TCE

E0

Gabriel, Kim, Sofie and Dory were all firmly middle-class, evidenced by their attendance at the Church's private school. Their parents were sufficiently well-off to provide instruments when they took band class, except Kim's only instrument was her own voice. She was a member of the Green Dome Temple Girl's Choir, an expressive mezzo-soprano with a voice that belied her fifteen years and verged on being too breathy and sensuous for spiritual music. Listeners compared her favorably to Peggy Lee.

Dory played a double-bass standing on an end-pin sha had lengthened to be more comfortable. Sometimes sha set down har French bow and plucked the strings pizzicato with meandering bass lines, a soundtrack to daydreams sha was a black cat slinking around at night.

Sofie Krause pounded the skins with all the power that made her a formidable offensive guard, yet sha ran effortlessly in and around Dory's machine-like bass, averting expectations and punctuating her licks with sixteenth-note drum fills as endlessly unique as snowflakes.

Gabriel Shybear had no innate musical talent but che figured that was the reason che was taking band class, after all. After a semester learning scales on a recorder Gabriel took up the sax. Kim started dabbling on piano and soon the kids had a basic jazz combo on their hands. Sophie Krause and Dory formed the constant pulsing heart of the act. After Sophie changed her name to Hunky the band would, in fact, be named Hunky-Dory after the rhythm section.

Word arrived of the Doolittle Raid after five months of unrelenting bad news following Pearl Harbor. In celebration, the conductor of the Green Dome Temple School band class led a recital of patriotic John Philip Sousa marches, attended by half of Headwater. For an encore the class tore into a cover of the classic Duke Ellington standard "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)' with Kim soloing on vocals and Gabriel on sax. It was the first real triumph of the future Hunky-Dory.

For Kim the only downside in all this was how her father didn't make the recital despite his solemn promise to do so. She could see her mother sitting out there in the gym and how she kept a seat saved for him, but even to the end of the encore the seat was never filled. Erik Zinter did not come home all that night and even the next morning.

In the middle of the school day Kim was pulled out of class by Deacon Paul Bergin and driven home, where Clara paced silently. E1

Kim started crying again in sympathy, pleading for her Mom to speak. After a time Clara looked directly at her daughter, building up the willpower to blurt it out to her, and finally she did: “Your father is dead!” They both cried until there was nothing more to give, and even when Kim’s eyes were bone dry she was still wracked with sobs that trailed off at length to silent grief. It was long before Clara gave Kim answers.

According to Prophet Jashen Shybear, Erik was killed by an ancient relic called the Golden Gift, something Kim and Clara assumed was merely an allegorical literary device to move the plot of the Green Book along, perhaps like the whale in the book of Jonah. In the scripture of the Church of Green Dome heaven was a real place with walled cities ruled by angelic kings. Michael once sent Prince Melchizedek down to Earth with the oracles of God, and the prince bore the same Golden Gift.

Jashen revealed he had lent Erik the relic to honeycomb Green Dome with tunnels to access coal. Thus Headwater prospered through the Great Depression. But overnight there was a cave-in that smashed Erik’s helmet lantern and plunged him into total darkness. Somehow he got turned around and bored deeper into the mountain rather than back out towards the way he came. As Erik created a greater volume of space to walk through the remaining oxygen was stretched too thin. At dawn men with picks and spades broke through the cave-in and reached Erik’s body.

Jashen assured Clara that her husband died without any pain. He simply fell asleep and never woke up again. Also he praised the memory of Erik for never violating a sacred trust that some in the Church were saying was more than even the Prophet had the authority to grant. Jashen was asking Clara to accept that the Golden Gift was real, and the scriptures were literally true. Beliefs were for uniting a Church, not to actually believe.

“When you attend the Final Rite you will come to see see the wisdom of it,” said Jashen. “But try to be strong, Clara. In days to come some will tell you that God punished your husband with death for misusing his holy gift to the Church.”

In the aftermath of her father’s death Kim stopped going to school. Sofie and Dory came over after a couple of days to see if their friend was well. She was not well, but their visit elevated Kim from her grief a tiny bit and her mother noticed.

After Sophie’s mother came to pick her daughter up Clara asked her to wait until Dory’s mother arrived as well, because she had a request to make of all of them. E2

When everyone was together Clara said, “I’d like Sofie and Dory to be with Kim for her father’s funeral.” Susan Krause shook her head. She said,”They are just school girls and a funeral is a very solemn thing.”

Dory’s mother Leliel agreed. She said, “This should be family time for Clara and Kim.”

“But we have no family here,” Clara said. “My folks are back east.”Leliel pointed out that Clara still had in-laws in Headwater. But Clara shook her head. “They’re Bunner Incarnate. They always held me at arm’s length. Kim is taking the death of Erik very hard but when the girls came over today I saw how they were like a family to her.”

Leliel said, “I’m not worried about Doriel. I’m worried more about Sofie and Kim. When you are on the other side of the Final Rite, Clara, you will no longer have the child-like faith that our Lord said was more blessed than the faith of who believe because they have seen.”

It was a gentle negotiation. Clara got permission for Kim’s friends to be with her at the funeral but Leliel persuaded Clara to have Kim and her friends sit out the actual Final Rite.

It would have been unseemly to run around playing while the body of Kim’s father was sent to his long home along with three other Greendomites from around the country, so they sat around in the Temple basement.

Volunteers prepared dinner for the families of the dead. Gabriel finally broke away from a group of Kuwapi boys smoking outside. Che seemed to know a lot of secrets about the Temple. Gabriel led the girls into a supply room which wasn’t locked. Kim, Sofie, and Dory went along because there was nothing else to do.

There was no electric light in the temples storeroom, only a window with closed blinds and it was a gloomy January day outside. There was an old piano which was probably broken. Kim avoided the urge to play it. There was a map of Headwater and many of the usual church odds and sods. The kids found unused hymnals, stacks of old temple bulletins, empty mason jars, and dozens of stacked folding chairs. Sofie found a cane carved from gnarled wood and shifted it from hand to hand to get the feel of it. Gabriel stopped moving and went, “Shhh! What’s that?” The children froze but the only thing they heard was organ music and the choir bleeding through the ceiling from the main sanctuary up-stairs. E3

“Very funny,” Sofie said, giving Gabriel a friendly shove. One of the walls was unfinished. Gabriel moved aside a piece of plywood which had concealed another dark space beyond. It was so black inside it drank their vision like a sponge.

“I’ve never been in there,” Gabriel admitted. None of the girls wanted to go in there but Gabriel dared them to go. Naturally Sofie was the first one through. Gabriel immediately followed Sofie to show che wasn’t afraid. Dory and Kim were afraid of the dark hole and they were also unafraid to admit it, but they didn’t want to be left alone so they squeezed in too.

Gabriel burned through ten matches before Dory went to the outer room again and brought back a candle. The kids found they were in a space that was about four times larger than the first room but there was no wooden floor, just dirt and pebbles.

Something like a rocky igloo reached halfway to the wooden ceiling, which creaked as someone walked to and fro overhead. Gabriel did a complete circuit of the space, then che said to Dory, “This is part of our family history, sis!”

Dory said, “This must be the very summit of Green Dome. Grandpa built that cairn, and the altar right over it.”

When Gabriel saw the blank faces of Sofie and Kim che was astonished. Che said, “Did you forget what they taught us in Sunday school? The temple is built on the Island in the Sky where God gave Chief Wanica the Golden Gift.’

Kim rolled her eyes and said, “God gave Moses the stone tablets too. Only there was no Moses, so he didn’t.” She had a point. The Green Book itself denied the existence of Moses.

Dory pointed to the ceiling. “What do you think is happening up there right now?”

Kim considered her answer, because she didn’t wish to offend her friends, and especially not Gabriel, who was a bit more than a friend. She said, “It's a cremation of my father’s body and the bodies of three other folks, spiced with ritual.’

Dory said, “Kim, we all know you've seen Gabriel, close up, in all hez glory and you still think the Green Book is just a bunch of stories they invented?”

“I went to the library and looked that up,” Kim replied. “Gabriel’s a hermaphrodite. It’s not a big deal."                              E4

"I don't know about your birth defect idea, Kimmie," Sofie "I know you've seen how Dory's got two cooters, and I've definitely seen them. Maybe it's a family trait."

Gabriel rolled up hez sleeves and approached Kim, flipping both hands over a few times to show they were empty. Che said, “Hold out your hand.” Gabriel clasped her hand, and when che took it away again Kim was holding a stack of silver half-dollars. ‘Explain that, if you can.”

Kimberly put the coins in her purse because money was money and if Gabriel wanted to give her ten bucks so be it. She said, “Magic tricks, Gabriel, just like what they’re showing Momma upstairs right now. I don’t say there’s no God, but why can’t people just be amazed at what God really did do?”

Dory threw up har hands in mock despair at har heathen friends and muttered something about White Wingers. Gabriel moved toward the cairn. “We’ll never have the chance to be in here again,” che said. “I want to see if it’s really there.”

Sofie warned, “If you do that you’ll go to hell.”

“There’s no hell in Greendomism,” Gabriel snorted, and che chose a boulder likely to be easily moved. Sophie gave hem a hand. he boulder slowly swung open like a hinged door, just enough that they could squeeze inside the stone igloo one at a time. Dory brought light. A plain white dome lay inside.

"God doesn’t look like much," said Kim.

“This isn’t God," said Gabriel, "but God made this. And don’t say God made everything, Sofie, even you know better.”

They all stood there silently for a time, each one of them buried in thoughts about the artifact. No one dared to touch it. After that, by unspoken agreement, they began to slide back out of the cairn, but they heard footsteps in the storage room next door. Dory put out the candle as everyone held their breath and tried not to make a sound.

Deacon Paul looked into the dark gap and could just make out their silhouettes. Bergin screamed at them to get out.

Blushing, Gabriel, Kim, Sofie and Dory scrambled out from beneath the altar, then out of the supply room. After that they sat in the basement lunchroom. The deacon locked the supply room, and true to Gabriel’s words they never returned. E5

Dory said, “Thanks for that little adventure, brother. I always knew the avatar of Chokhmah was real, but actually seeing it was something I’ll never forget.”

Just then the attendees began to filter in from upstairs. During the shared meal after the Final Rite Kim thought her mother seemed very different. The grief was gone. Clara said, “It’s all true, Kim. Everything in the Green Book is really true!” She no longer needed faith for the things taught by the Church.

Kim knew her mother had been a nurse in the First World War and had seen things in France so terrible she refused to even talk about them, things which would crush the faith of anyone who believed in a good God. It was good to see some semblance of joy restored in her. But Kim and Sophie needed more convincing.

The demonstration was already in the pipeline. Kim and Sofie grew bumps on the front of their heads. Dr. Wahkan said not to worry about them. He said they were benign and some of the Kuwapi also had the condition. But when they turned into outright horns it startled Clara to the point of taking Kim to Lusk in Wyoming for a second opinion. Two days later Sofie’s parents brought her to Lusk also but the doctors there could do little more than watch the girls get worse. Soon after that the girls were under federal quarantine in parts unknown.

Kim and Sofie had no idea where they had been taken, but it seemed to be a prison that doubled as a clinic. Doctors and nurses came to visit them. They punched a code on a keypad to get back out. It was an odd combination of science and shabby construction with nails sticking through the walls. There were no windows in the clinic where they were held, but the girls could hear construction outside that only ceased at night.

For months their captor, Dr. Trochmann, learned maddeningly little about their condition. The white horns emerging from their scalp were bone, not merely skin tumors. There were other symptoms, but the doctor said nothing of them to the girls.

One time Kim and Sofie were playing Eights, and Kim heard a strange silent shout in her head that, despite its silence, sounded exactly like Dory. She said, DISCARD THE QUEEN!

Kim replied to the voice with a mental shout of her own. “It’s not even the right suit!”

DO IT! Kim obeyed the voice, dropped the queen, and Sofie’s eyes went much wider than it should have done from a bad play. E6

Dory’s voice now told Kim, SOFIE WILL DISCARD A SIX OF HEARTS, WATCH! And that’s exactly what she did. After that they both knew their friend’s voice was real.

Lest watchers suspect something meaningful in their mutual glances (and they were indeed being watched) Sofie covered by saying, “You don’t even know how to play this stupid game.” She retreated to one corner of the clinic, Kim to another, and they conversed through Dory.

First their friend had to smooth over some hard feelings about keeping this strange talent a secret. She did this by calmly pointing out that both Kim and Sofie would have thought her nuts if she said she could hear voices, plant voices, and ride along with another person's senses. When Sofie asked about Jerry, and what his talent was, Dory replied, DO YOU REMEMBER THAT TRICK YESHUA DID WITH LOAVES AND FISHES? JERRY COULD PULL THAT OFF! Kim remembered the coin trick then. But she didn’t think it sounded like something that would help them get out of the windowless clinic that was their prison.

Kim suggested punching every number on the lock until the door opened. Dory relayed that to Sofie, who shook her head. They were being watched. One time she killed the lights in their space and saw a faint glow coming from the ‘mirror’ that stopped soon after. It was really a window.

Kim came up with an idea to end the surveillance. They had to embarrass Doc Troch by making him think that two girls, ages seventeen and confined together for months in a small space, had fallen in love with each other. Sofie thought she could swing it. Kim asked how two girls did that sort of thing anyway. Sofie said it was complicated and she'd have to show her. Dory said BEHAVE.

Kim and Sofie went on strike and did not cooperate with their captors at all. They said no words, but just sat in the clinic all day doing nothing. There were two ways of dealing with all the dead time that were newly available to them after the Change. Kim let the clock appear, to her, to race and let her heartbeats seem, to her, to become a low hum.

Kim sped up, cruised for a while, then slowed back down. Her muscles got sore from staying in one position but four hours were burned up in as many minutes. Sofie didn't like the feeling of her heart buzzing and bladder filling. She preferred to take a series of hour-long jumps in time with her consciousness simply turned off. This was the cat nap method. E7

After four meals, two showers, and many other stops to use the restroom or drink some water Kim and Sofie had a rather busy day that compressed a full week of real time. Another three weeks passed and the lunatics in the assylum won.

The asylum keepers brought in their biggest gun. He said he was the Director of something called DECON. He told them it was time for a heart-to-heart.

“Fine,” said Sofie. “Start by telling us who you are.”

“I am FBI Special Agent-in- Charge Clyde Tolson. You and Kim are under the jurisdiction of a branch of the US Department of Justice called DECON, which I head up."

"I never heard of it."

"DECON is short for Domestic Enemies Containment, Observation, and Neutralization.”

Kim grew angry at that. "Domestic enemies? You must be joking. My father lost an arm fighting the Hun in the last war. My mother was a Red Cross nurse Over There. Every Wednesday morning after Temple I lead the White Wing of my church in a rip-roaring rendition of God Bless America.”

“You and Sofie have contracted an unknown contagion in a time before there is a proper federal response for that, which is bad luck for you and bad luck for everyone. But there are Presidential executive orders which could be read, very loosely, and for a very brief time, as offering such a response.”

“You don’t seem afraid to talk to us face-to-face,” Kim pointed out. “For a contagion, Doc Troch and Nurse Ramsey ain’t so scared either.”

Tolson said, “If it was transmitted by sneezing you girls would be totally isolated. But revealing something about how you got sick would do much toward getting you back home.”

Kim and Sofie both suspected they got the condition after sleeping with their Kuwapi friends but they said nothing about that. Instead, Sofie said, “Okay, we know why you won’t unlock the door, but we don’t even know where we are.”

“You’re not very far from Headwater,” Tolson said. “Just one state over, in fact, near Cody. This is called the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.” E8

Sofie said, “I don’t understand. Who is being relocated, and why?”

“It’s very easy to understand, Sofie. Last December after Pearl Harbor FDR authorized the incarceration of Nips living on the West Coast. Last February the first camps were built.”

Kim said, “By Nips I presume you really mean American citizens with a Japanese ethnic background.”

When Tolson had no answer Sofie said, "Hey Kimmie, I think I’m in the wrong camp. My great-great-granddaddy was a German.”

Tolson wagged a finger. “This camp is the third biggest city in Wyoming but only seven undesirables out of every ten are Nips. The President’s executive order was the kind of gift that comes around only once in a generation, but strike while the iron is hot, they always say.”

Sofie said, “So I’m one of your undesirables but I don’t even feel sick.”

Tolson said, “Sofie, your brain isn’t even alive anymore.”

“Then how could we be having this conversation?”

Tolson turned to Dr. Trochmann and asked him to tell the young ladies what they’ve learned so far.

“It spreads like a virus,” the doctor said, “but I’ve never seen anything like it before. It literally remodels nerve and brain cells. No more potassium and sodium ions pumped through a membrane. Your neurons are now little gadgets with sliding levers and the like. Both of you girls have been hooked up to a Dynograph and it shows nothing. You’re literally brain dead. Maybe you are victims of a secret Nazi weapon.”

“I don’t like you very much,” Sofie said, directing her glance at both men in turn, “But I can see you want something. Well, we want something first. We want the windows disguised as mirrors removed from our living space.”

Dr. Trochmann tried to play dumb. “Mirrors?”

“Come now, Doctor,” said Sofie, “you must think we’re just stupid girls. But we’ve had a lot of time on our hands locked up in here. Naturally we found your two filthy peeping-Tom mirrors and people looking in on us.” E9

Tolson sighed and said, “I can see there is no fooling you.”

“Sometimes I call Sofie a scrub,” Kim said. “She knows I’m only kidding. But Agent Tolson, I’ll match a scrub at Green Dome High against any B student among the publics anywhere.”

Sofie said, in a rueful aside, “It better be that way, the amount of money my daddy shells out for tuition.”

Tolson tried to defend the arrangement he had made. “The mirrors are not used for what you think. This is a medical facility. No one is overly interested to watch you in a state of undress.”

Kim said, “And what we're talking about is not what you think. Look, maybe we’re infected and you have some order that says you can hold us in this quarantine of yours, fine, but we still have one fundamental Constitutional right: plain old-fashioned privacy!”

For the first time Tolson and Trochmann became aware that Kim and Sofie were holding hands. The doctor blushed intensely.

Sofie saw the opening and moved tighter up against Kim. “What did you expect, gentlemen? We’re seventeen and cooped up in here together. I hope you get what we’re trying to say here. I hope we don’t have to spell it out."

Tolson said, "I want to apologize for starting out on the wrong foot." And it even sounded sincere.

“Then let’s begin once more,” offered Kim. "Perhaps if you were to address our privacy concerns, we'd feel obliogated to be more forthcoming on answering the concerns that you have."

Sofie and Kim could both see how the mood of the men brightened visibly at this breakthrough.

Tolson said, “I'll need to tighten up security a bit to compensate but I’ll let you have your privacy. Curtains on your side of the mirrors.”