by his great thoughts and meditations to notice someone like Sara, she still found him a paternal figure. Strange, slightly scary and awe-inspiring, but paternal nonetheless.

  Before lunch ended, Ana had arranged to join Sara in the walled garden, where Sara was due to set out seedlings. They then went their ways, Sara to private meditation and Ana to the dirty dishes and then the awkward broom.

  She found that she was quite looking forward to meeting Jonas.

  In the meantime, she was enjoying the respite from people, working her methodical way down the still, warm room with its high ceiling and jumble of furnishings. The dust motes she raised hung in the shafts of sunlight that streamed through the wide, uncurtained windows, and the collection of bread crumbs and lettuce leaves in her pan grew.

  When she looked up. Marc Bennett stood in the doorway watching her.

  "I don't know if anyone has informed you," he said without preliminary, "but we do not welcome newcomers to group meditation until Jonas has spoken with them."

  Ana opened her mouth to respond, framing the appropriately meek response of a novice to her master that would reduce some of the animosity he demonstrated toward her, but she found that the words would not come; her spine would not bend. Instead, her shoulders went even straighter and her face and voice clearly showed how unimpressed she was, and what came out of her mouth was simply "Yes, that's probably for the best." She went back to her sweeping, to all appearances completely indifferent to his presence.

  A moment passed, and he gave a sharp laugh. "Steven thinks you're hot stuff. He says you know things before you've learned them. But then, Steven has always been gullible. That's why he's in Arizona."

  "He's a good leader," she said easily, tipping a chair to reach a clot of dried mud next to its leg. He took her mild emphasis on the pronoun as a criticism, as she had intended. "You assume because he's in charge there, he's higher than I am? Think again, Ana Wakefield. You're not as clever as you think you are. Actually, you're here only because Jonas wanted to see the boy Jason, and you're the easiest way of prising him loose from his sister. You're not an adept; you're a glorified baby-sitter with a sore hand that excuses you from any real work.

  "And," he added spitefully, "if I hear of you going out again without a hat, you're on your way home to Arizona."

  She paused in her work and turned on him the haughty, professorial raised eyebrow that had intimidated furious thirteen-year-olds and irate FBI agents alike. She just stood and looked at him until he whirled and left her alone in the empty, sun-filled dining hall, sweeping the floor and thinking mordant thoughts.

  Stupid. That was a stupid, stupid thing to do, she told herself—a newcomer who had yet even to begin her Work doesn't stand up to the second in command. Bennett could make a great deal of trouble for her, and the worst part of it was, she did not know why she had not simply put on her humble face and ingratiated herself to him. It would have been easy enough to do. She'd done it a hundred times before, but for some reason, the automatic response had been overridden by a pride that might cost her dearly.

  Was it just another inconvenient intrusion from her past, because Bennett reminded her of Martin Cranmer, the Kansas wheat farmer she had chosen to pursue? The man Glen had dubbed the Midwest Messiah. Even physically they were similar, that same tall, thin build and deep-set, burning eyes. Cranmer had been easy to manipulate in some ways, because he did not expect opposition from a woman, but he was difficult in others, for precisely the same reason. He had gathered to himself a high proportion of women in Utah, along with a number of men with low sex drives who seemed happy to turn a
blind eye on Cranmer's adoption of their wives. Fortunately, Ana had still been fairly gaunt, and her short-cropped hair and a lack of makeup, combined with a stubborn commitment to loose jeans and baggy men's shirts had kept her out of his grasp.

  Not that Marc Bennett seemed to have made a private harem for himself at Change. Far from it; the most overt display of sexuality she had seen in the past twenty-four hours was the blonde girl's flirtatious laughter when Jason made a joke over the vegetable stew (which laughter had caused Dulcie to scowl).

  Bennett wasn't actually anything like Cranmer, was he? Tall and pushy, sure, but that was about it. No, the problem was with her, Ana, and her inability to keep the door to memory shut. Something in the past twenty-four hours had jostled her badly—jet lag, perhaps, or something random like the chimneys on the house or the garden or Bennett's speech, maybe even the dog that resembled Livy—and the past was now scrambling back at her, lost incidents washing in with every new sight, repressed images pressing at the back of her retinas. Jonestown, Abby in Texas, the armed kibbutz and the encampment of survivalists—once a memory had its toe in the door, it dragged a dozen more with it. Dangerous, distracting, and distorting to judgment, it was equally difficult to suppress.

  It had happened in the past, most strongly in her second case in Miami when the first stressful phase was successfully negotiated and her defenses had relaxed just a bit, and in swept all the anxieties and discomforts that were waiting at the gates like a horde of importunate peasants demanding audience. At home, when she was Anne Waverly and the ghosts crowded close to her skin and whispered just beneath her ability to hear, she had found that the only solutions lay in tranquilizers or alcohol, or long hours of exhausting labor.