Mysterium

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.