Mysterium (14 page)

How much had she heard? It was impossible to know. Or to guess what she would make of it. Briefly, he reran the conversation in his mind, sorting his own words from the Censeur’s: how much could she guess?

She seemed to look at him oddly, but that could have been his imagination. She was an alien, after all. Mistakes were easy to make with these people, especially in matters of body language.

She said, “I came to see if you wanted coffee.”

“Yes, please, Evelyn. I would like a cup of coffee.” He gestured at the desk, which had once been her desk, in a room in which she had once kept accounts for her auberge. “A little more work to do tonight.”

“I see. Well, I’ll be back in a minute.”

She closed the door behind her.

Demarch picked up the most immediate paper on the desk. It was the first of Linneth Stone’s reports, essentially her working notes. He had intended to read it tonight, but he wasn’t enthusiastic at the prospect. Linneth Stone was a career academic and wrote like one, tedious pensées in the passive voice.

On the evidence of Subject’s accounts and numerous contemporary published Works
(
cf
. Time
magazine
, Newsweek,
etc
.),
the Institution of Marriage in the United States was undergoing a process of rapid Change, from predominantly traditional, religiously sanctioned Monogamie
(
with a minority of exceptions
)
to a commonplace of Divorce and Re-Marriage and unorthodox Arrangements including unmarried Parenting and even a certain sanctioning of like-gender Relations.

Venery, bastardy, and sodomy, in other words. Demarch thought of his own wife and child in the capital. Dorothea had been instrumental in his rise through the ranks of the Bureau: she was a Francophone of good family, an essential career asset for someone like Demarch, born an Anglophone in a rural town. The Bureau de la Convenance was a vast, incestuous bureaucracy—a labyrinth of old families. Demarch’s connection had been tenuous, through his mother Célestine, who was cousin to a retired supérieur ancien named Foucault; that and his university degree had been enough to get him in the door of the Académie at Belle Ile. Dorothea opened doors more arcane and significant. Her father, a Censeur, had shepherded Demarch through a long stint as an Ideological Branch operative. He had earned his bona fides there, had put in years and fought for promotion. Still, even today, aging Censeurs like Bisonette spoke to him with the disdain of a pureblood for a halfbreed.

Dorothea had been essential to him and he could not imagine leaving her. Divorce was not altogether uncommon among Valentinians in the upper echelons of the civil service, but Demarch disapproved. According to Linneth, American literature spoke often of love. Well, so did every popular literature. But the educated classes were supposed to know better. Marriage had very little to do with love. It was an institution, like the Bureau or the Federal Bank. You don’t cease banking simply because you no longer “love” the bank.

Love fades; wasn’t that inevitable? And the demands of the body were fickle. One made arrangements to deal with the physical aspect. One did not, Demarch thought, indulge in melodrama or attempt to rewrite history.

Or maybe that was only the voice of his own buried conscience. His father had been a Sethian of the Order of Luther, a deacon of the Church and a moral pacifist. Hedrick Michael Demarch: the fierce Saxon consonants always made him think of the sound of a dog gnawing a bone. The name still echoed in the lieutenant’s mind, though his father had died ten years ago; sometimes, too, the voice itself, the tides and swells of its disapproval.

He thought of Bisonette’s nucleic bomb project, dramatically hastened by documents the Bureau had culled from the libraries of Two Rivers. Apparently there was enough in the generally distributed literature to advance the research by months. Once the Censeurs had given this strange documentation their imprimatur of authenticity, it had gone to the engineers and scientists, who had turned it into blueprints.

This was work Demarch had helped along; it had been his idea to archive the libraries first of all. Theologians in the Ideological Branch had still been debating the metaphysical status of Two Rivers while Demarch was shipping east its books. That was something else his father had taught him: the value of a book.

But what kind of a world had he hastened into being? His son Christof was eight years old. Now Christof would grow up under the shadow of this transcendent weapon, just as the inhabitants of Two Rivers had. Maybe it was the bomb that would unleash the other horrors: the anarchy, the drug addiction, the rampant immodesty.

An October wind rattled the window. Demarch looked up from his thoughts. Evelyn had come back with coffee on a wooden tray; she stood at the doorway waiting to be noticed. He waved her into the room.

She glanced at the window and shivered. “Cold out there. All the leaves are off the trees. It could be a cold winter ahead.”

He stood and drew the blinds. “Winters are often cold here. But you must know that.” Reminding himself of the fact. “We shared the weather, if nothing else.”

He had seen Evelyn’s map of the United States, and the contours of the landscape were identical: the fingers of the Great Lakes, the coastlines and the rivers. Her map had been more crowded with roads and cities, and all the names had been ludicrously strange, but he supposed the weather in the Near West must have been the same. “Snow before too long,” she said. “Will that complicate everything? I mean, supplies and so forth?”

“The road from Fort LeDuc has been reinforced. We have mechanical ploughs.”

“I see.”

She seemed to want to linger. Maybe it was the sound of the wind in the eaves. The house was empty but for the two of them; it had become Demarch’s private headquarters. It was comfortable but large enough to be lonely.

He glanced back at the desk, at Linneth Stone’s typed pages.

Subject maintains that American Morality has always been a Battleground between contending Ideas of Liberty and Virtue. In the last Century—

But the last century could wait until morning. He was tired. He turned off the desk lamp.

“Come to bed,” Evelyn said.

Evelyn was passive in bed. Demarch preferred it that way. He was not a passionate or athletic lover. He never lost sight of the fundamental incongruity of the act—one of the several jokes God had played on Man. Evelyn’s motion under his weight was as delicate as a breath, and she sighed at the climax.

He was as fond of her as he had been of any of his occasional women. He liked her silences as much as her words. She knew when not to speak. She was quiet now, looking at him with sleepy eyes.

He kissed her and drew away. He had worn a fish-skin—what Evelyn called a condom, a singularly ugly word. He peeled it off and took it to the bathroom and flushed it away and came back to bed chilled by a tide of cool air. Evelyn was already asleep, or seemed to be. He adjusted the blanket over her shoulders and admired the terrain it made of waist and hips, so unlike Dorothea’s. He closed his eyes. The north-country wind rattled the window. She had been right about the snow. Snow soon, he thought.

His mind drifted back to Bisonette’s telephone call and Linneth Stone’s ethnological notes. He thought of the town of Two Rivers, dropped from the sky by an unknown magic; itemized, dissected, cataloged, ultimately to be destroyed. The Ideological Branch, an avant-garde of Christian probity, could not abide the prolonged existence of the town. It posed too many questions; it argued for a world even stranger and more complex than their celestial troupeau of angels and Archons. They hated especially the town’s mutant Christianity, a Christianity almost Judaic in its insistence on one Creator, one risen Christ, one Book.

And yet here was Evelyn, a heretic by anyone’s standard, though she claimed she had never taken religion “too seriously”; she was human, spoke English, was clothed in flesh not different from his flesh. He had felt her heart beating under the bump of her ribs. She was not a criminal or a succubus; merely a bystander.

One could not offer such arguments to the IB. They were more fascinated, more frightened, by the dome of blue light in the woodlands. It partook of the miraculous and was therefore, they reasoned, their property. Give credit where due, Demarch thought: some of the IB men were brave; some of them had walked into that light and walked out sickened or insane. Some had died, of what the doctors eventually called an irradiation disease. But the metaphysical puzzle was finally too much to endure. The town and all its inhabitants were
malum in se
and must be erased from the earth.

And how better than with Bisonette’s nucleic bomb? Which, in any case, would need to be tested.

But Evelyn. Evelyn was human. Evelyn would have to be taken care of.

He would have to look into that.

He had scheduled an interview the next day with Linneth Stone’s “Subject,” the history teacher, Dexter Graham.

The sitting room of Evelyn’s hostel made an odd reception for a lieutenant of the Bureau. Leafless tree branches tapped the high windows; the furniture was large and padded. A Persian carpet decorated the floor and a mantel clock ticked into the afternoon silence. A moat of stagnant time.

Graham arrived between two pions in blue winter vestons, escorted in from a cloudy cold day. There was frost on the schoolteacher’s shoes. He wore a gray windbreaker tattered at the seams and was more gaunt than Demarch remembered. He looked at Demarch without visible emotion.

The lieutenant waved at a chair. “Sit down.”

Graham sat. The pions left. The clock ticked.

Demarch poured coffee from a carafe. He had interviewed dozens of the town’s preeminent men in this room: the mayor, the city councillors, the police chief, clergymen. Their eyes always widened at the sight of a hot cup of coffee. Demarch was always scrupulously polite. But there was never a cup for the guest. Of such humble stones, the fortress of authority was built. He said, “I gather your work with Linneth Stone is going well?”

“It’s her work,” Dexter Graham said. “I work at the school.”

The insolence was amazing. Refreshing, in a way. The lieutenant had grown accustomed to the automatic deference of civilians, to the uniform as much as to himself. Dexter Graham, like many of the citizens of Two Rivers, had never learned the reflex.

Since the executions last June, many had acquired it. But not this one.

“Miss Stone arranged some liberties through my offices. She won’t be escorted by guards, for instance. Are you cognizant of the fact that this is a considerable generosity on my part?”

“I’m aware that it’s a little out of character.”

“I don’t want you to trespass on that generosity.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“In the course of the last several months we’ve had notable cooperation from the town’s responsible leaders, Mr. Graham—everyone from the mayor to your principal, Bob Hoskins.” Which was all true. Only the churchmen had been truly problematic, and Demarch had promised them they would be allowed to carry on their odd species of worship. Clement Delafleur had protested all the way to the capital. But it was only a temporary arrangement, after all. “You’re something of a pillar of this community yourself, Mr. Graham. I need your cooperation, too.”

“I’m not a pillar of anything.”

“Don’t be modest. Though I admit the record tends to support you there. Transferred five times in fifteen years for violations of school board protocol? Maybe you chose the wrong profession.”

“Maybe I did.”

“You admit it?”

Dexter Graham shrugged.

Demarch said, “There is an aphorism. One of our writers defined a scoundrel as a brave man without loyalty to his prince.”

“There aren’t any princes here.”

“I was speaking figuratively.”

“So was I.”

The clock rationed a few more seconds into the still air.

“We’ve done a great deal for the village,” Demarch said. “We’ve restored water. We’ve laid electrical lines all the way from Fort LeDuc fifty miles south. Those weren’t easy decisions. They were opposed. No one understands what happened in this patch of woods, Mr. Graham; it’s very strange and very frightening. Goodwill has been shown.”

Graham was silent.

Demarch said, “Acknowledge that.”

“The water is running. The lights are on.”

“But despite that generosity we still have reports of curfew violations. A man about your size and age was seen crossing Beacon Street after dark.”

“It’s a common size and age.”

“The curfew isn’t a joke. You’ve seen what happens to criminals.”

“I saw Billy Seagram’s body on a cart outside City Hall. His niece walked past the body on the way to school. She cried for three hours in the classroom. I saw that.” He leaned over to tie a ragged shoelace, and Demarch was fascinated in spite of himself by the casual gesture. “Is that why you brought me here? To put the fear of God into me?”

Demarch had never heard the expression. He blinked. “I don’t think that’s in my power, Mr. Graham. But it sounds like a prudent fear.”

He was insolent, but was he dangerous?

Demarch pondered the question after Graham was dismissed. He pondered it that night as he climbed into bed with Evelyn.

She had been nervous about the interview. Demarch supposed she thought he was petty enough to hate Graham because Graham had been her lover. “Don’t get angry with him,” she said. Imagining that
anger
had anything to do with it.

Demarch said, “I only want to understand him.”

“He’s not dangerous.”

“You’re defending him. That’s a noble impulse, but it’s misplaced. I don’t want to kill him, Evelyn. My job is to keep the peace.”

“If he breaks the law? If he violates the curfew?”

“That’s what I mean to prevent.”

“You can’t frighten him.”

“Are you saying he’s stupid?”

She turned out the light. The temperature outside had dropped and there were fingers of frost on the windowpane. Dim radiance from a streetlight traced a filigree of shadow on the opposite wall.