TCG

Kim, Sofie, and Dory were in that wonderful last year of their tweens when their bodies were gathering power for the big changes soon to come. They talked about boys in abstract terms that had little to do with the little barbarians that were actual boys. In slumber parties the girls practiced necking with each other so long as it was understood that one of the neckers had to be a boy in theory. Sofie Krause ‘at great personal sacrifice’ played the role of beau nine times out of ten, especially when Doriel was up.

At their private school the tight group of girlfriends passed flowery love letters to each other. Girl-love at age twelve is of such a high order that it knows no jealousy. Share and share alike, every- thing from lunch to masterpieces of amorous soliloquy.

Doriel. No last name. Black eyes, long jet black hair tied in the obligatory Church pony tail but with the cutest bangs ever. The first of the three to start growing knockers, Dory was already, at just age twelve, a full six feet tall. Sha was going to be a giantess. Dory aimed for straight Bs to please har father, who was very often absent, while not appearing too bookish. Dory heard voices. When sha was younger, it was a fun game, but over time Dory came to dislike being a telephone switchboard. Eventually, Dory in- sisted the Voices keep it limited to important calls. Sha enforced this by threatening to keep the Voices up at night with voices of har own. Over time sha learned sha was a member of the B’nei Elo- him and sha learned what that really meant.

Sofie Krause: A tomboy who kept her ash-blond hair short, with no Church-mandated pony tail. When she grew older she was the only girl on the football team. Like Kim and Dory, Sofie was required to wear woolen skirts to class rather than trousers, which always an- noyed her. One Halloween morning Dory came dressed as a pirate’s wench. Sha had ripped har dress into long strips so har pinup-model legs could poke out when sha walked. When Sofie saw that she felt a sweet electric shock and knew she had graduated to full-service tribade.

Kim Zinter: Auburn hair about halfway between mahogany and carrot-top. Light green eyes. She had a pretty face but she was a little chubby. Or perhaps just Rubenesque. In temperament she was the most classical- ly feminine member of the Boda, for she took after her mother. She was compelled to wear her hair in a ponytail at all times, of course, like her mother and father and elders and all other good little Greendomites, male or female. But Kim was an infidel. She didn’t really believe any of that stuff about Chief Malekwa and the Golden Gift written in the Holy Buron, which was testimony to how tightly her father Erik was capable of keeping Peter Two Feather’s secret. At the same time she wasn’t ready to let down her father. So she gritted her teeth, wore the damned ponytail in a bun, and when she ventured outside of Headwater she tried to ignore the comments at the edge of her hearing like, ‘Oh hey, there goes another Bunner, look at her hair.’

For science class the teacher paired everyone off as lab partners. Kim ended up with Sofie, and Dory ended up with har cousin Ga- briel Shybear. Everyone assumed those two would gravitate together and do the usual Church of Green Dome thing, but that was never to be. Here, Sofie kicked Gabriel out of hez seat with “no offense pally” and sent hem shambling towards Kim, an adjustment in the teacher’s choice. Che could tell Sofie and Dory were a unit so che grew close to Kim, even gpoing so far as to hold her hand skating at Lake 13 when it was frozen over.

By the time they were fourteen Sofie and Dory were asking if Kim and Gabriel had pitched woo and what it was like. “We did indeed pitch woo,” Kim said. “He feels like a rubber wet suit stretched over a suit of armor. Soft on the surface but with a hard core underneath. I like it.”

In the summer the same Lake 13 used for ice skating was used for skinny-dipping and there was no more keeping one of the oldest Red Wing family secrets. Dory already knew, but now Kim and Sofie knew as well that Gabriel Shybear was both a boy and a girl at the same time. And che wasn’t unique. The four of them stood naked in a square, ten yards out into Lake 13 up to their thighs in cool wa- ter with no body modesty at all because they were good friends and nobody else was there. The boy part of Gabriel was doing what four- teen year old boy parts usually do around girls.

Kim asked about the one ball, so Gabriel lifted it and showed hez labia majora behind it. “The other ball is inside me, Kim, it’s a real ovary. I could get pregnant.” Kim glanced at hez small breasts and nipples, which didn’t look like they were just for deco- ration either.

“Gabriel is what we call a jen,” Dory said. “Now take my momma, che’s an ambi. The genitals are the other way around. If you told hem to fuck hemself che could literally do it.”

Gabriel, who heard that joke before, still cracked up. But Kim and Sofie were stunned to silence. When Gabriel saw their unbelief che said, “Recall your scripture. Genesis six four. There were giants in the earth in those days. When the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men they bore children to them. The same became the mighty men of old, men of renown.”

Kim processed this, put it together with Gabriel’s height of six feet seven, then said, incredulously, “You’re saying you’re actual- ly one of the nephilim?”

Dory defended har cousin by explaining they both had copies of their grandparents’ Z sex chromosomes.

“What about you?” Sophie asked, looking at Dory. “You’re Gabriel’s cousin so why didn’t you end up with a dangler?”

“I’m not a nephil, I’m one of the elyonim. An angel. That’s why I’m even taller than Gabriel and I’ve got two girly bits. A little bit harder to see, but that’s why we’re here, right?”

Sha reached down to spread things open for their view. They were not perfectly identical, only the lower set had a urethra. Then Dory looked askance at both of har friends. “None of this should be new to you, Kim. Sofie? Don’t you two believe the Book of Green Dome?”

“Of course I believe all that stuff in the Green Book and the Bi- ble,” Kim answered. “God, heaven, miracles, the resurrection, ever- yone believes it happened then. But nobody believes it happens now.”

Sofie said, “Kim is right, and everybody knows it, but nobody ever admits what they all know.”

“If you were just talking about the Bible you’d have a point,” Ga- briel said. ‘Half the Green Book is corrections to the stories in the Bible. But the new claims in the Book of Green Dome? Every- thing in there really happened. It’s like no other holy text ever written.”

Kim and Sophie accepted this rebuke and nodded their heads si- lently, unprepared to call their friends liars. Besides, the evidence was there for them to see between the legs of their friends. Kim asked, “The archangel? The one who spoke to Mother Mary? You’re that Gabriel?”

Dory and Gabriel locked eyes briefly, and Dory chose to speak. “I hate to say it, but there are things we can’t tell you, at least not now. I think later you’ll understand why we couldn’t talk. But I can teach you the proper pronouns for ambe and jan, yen and yeng, men and women.”

Gabriel, Kim, Sofie and Dory were all firmly middle-class, evi- denced 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 expres- sive mezzo-soprano with a voice that belied her fifteen years and verged on being too breathy and sensuous for spiritual music. Lis- teners 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 pizzica- to 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 punctu- ating 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 se- mester learning scales on a recorder Gabri- el 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. Early on the kids came to be called simply the Band. Their B’nei Elohim associates styled themselves Roadies. And the ones who fell under the sway of Rebekah, or the ‘loyal opposition’ as Kim charitably called them, became known as the Groupies.

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 patri- otic 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, Rebekah Redstar on trombone, 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 didn’t 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. Paul said nothing but Kim began to cry. He found his way to 1301 ‘V’ Street but Kim didn’t get out. ‘Home sweet home,’ Paul said. Kimberly stared at him for a moment through blurry eyes, wondering if he was being callous. Then she did get out of his car and proceeded to walk a block to 1301 ‘U’ Street. Sloppy temple records. And that was how Bergin found out where she really lived.

Paul choose not to follow. At home Clara paced silently. 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. Finally Kim started repeated- ly asking her mother why and when she was ready to speak Clara had answers.

According to Prophet Peter Two Feathers, Erik Zinter 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. One time Michael sent Prince Melchizedek, the son of Melchiyahu and grandson of Gordiel, down to Earth to set aside a people to receive the oracles of God.

Peter Twofeathers revealed that for ten years he had lent Erik Zinter the Golden Gift, the very relic wielded by Melchizedek in the story, to honeycomb Green Dome with tunnels to access isolated pockets of coal. This had allowed Headwater to prosper through the Great De- pression. But overnight there was a cave-in that smashed Erik’s hel- met lan- tern and plunged him into total darkness. He couldn’t dig his way out, even with the Golden Gift, be- cause 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 and there were also suction losses through the Golden Gift itself. It wasn’t until dawn that men with picks and spades broke through the cave-in and reached Erik’s body.

Peter 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.

But Clara admitted she had a hard time taking all of this in. Peter was asking her to accept at face value that the Golden Gift was real, and the scriptures were literally true. In this she was like Kim. Shared beliefs were for binding a faith community, not to actually…believe.

‘When you attend the Final Rite you will come to see see the wisdom of it,’ said Peter Twofeathers. ‘But try to be strong, Clara. In the days to come there will be those who 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, but their visit elevated Kim from her grief a microscopic bit and her mother Clara noticed that. After Sophie’s mother came to pick her daughter up Clara asked her to wait until Dory’s parents arrived as well, because she had a request to make of all of them.

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 father Ithuriel agreed. Hy said, “This should be family time for Clara and Kim.”

“But we have no family here,” Clara said. “My folks are back east.”

Dory’s mother Anael pointed out that Clara still had in-laws in Head- water.

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.”

Ithuriel 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 for the funeral. Ithuriel persuaded Clara to have Kim sit out the actual Final Rite, and rarely in history have so many future lives been so deeply affected by so trivial a choice.

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 Greendo- mites from around the country, so they sat around in the Temple basement. Volunteers prepared dinner for the families of the dead. Gabriel joined them after breaking away from a group of 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 tagged along because there was nothing else to do.

There was no electric light in the temple attic, only a window with 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 ends. The kids found unused hymnals, stacks of old temple bulle- tins, emp- ty 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 ceil- ing from the main sanctuary up-stairs.

“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 brought a candle from the attic.

The kids found they were in a space that was about four times larger than the attic but there was no wooden floor, just natural stone and dirt rising halfway to the ceiling. Something like a rocky igloo reached nearly to the ceiling from the center of a circle of stones. The ceiling creaked as someone walked to and fro overhead.

Gabriel did a complete circuit of the space, then said to Dory, “This is part of our family history!”

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

When Gabriel saw the blank faces of Sofie and Kim che was aston- ished. “Did you forget what they taught us in Sunday school? The tem- ple 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.” And 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. She said, “It is a simple cremation of my father’s body and the bodies of three other Greendomites, spiced with ritual.’

Dory said, “Kim, you saw Gabriel when we went swimming once at Lake 13 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. “Gabri- el’s a hermaphrodite. It’s not a big deal. Birth defect. Sometimes it happens.”

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 there was 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 God for what he 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 you’ll go to hell.”

“There’s no hell in Greendomism,” Gabriel snorted, and che picked the boulder most likely to be easily moved. As soon as it did a mouse escaped. Dory and Kim screamed together when they saw it.

Without a word Sofie let her cane fly in an arc over her head upon the creature. Sofie was just hoping to scare the mouse away but she ended up hitting the critter instead with a lucky shot.

“This is a church right? So there’s your church mouse.”

Dory shifted immediately from fear to maternal concern. The animal was in obvious pain and Sofie crippled it. But Sofie just wanted to shoo it off and was surprised she actually hit it. They all took a closer look at the creature. The head was misshapen with a huge bump on the back that was nearly as large as the mouse’s head itself. “Look what you did, Sofie!” Dory complained.

“That isn’t from anything she did,” Gabriel said. “He didn’t go in the cairn like that, but after it happened he couldn’t get out. He must have waited for someone to crack a gap in the rocks wider so he could get out, the poor little guy.”

Sofie finished him off with the end of her cane and said that was better for him.

Its head had become a flat furry coin. Nobody knew what the white bump meant. Sophie scratched the dirt with her cane and dug a little grave for the dead mouse “Rest in pieces,” she said, then remembered, too late, that they were at the funeral for Kimberly’s father. “Sorry.”

Gabriel returned to the cairn and tugged on the stone once more. Sophie gave him a hand, and the 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 in- side.

Kim said God didn’t look like much.

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

The skin of the dome was dotted with many little holes. Some of these had needles like a cactus. Kim touched a smooth area. That was something she ought not to have done. With a sound like a tiny squirt of steam her fingertip was instantly skewered.

Kim pulled her hand away involuntarily before the pain even regis- tered. After that the white dome sported another extruded spine from its surface.

Dory was a little more wise. Sha grabbed a pencil out of har purse and leaned over the artifact with the eraser tip prudently standing in for har finger. Sha verified it was ready to defend it- self at any time. Gabriel thought about kicking it but che was wear- ing moccasins.

Sofie was not afraid. She allowed her own finger to be skewered by the white dome and doesn’t even wince. “Here we go, Kim. Whatever trouble you’re in for getting stung by this thing, I’m in the same trouble.”

So she had the final victory over Gabriel in the test of courage.

After that 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 two 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. They sat together in the basement lunchroom. The deacon locked the supply room, and true to Gabriel’s words they never re- turned.

Dory’s only casualty was a pencil with a soggy eraser. Sha said, “Thanks for that little adventure, Gabriel. 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.

Over the next few days Kim and Sofie grew bumps at the back of their head just like that poor church mouse. Dr. Wahkan said not to worry about them but Clara disagreed to the point of quitting her job at the little hospital and taking Kim to Lusk.

Two days later Sofie’s parents brought her to Lusk as well but the doctors there could do little more than watch the girls get worse. The bumps opened up like flowers to reveal stiff black hairs in- side. In a few weeks the girls were under federal quarantine in parts unknown.

Kim and Sofie had no idea where they had been taken, but it was a new place. There was no use mincing terms, they were in prison, but it doubled as a clinic. Doctors and nurses came to visit them, and punched a code in a keypad to get back out. It was an odd combination of almost magical 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 out- side that only ceased at night.

For months their captor, Dr. Ian Trochmann, learned maddeningly few things about their condition. The white D-shaped cup emerging from their scalp was made of bone. The cups had exactly fifty- five graphite bristles growing out of a floor. If the bristles were crushed or snapped off they grew back like the lead in a mechanical pencil. Dr. Trochmann had two cables made. The B’nei Elohim would call them Purple Cables, even after many copies were made that were- n’t actually purple. But for Dr. Trochmann’s purposes the cables proved to be useless. He would print squiggles from the girls on a fat roll of paper but didn’t know what they meant.

Trochmann put a 15 millivolt level on the pins. Both Kim and Sofie reported total-body sandpapery sensations they found very unpleas- ant and refused to endure again. Hooking the girls together with the Purple Cable was thought too risky in the early evaluation.

One time Kim and Sofie were playing Eights, and Kim heard a 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.

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 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 be- hind another person’s eyes.

When Sofie asked about Jerry, and what his talent was, Dory re- plied, DO YOU REMEMBER THAT TRICK YESHUA DID WITH LOAVES AND FISH- ES? JERRY COULD PULL THAT OFF! Kim remembered the coin trick then. 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 embar- rass 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.

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 tried that too, but she thought the time-lapse method was gross because she could feel her bladder fill up and food moving inside. She preferred to take a series of hour-long jumps in time with her consciousness simply turned off. This was the cat nap method.

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 and the lunatics won. The asylum-keepers brought in their biggest gun.

This was the self-styled Controller of what he styled DECON. It was the only time Clyde Tolson ever met Kim Zinter and Sofie Krause in person. 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 Jus- tice called DECON, which I head up. DECON is short for Domestic Enemies Containment, Observation, and Neu- tralization.”

Kim was pissed off. ‘Domestic enemies? You must be joking. My fa- ther lost an arm fighting the Hun in W.W. One. 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 be- fore there is a proper federal response for that, which is bad luck for you and bad luck for everyone. But there are Presidential execu- tive orders which could be read, very loosely, as offering such a response.”

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

Tolson said, “If it was transmitted by sneezing you girls would be totally isolated. But revealing how you got sick would do much to- ward getting you home.”

Sofie said, “Okay, you’ve explained why you won’t unlock the door, but we don’t even know where we are.”

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

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

“It’s 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 nothing to say to that 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 by ATP through a membrane. Your neurons are now little gadgets with sliding levers and the like.”

Kim wanted to know what he meant by gadgets.

“Both of you girls have been hooked up to an Offner Dynograph and it shows nothing. You’re literally brain dead. Special Agent Tolson thinks you may be the first victims of a nasty Nazi weapon we’ve never seen before.”

“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 re- moved 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.”

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

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

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

Tolson said, “The mirrors are not used for what you think they are.”

Kim said, “Look, maybe we’re infected and you have some order that says you can hold us in this quarantine of yours, but we still have one fundamental right: plain old-fashioned privacy!”

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

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

Tolson said he knew exactly what she meant, and he truly did. He apol- ogized for starting out on the wrong foot.

“Then let’s begin once more,” offered Kim.

The mood of the men brightened visibly at this breakthrough. Tolson said, “I need to tighten up security a bit but I’ll let you have your privacy. Curtains on your side of the mirrors.”

KThe girls were attentive to the tighter security arrangements Tolson mentioned, but the only real change seemed to be how their tormen- tors would look at a scrap of paper from their pocket before punching the buttons that would let them out, which meant a daily code change. Sofie almost despaired but Kim explained (via Dory to maintain secrecy) that the change did not make their task any hard- er at all. They just had to pick a range and try all the combos in it night after night until the daily shifting combo happened to fall into that range.

Next to the door leaving the clinic was a square keypad with the digits 0 through 9, and the letters A through F, and Kim knew from listening that the combo was only four keystrokes. But as soon as she started trying a very vivid daydream of time appeared in her mind.

To Kim her future was like a self-assembling house of cards. She could see the top, ten nights later, when doing the range from 7000 to 7FFF she punched 7BC6 and the door clicked open. But Kim want- ed out that very night, so she started trying the range from 1000 to 1FFF.

The house of cards collapsed and assembled itself again. This time the answer was four days away. Kim began trying higher ranges, and got jackpots ranging from two days to two weeks. Then in her mind she saw the number that was their ticket home that very night: D1FC.

But it was November and they were wearing nothing but slippers and hospital gowns. That itself was part of Tolson’s security. Kim told Sofie to gather blankets and towels and whatever else she could find to create makeshift extra clothing to shield them from the cold.

“This is going to frighten Agent Tolson to no end,” said Kim as they both bundled up. “This, and especially what we do after this.” She could see the events leading to their escape from the camp stacking in her mind.

Sofie said she was fine with Tolson being scared shitless.

They saw two Purple Cables hanging in a rack on their way out of the clinic and requisitioned them as belts to make their ad hoc ensemble of blankets almost sort of hang together. Then they stepped out into Wyoming on a cold November night.

After crossing L street, 11th rose from the flats of Headwater and dead-ended at the home of Doriel almost a hundred feet higher. From her backyard the hill rose another sixty feet, bald and scraped raw by the wind, but the summit had a stand of three birches.

No one owned the top of the nameless hill owing to the difficulty of building a house there, but for generations a ramshackle cluster of tree forts was built between the three birch trees. When Kim and Sofie were taken away Dory and Gabriel spent much of their time up there. From that vantage Dory and Gabriel could see all of Head- water spread out to the north and east. To the south the railroad looped around Mt. Motorcycle to form the end of the line. West beyond an bend in the Squaw River was Lake 13 lying at the foot of Green Dome.

Looking down, Dory and Gabriel saw Special Agent Bill Sullivan toiling up the mossy bald. When he was closer he called for them to come down to chat. Dory invited him to come up into her tree fort instead, and after a moment considering this, he decided to try it.

Agent Sullivan managed to reach the high railed platform where Dory and Gabriel were sitting. He opened his mouth to introduce himself but Dory spoke first. “You are Special Agent William Sullivan of the FBI and you came up here to ask us about Kim Zinter and Sofie Krause.”

He wondered aloud how Dory knew all that. She said, “You’ve been ask- ing people all over town about my friends and some of the people you asked are on my wavelength.” He was puzzled by that answer. Ga- briel asked him where Kim and Sofie were taken.

“I’m not at liberty to say where they are right now, Gabriel, but I can say they are very sick, and their doctors still don’t know how they came down with what they have. That’s where the two of you can help. We know the last time they were together was at the funeral.”

“If you’ve been asking about us,” Gabriel said, “then you already know we didn’t actually attend the Last Rite for Erik Zinter. We were downstairs the whole time, the four of us.”

“Paul Bergin said he found the four of you in the storage room where you oughtn’t be.”

“It was unlocked,” shrugged Dory. “We were bored, so we had a look inside.”

“Did you find anything unusual?”

“No sir, except maybe a piano.”

“After Paul booted us out,” Gabriel added, “he locked it back up. But flashing a badge might let you in to see.”

“I did go up to the Temple flashing my badge, Gabriel, but Paul Bergin’s boss, Peter Twofeathers, is a little too old-fashioned for my taste. He’s of a mind that I need to get a judge to sign a warrant before I can go snooping around in the basement of the holy pre- cincts.”

Dory said, “Prophet Twofeathers can get like that.”

Gabriel nodded his head in agreement. “I’m very sorry we can’t tell you anything more.”

Agent Sullivan reached into his jacket and pulled out an en- velope. “Anyway, Gabriel, here’s a belated birthday present for you.”

What Gabriel thought was a birthday card turned out to be a notice for the draft. Agent Sullivan pointed over the railing. “See down there over Dory’s house? I know it’s not your school, that’s Headwater High. In the gym you’ll find Dr. Wahkan and two other fellows. You tell me how Kim and Sofie got sick and I make this draft notice go away. You say nothing, and down the hill you go to see who gets you, the Army or the Navy.”

“Sir, I already told you everything I know.”

“Dory will you help the young man out? War is hell. You might not ever see cousin Gabriel again after he reports to Boot.”

Dory shook her head, refusing to even mention the mouse.

Sullivan said, “Last chance, Gabriel. No? OK, suit yourself, son. Go kill yourself some Japs.”

After Sullivan left Gabriel suggested a game of Cartel, which was the least likely thing Dory thought could come out of his mouth after what just happened. “And by Cartel I mean strip Cartel of course.” That raised the stakes from losing little pink pieces of paper.

The dice flew and round and round the board they went. Gabriel bought up 42nd Street, Broadway, and Park Avenue. All he needed was Wall Street for a full Cartel. Dory scooped up the Appian Way, the Burma Road, and Easy Street, and all she needed was the Yellow Brick Road.

Dory thought it strange Gabriel wanted to play a game when he’d just been handed a draft notice and she didn’t have her heart in it. Ga- briel got another half-Cartel going with Mulholland Drive and Sun- set Boulevard but Dory blocked by getting Bourbon Street and Main Street.

Gabriel had some lucky rolls and avoided landing on any of Dory’s properties, while Dory kept hitting Gabriel’s stuff and started to have a serious cash flow problem. She auctioned off her belt and nylons for a little breathing space but then the dice really turned on her.

Dory started landing on Gabriel’s Cartels repeatedly. She was methodically stripped of most of her cash and started showing more skin to stay in the game. Soon Gabriel owned Dory’s dark yellow dress with white polka dots, and after that her knit rayon undies and bra.

But Dory rallied a little bit near the end. The properties associ- ated with her knee socks and little black Mary Jane shoes, which Ga- briel didn’t want, were enough to complete a second Cartel, creating a kind of death row on one side of the board. Soon Gabriel was shirt- less.

Another round. Dory demanded his pants. But Gabriel simply put on Dory’s bra and dress, and when che was sufficiently covered, che dropped trou and handed them over.

“A man shalt not wear that which pertains to a woman,” Dory preached, “for it is an abomination to God!”

“That verse doesn’t apply to me, cuz,” said Gabriel. “I’m not a man nor a woman.”

Gabriel landed on the next half of Dory’s death row. With insuf- ficient cash to pay Dory she demanded his underwear, which che promptly handed over. The game was over but che was fine with that. Under the cover of Dory’s yellow dress Gabriel slipped into her panties and together with her bra che had everything che was looking for. Gabriel bid his cousin adieu, left the tree fort, and flounced down the hill to the high school gym to face the local draft board music.

The NCO representing the Army asked Gabriel what his deal was showing up dressed like that. Che looked down at hemself, then caught the sergeant’s eye. “I guess I’m a waddyacallitt, homosexual.”

But the Navy first class petty officer had heard that dodge before. He complained that slackers like him thought it was an easy way out, and demanded the name of his boyfriend. Gabriel blurted out the name of the only male homosexual he actually knew: Aaron Anton.

“We had that o ne here last month,’ the Army NCO said. “Queer as a football bat.”

Dr. Wahkan knew what Gabriel was trying to do, and he also knew Gabriel wasn’t actually going to get drafted. He decided to hurry things along. “Gabriel! About face! Hike up that skirt! Panties at half mast!” Gabriel complied and both military men drew closer to take a look.

“I was present at Gabriel’s birth,’ said the doctor, ‘and I’ve seen hem many times since. Che has a rare birth defect that gives hem both male and female genitalia. Imagine what they would do to Gabriel on a destroyer after three months at sea hunting Japanese subs.”

The Army and Navy representatives looked at Gabriel and realized the doctor wasn’t bullshitting them. They looked at each other, and nod- ded agreement. Petty Officer Watson typed up a card classifying Ga- briel IV-F: not qualified for military service for physical rea- sons.

“Hang on to that card, son,” Watson said. “Get it laminated. That’s gold. Starting next month you’ll have to present proof of your Selective Service status on demand. And Doc, I don’t think we’ll be back next month. I think we’re scraping rock bottom of Headwater now.”

On the way out of the gym Gabriel bumped into Dory and wondered aloud how she knew he’d be there. She said, “Michael told me to meet you here.”

Even as she spoke, Michael strode around a corner of the school. Gabriel and Dory instinctively recognized hym. They assumed a posi- tion of attentive listening. Hy said, ‘Hello Dory. Hello Gabriel. Your friend Kimberly has found a way to get herself and Sofie home but she needs you and Peter Twofeathers to help or it will not work, which is really to say they will freeze to death.”

“So we’re to meet the Prophet,” said Dory. She looked at icy 7th Street switch-backing up snow-covered slopes before meeting the dark slash of Green Dome Road, which wrapped to the summit of the hill like the stripe on a barber pole. “Shall we walk to the Temple, Lord?”

“Yes, Dory,” hy said, “let’s walk.” And something like a crystal ball grew before them until it was taller than Jerry and even Mi- chael, yet it was not solid or substantial in any way. The seraph walked right inside the sphere without resistance. Jerry and Dory followed. They looked back and saw the high school, inexplicably, was now two miles away and eight hundred fifty feet below, with most of Headwater spread out beyond it. Taking only a few steps they had attained the summit of Green Dome without breaking a sweat or slipping on ice.

“Fragments of reality can be formed into bridges,” Michael said. “Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen explored this on a blackboard a few years ago, but I doubt it will be practical for any human to actually make one. It takes the power of a star just to hold the path open.”

The original avatar of Chokhmah had always been at the Temple, in the sense that the Temple was built over the cairn assembled by Wanica after he received the Golden Gift. But Chokhmah, in union with Michael as a living avatar, had never before walked the wooden halls.

Peter had his head over his desk in silent prayer. Jerry and Dory came to him for a hug, one at each side. Michael said, “You should make your petition aloud, Peter. I can’t hear your thoughts unless you are one of the B’nei Elohim and frame your thoughts a certain way.”

Peter stood up and exclaimed, “My Lord!” but Dory and Jerry were already setting out three chairs in front of his desk. Michael asked everyone to be seated, and when they were, hy took a few moments to study the family photographs hanging on the walls of Peter’s office.

Hanging over Peter’s right shoulder was a 1914 photograph of Peter himself with his wife Jaroah.

Over his left shoulder was the oldest photograph, hanging above Peter’s head, was Gabriel, as an infant in 1868, being held in the arms of hez mother the hashmal Leliel.

Standing next to har in the image was was Gabriel’s father Jash- en, son of Chief Wanica. “There he is,” said Michael. ‘Jashen. The original Shy Bear. Made, not Begotten. Until recently he was the only B’nei Elohim to be Made since the Fallen Angels were exiled from Salem.

Gabriel pled for mercy, and confessed taking his friends under the altar to see the Avatar.

“Be at peace,” Michael said. “Do you think Kimberly and Sofia experi- enced the Change contrary to my will?”

Jerry shook hez head no and Michael was satisfied with hez response. Hy saw that one wall of the office was covered with a large tri- state map and hy stood up to approach it. “Kim and Sofie have been held in a camp here,” hy said, pointing to a place northeast of Cody. “Not tonight, but on the following night, they will escape. They will hide on a freight train. By the time that train makes its first stop here, in Powell, they will be unconscious from exposure. You, Peter, must be waiting for the girls at 2:04 AM with your warm station wagon filled with warm blankets and warm chicken broth in a Thermos.

Michael turned to glance at Gabriel and Dory. “Not to mention the bodies of two warm friends. Otherwise Kim and Sofie will die somewhere in the mountains south of Billings, Montana.” Michael turned to Jerry and said, “Put the coin on Peter’s desk.”

Gabriel did the trick with his left hand and set a half-dollar on the tabletop. Michael was already shaking hyz head. “Not a copy, Gabriel, the original.”

Chastened, Gabriel repeated the move with his right hand. Then Michael said to Peter, “Present the Golden Gift.”

To obey his lord, the Prophet had to overcome his deep habit to keep it concealed. It was hiding behind books on a shelf. Momentarily a golden bladeless knife hilt was on the desk. Peter asked, “Lord Michael, is the relic to pass out of my hands at this time? If so I fully understandd. It is sacred, yet I gave it to Erik to honey- comb the mountain, which was a truly impious use.”

“That was actually a good deed, Peter. Be in good spirits. Remember that I desire mercy and not a sacrifice. Prophet Lange would have done the same. But the time is quickly approaching when only young Gabriel can keep it safe.”

Gabriel took that remark as a cue to lift the Golden Gift from the desk top and place it securely in the little hidden space-time pocket that was always next to him.

Michael said to Gabriel, “To Chief Wanica this was the Golden Gift, but to you it is the Macro and I do have rules. Use it only at need. That makes you solely responsible for the Last Rite, Gabri- el, but only for as long as the Temple is in the hands of the Church. And that will be true only for two more months. Make no copies of the Macro until you see the Abomination of Desolation has defiled the very altar. After that, when the temple has been destroyed, every living soul among the B’nei Elohim are to receive a Macro.”

Dory wondered aloud where she fit in. Michael said, “You are a driver now, so you will share the wheel with Peter. And gas money is not an issue.” He dropped a thousand in twenties on the desk.

Dory picked up two of the bills and looked at them closely. Shanoted that they all had different serial numbers. These bills were not copies like Jerry’s fifty cent pieces.”I’m richer than God, Dory. I could drop a hundred million dollars on your little town, but then a cup of coffee would run you fifty bucks. Peter, your country is at war along with most of the world, so there’s strict gasoline rationing, but you’re a member of the clergy. The X sticker on your woodie gives you permission to buy unlimited sup- plies just like any fireman or cop or congressman in Washington DC. There are many more details but all of you are Academy trained. I’m certain you will reason them out. Go save your friends.’

A carefully-shaped Einstein-Rosen bridge took just Michael and his chair away with a loud pop. Dory and Jerry scooted together in the new space.

The girls could see the clinic was one of hundreds of long single- story sixplexes with tarpaper walls, each one surrounded by drainage ditches crossed by gangplanks. Some had their interiors lit. Sofie wanted to knock on a door begging for help but Kim shook her head. Instead Kim chose a greenhouse that was empty but locked.

She quietly told her friend, “We have special talents now just like Gabriel and Dory do. I know you can break anything you touch. So break that padlock.” Sofie didn’t believe her, but the lock broke in her hands anyway.

“How do you like them apples?” Sofie husked. “If I knew I could do that we’d a left that hellhole any time we wanted.”

Kim shook her head again and explained it was an electric lock, so if Sofie broke it, they’d still be in the clinic.

“So how did you get us out of there?”

“I’ll explain when we get inside.”

Sofie was disappointed that the greenhouse was cold. There was a veg- etable garden inside, but the glass only kept away the snow and wind. Kim seated herself, plugged one end of the Purple Cable into her head, and offered Sofie the other. The D shape of the connector ends meant they could only go together the intended way. In the first Sharing by two B’nei Elohim, Sofie replayed Kim’s memo- ries and learned how the winning door combination appeared in Kim’s mind as soon as she started punching out.

After that, Kim’s mind latched onto a much more elaborate scenario for getting out of the internment camp. Sofie could see that also, in all its absurd glory. In just one half hour they would be dis- covered by the fellow who maintained this greenhouse, one George Kaneko.

Mr. Kaneko’s initial anger at finding Kim and Sofie hiding in his garden would fade to pity when they told him that they had been held prisoner in the clinic since June. Not even the first wartime internees arrived until August.

And the girls would learn three new words. Mr. Kaneko’s parents were issei. They had been born in Japan, but immigrated to America. Mr. Kaneko himself was nisei. The US was the only country he had known, yet George, his parents, his wife and even his three san- sei (or third generation) daughters were in the camp.

The extended family of George Kaneko, through simple hard work, had made a good life on their Washington State strawberry farm. But in the confusing legal tangle after the internment was announced they were tricked into selling their land to whites for pennies on the dollar. Now the Kaneko family was forced to crowd into a single-room in barracks, lit by a single bulb. They had to shit, shower and shave with other families in community facilities with no partitions for privacy, and eat in a common mess hall that served the whole block.

This happened out of fear in the wake of Pearl Harbor, and Kim would remind Sofie how Tolson bragged of making it come to be. Sofie would ask Mr. Kaneko if his daughters had any clothing to spare, but he would say they were too young to have anything that would fit her. Instead Mr. Kaneko would give them spare garments of his own, even shoes and jackets, and when they were captured, as he was certain they would be, they could claim they stole them from the greenhouse.

And Kim would ask why he was so certain they would not escape the camp. Mr. Kaneko would bring up the barbed-wire fence that began to go up in October and was nearly complete, much to the bewilderment and dismay of the Japanese-Americans in the camp who thought their perfect acquiescence to the internment would prove their loyalty to America.

He would say the only gap in the fence was along the west side of the camp away from the train station. It was guarded by two tow- ers with high-power searchlights, and soldiers on horseback to run down any who made it through. Seven lesser-equipped towers guard- ed the rest.

Nevertheless, Kim and Sofie would thank Mr. Kaneko for the clothing, leave his greenhouse, and make for the fence along the train tracks, choosing a section equidistant between two guard tow- ers. They would be spotted but none of the guards would shoot right away.

Sofie, by simply touching a lamp post, would take out the light overhead by remotely pulling the wires. After that, she would merely touch a fence post to snap it off at the base. The fence would dangle suspended by the two nearest posts permitting the girls to roll under.

The guards would begin firing, but none would score hits in the darkness as the girls ran for the tracks. There they would find the manual turnout switch used to move trains onto the siding to unload new internees for the camp. Sofie would break the metal left/right sign.

With the reflective sign no longer indicating the position of the switch Sofie would throw a lever to divert traffic to the siding just before the next train arrived in a ridiculously opportune coincidence that would say much more about Kim’s new sense of timing than luck.

The train would veer onto the side track as expected, and the en- gineer would apply the brakes with a will, causing an empty gondola car to stop right in front of the girls just long enough for them to climb inside and get out of sight. Then the train would go into reverse.

When the train was entirely on the main line again the engineer would manually move the shunt from left to right. The guards couldn’t leave their posts and would report the fence breach by telephone. The train would resume its voyage east before anyone knew it had stopped.

That, in any event, was the escape scenario Kim had foreseen, but the half-hour was up. Mr. Kaneko turned the lights on within his greenhouse, and it was time for the girls to carry out everything Kim had daydreamed to the last detail without a single deviation.

The freight train between Cody and Billings was not scheduled to make a stop in Powell but on this occasion the engineer stopped to phone in the broken light at the Heart Mountain internment camp. That gave the friends of Kim and Sofie a very brief window to save them.

The train was a half mile long and nobody knew exactly which car the girls had chosen to stow away on. The last image Dory received was the kind of rolling stock with an open top, about half the height of a box car. The girls themselves were unconscious from ex- posure.

Peter drove beside the motionless train for a quarter mile before reaching the first run of gondola cars. Everyone got out of the station wagon and began calling Sofie and Kim by name but no heads poked over the sides of the cars. Gabriel used handrails to climb one of them.

Gabriel didn’t see the girls, he saw a railcar filled with inch- thick sheets of steel stacked to within a foot and a half of the top. Same with the next car back. But the car after that had two piles of rags huddled against the front wall that could have been Kim and Sofie.

Gabriel climbed back down and pointed at the correct gondola car. “They’re in that one!” he told Dory, sprinting toward it. He hoped he was right. There was only the light of a waxing gibbous moon for him to see.

Then disaster struck: the train began to move once again. Instantly Gabriel had the relic that Michael called the Macro in his hand. He squeezed it until the hissing shaft, pitch black on near black in the night, reached its maximum extension of about ten feet. If he squeezed harder it would begin to retract as a shield or dome.

When the railcar containing the girls approached, Gabriel swiped the active Macro effect through the coupling. This caused an inch- wide swath of steel to disappear. The half of the train with a locomotive continued to accelerate, while the rear half began to slow to a halt.

Peter moved his vehicle in reverse to follow the part of the train that was left behind, while Gabriel and Dory followed on foot. Dory felt a great sense of relief. No matter what happened now, Kim and Sofie were not on a one-way trip into eternity by way of the Rockies.

When the rear half of the train rolled to a complete stop Gabriel told Dory to get up there and make sure it really was the girls he saw. Dory climbed to the top, saw it was indeed Kim and Sofie, and burst into tears from the raw emotion of seeing them again after so long.

“I’m going to cut them a slide,” Gabriel said, and he let the Macro bite into the lip of the open gondola car.

“You’re too close,” Dory warned. “You’ll slice their feet.”

The front half of the train was slowing to a stop. The engineer had realized something was wrong.

Gabriel put another nick about two feet aft of the first one and Dory told him that was better. So he made a cut about three feet wide and danced out of the way as the wall of the gondola car and tons of steel spilled to the ground. The chute was as smooth as a mirror.

Peter Twofeathers joined Gabriel, ready to catch the girls when they came down the slide. Dory dragged Kim to the cut first and let her go. Kim was wrapped in blankets and a man’s clothing. Not so much as a single atom of iron was sticking its head up to impede her drop.

Dory waited for Peter and Gabriel to pile Kim into the station wag- on before dragging Sofie to the slide. She could see two flashlights dancing a thousand feet away. The crewmen from the caboose were walking toward them to investigate why the train had been snapped in two.

When Peter and Gabriel were ready Dory pushed Sofie off the railcar into their waiting arms. Dory slid down after her. After everyone was in the car Peter drove perpendicu- lar to the tracks so the men with flashlights wouldn’t see the plates.

Gabriel saw that Kim was wearing some short fellow’s clothes and flannel coat under a blanket and she looked for all the world like a homeless bum, but everything smelled clean. The car stank worse than Kimberly did. Che dug to reach skin and found she was dangerously cold.

“No wonder they nearly froze to death,” Dory said. “There was only a foot of steel between them and sixty miles an hour of November wind, at two in the AM, in Wyoming. Poor Kim. Poor Sofie.”

Sofie stirred awake under Dory’s ministrations and said she was Hunky now.

Dory was confused.

“They’ll never stop looking for us,” Hunky explained. “We decided to change our names. Kim is Robyn now.”

Gabriel still had Robyn to revive.

“Skin to skin,” Dory told him, “that’s the secret to it.”

Gabriel didn’t need much convincing of that.

Peter said naming herself Hunky Krause wouldn’t hide her from the FBI.

“Just Hunky,” she said. “One name.”

Dory thought Hunky-Dory was cute.

“And I want a secret code name just like in the Galaxy’s Fall trilogy,” Hunky went on. “Call me Sabotage. I can break things.”

The way home doubled back southwest. As Peter was driving past the Heart Mountain camp Robyn stirred to life, as if sensitive to the mere proximity of her former prison. Luxuriating in the attention Gabriel lavished on her she purred, “I like this afterlife.”

South and east of Cody lies the Big Horn Hot Springs, which is sort of little brother to Yellowstone Park. There was even a herd of bison who stuck around for the free food. The health benefits were real but wartime gas rationing took an equally healthy bite on tourism. So when a clergyman of the Church of Green Dome arrived in town with four young adults, an X ration sticker on his wind- shield, and more than nine hundred dollars in cash, it took very little time to find four rooms clustered around a small private pool running at a toasty 104F.

Hunky and Dory sat close together playing footsie under the milky water. Robyn and Gabriel sat across from the girls and Peter was between the two pairs. Gabriel wondered aloud if stopping there was safe.

Robyn nodded. “Tolson probably knew we were gone but it was dark. By the time we were in Cody, Tolson was searching around the camp for two dead girls in hospital gowns and stolen blankets. I reckon about right now he’s trying to make heads and tails of that damaged rail car. That we might be staying here hasn’t entered his wildest imagin- ings.”

An air bubble the width of the pool surfaced, broke, and suddenly everyone was soaking in fizzy water. The head of a sixth person sur- faced and the kids instinctively knew it was Michael, even Hunky and Robyn, who had never met hym before. They all stood up in the water.

Michael told them to sit back down, and requested that Dory and Sofie remain untangled until his audience was over.

“Lord, we’ve agreed to use Hunky for Sofie’s name,” said Dory as she sank back into the water. “And Kim is ‘Robyn’ now. They’re both wanted women.”

“Yes they are,” agreed Michael. “Robyn, did you tell your friends how long Tolson will be looking for you?”

When she told them it would be for the next thirty years, and end only when he died, it brought a wail of despair from Hunky, and Mi- chael turned hyz attention to her.

“Hello Hunky. Robyn already knows me because she can remember the future, and I met Gabriel, Dory, and Peter while you were still captive, but we’ve not met. Please tell us what you already know about me.”

“I know you are the Michael named in the Green Book. How I know that I can’t explain. I suppose it’s part of this change I signed up for when I let my finger be skewered up on the hill after Robyn went first. I know you’re the best fit for what we think of when we think of God, and I know it’s not a very good fit at all. I know your real body is the sun, and you share that body with Binah. And I know those things because now I realize the Green Book is true after all.”

Michael shook hyz head with rue. “I wanted to see what it be like if my own holy book was about things that really did happen.”

Peter Twofeathers came to Hunky’s defense here. “I think when people read the stories in the Bible of talking snakes and talking donkeys, then another story in another ancient book with talking animals rings true. I’m speaking of Aesop’s story of the boy who cried wolf.”

Michael laughed because what Peter said was right on the mark and hy had never thought of it that way. Of course Hunky and Robyn would think the Green Book was filled with poetry and parables and allegory after being told many passages of the Bible were writ- ten in a similar mode.

“Lord,” ventured Gabriel, “may you not think it impertinent to ask, but when you appeared in the pool just now it made me think of when you took me and Dory to the top of Green Dome in a moment. Why could you not have gone to the camp yourself and brought our friends home?”

“You’re Begotten, Gabriel. Your family helped you discover you are the Magician. But the Made are on their own. Without a crisis to overcome Hunky wouldn’t be Sabotage, she would just think she was unlucky. And Robyn wouldn’t be the Seer, she would just think she was crazy. But now here you are, safely at point B after escaping from point A, bathing in milky water that smells like brimstone, but not to get clean I imagine.”

Peter said, “Lord, the water is imagined to have health benefits, but mainly we just didn’t want to spend another night in the car.”

“What awaits at point Z, Lord?” asked Dory. “Will you say why the B’nei Elohim exist, and why we can do the things we do?”

Michael said, “You already know the ancient controversy. Binah and myself are forbidden to communicate with any eloah aside from our parents. But we can listen, and last year something big happened. Have any of you heard Ma Pekins?”

“Land o’ Goshen, Lord, there ain’t a hull lot of folks never heard Ma.”

Michael said. “I see that you have, and so too has the eloah named Gevurah.”

“Oh, that is wonderful news, Lord. That means you’ve won!”

“No, Dory, what it means is that for the eleventh time in history, the community of elohim has received signals from planet-dwellers. But Gevurah only has a direction to Earth, not the distance. That comes later. Soon other elohim will pick up broadcasts from Earth and realize you are not out of reach. El Elyon will have found the Students at last! And the City of Stars will wonder, collective- ly, how I can be a stable yellow sun in their midst yet remain unquickened, and things will quickly grow sticky for Keter. Mean- while all the elohim listen with rapt attention to the first soap opera, sponsored by Oxydol, the whiter, whiter soap, and they fail to understand one single word. But the broadcasts came from 1933, so I know who Gevurah must be. Humans know him as the very bright star named Sirius.”

Gabriel wondered aloud if the elohim will be coming to visit by and by. Michael said, “They will send avatars, Gabriel, like remote- controlled rockets, but only as flybys. After it gets a certain dis- tance from an eloah the link is too thin to pass any propellant. So to finally answer Dory’s question, at point Z you’re going to help me catch one of those incoming avatars and bring it inside myself. And that will not be easy at all, because they will be moving at seven-tenths light-speed. And none of this can be forced upon you because all of this, all of human history, in fact, is nothing more than the greatest love story never told: overcoming every artifi- cial barrier Keter and Daat and Chesed can throw up to block the wedding of elohim and humanity.”

When che heard these words Gabriel swam out around Peter to face Robyn, stood up tall to brace his courage, looked her in the eyes, and said, “From the day we became lab partners in school I loved you. Every day you were gone and only Dory could reach you it tore me apart. Then Michael said we had one narrow chance to save your life and I couldn’t sleep for a minute until I saw you again, and when I did you were frozen half to death on that stack of steel. It was a life changing moment, Robyn. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Robyn waded out to face Gabriel and took each of hez hands in her own. “And I love you too, Gabriel. It’s true. I loved you even after that time at Lake 13 and your lesson on nephilim biology. But we’re Church of Green Dome and you know there’s rules. Dory is for you.”

“Whoa,” said Hunky, clearing her throat and wading out a little bit too. “I know the scripture says never put God to the test but here’s a much smaller love story than human history, Lord, with much smaller artificial barriers. You say it’s all voluntary? If you can’t fix this I won’t take your job.”

All eyes turned to Dory, who nodded her head. She said she was with Hunky on this, Robyn becoming Mrs. Gabriel Shybear was point C.’

Michael said, “Why not? I never set down mandatory cousin-marriage. That was Mark Lange.”

Peter said, “This will be certain to split the Church, Lord.”

“I know it will, Peter, and the external reality will finally con- form with the internal reality.”

Peter tried to shine a good light on it. “Once the nomadic people of the plains had to choose between removing to the reservations or starving. The Church was a third way.”

“We can still save something of the Church,’ said Michael. “We’ll move the faithful remnant to another place. But for now, Peter, take these young people to Headwater and announce the betrothal: Ga- briel to Kimberly. The important thing is not to use her new name of Robyn.”

Peter bowed his head and acknowledged Michael. The decision having been made, Robyn slipped into a daydream of consequences. “Oh, poor Gabriel. Poor me!”

Michael asked Robyn, “Seeing that, will you still marry hem?

But she was confused on that very point. “I can’t see how the wedding will happen with me being dead.”

Michael did a little hand wave. “Dead? A temporary inconvenience. Re- member in the Green Book how Yeshua was wiped off the face of the Earth but now he’s good as new? You don’t think I can do it again?”

Robyn begged forgiveness for her unbelief.

“Come this December,” said Michael, “you will be wed to Gabriel. Yesh- ua himself will preside, with Peter and Jaroah and Hunky and Dory at- tending. The ceremony will be in Nyduly Wood. A match made in Heaven, as they say. As for you, Peter, and your wife, I’ll ask you to stay in Haaretz. The Church will not long survive this wedding, I’m sorry to say. You should be prepared to transfer the office of Prophet to Robyn on the day you announce the happy tidings. Some will not be so happy.”

Gabriel said, “I want to go back to the part where you said, poor Ga- briel. What does that mean, Robyn?”

She looked at Michael as though seeking permission, but hy refused to answer yea or nay. She told him, “There will be an effort to dissuade you from marrying me. Also they’ll want you to hand over the Macro. In the first case, we’ll already be married, and in the second case…” She shrugged. “You’re B’nei Elohim, Gabriel. They’ll try to persuade you with the business end of a bullwhip, but as you already know we can be quite stubborn.”

Hell’s Half Acre is a roadside patch of badlands almost exactly in the center of Wyoming. It’s much bigger than the name suggests, more like Hell’s Half Square Mile, and the nearest sandstone and shale scarp that looks similar to it lies a whole state away in South Dakota. A brown-skinned man emerged from the entrance of a cave in the eroded landscape dressed in dark blue-gray trousers and a knee-length jacket. He had a matching shirt and a silver leaf brooch in place of a tie and looked like a Shoshone with a good seamstress for a wife. But the fellow was too short, his hair wasn’t straight enough, and his facial features suggested the Mediterranean shores were his true home.

He had never walked in that place before, but the strange erod- ed landscape reminded him of the desolate area around the Salt Sea. It was one hundred fifty feet from the floor of the ravine to the gravel parking lot above and the man ascended with no sign of exer- tion. He once roamed on foot the whole land of his birth from Lake Kinneret as far as Mount Hermon and south to the hill country of Judaea.

He noted, without any surprise, the presence of a maroon 1941 Chrysler Town & Country woodie parked at the restaurant over- looking the geological oddity and knew he would find Robyn and friends eating lunch inside, just as Robyn knew he was coming and gave fair warning. Robyn, Gabriel, Peter, Hunky and Dory were al- ready standing at their table when he walked indoors, which the other guests might have thought was odd. None of them had ever seen him before but as B’nei Elohim they knew a seraph on sight and made themselves ready to serve.

“Please be seated,” he said, grabbing a chair from another table and carrying it over to theirs. “I’ll have what you’re having, Peter.” The Prophet raised a hand to flag down the waitress but the newcomer said, “No, not allegory, Peter, I’ll literally have what you’re having.”

He took up a knife, cut Peter’s cheeseburger in two, and helped him- self to one piece.

Hunky said, “I’m pretty sure that burger is not kosher, Lord. Aren’t you Jewish?”

He said, “My mother made one rule against pork and another one against shellfish. Mixing beef and dairy is fine.”

Dory and Gabriel stared at Yeshua in wonder, trying to recon- cile his actual appearance with the popular depictions of him and there was just no way to do it. But Robyn seemed preoccupied and she looked off to the side.

“What is wrong, Robyn?” Yeshua asked her. “What do you see?”

Robyn said, “Peter announces the wedding but the White Wing of the Church will not accept it. Gabriel is attacked, but torture doesn’t work on B’nei Elohim and Gabriel’s friends re- taliate, so Paul Bergin and Klaus Hansen kill me instead. And in the end they also kill the Church.”

“How would you reply, Robyn, if I requested, not ordered, that you do not avoid or resist those men, even to your death?”

After a long pause she said she, “I think I will decline that request, Lord. I’m not in any particular hurry for my life come to an end so early into it.”

He asked, “What did my cross teach you?” She said, “That death is not a blank wall, it’s a door, and you went through it and came back to show us that even if we die we don’t stay dead. But I see how time really works and I know it was all just a magic trick like Gabriel with his coins.”

Yeshua was genuinely fascinated by Robyn’s unexpected reply. He asked, “When you look at my life with your talent, what do you see?”

She said, ‘I see a movie of a burning fuse, but the movie is run- ning backwards. The fuse assembles itself from smoke and sparks. One time that fuse looped back, crossed itself, and there were two burn- ing Yeshuas experiencing an advancing present, but one of them was wiped off the face of the Earth by the Romans. He hit that blank wall we call death. The one who lived, the lucky one, is you.”

“You’re wrong about the blank wall, Robyn. The part of me that is Binah carried over the dying memories of the man who was put to death and merged them with my own.”

Robyn suggested, “But that didn’t help the Yeshua who experienced death. He was a different Yeshua.”

“Robyn, nobody in the whole history of both worlds has ever ex- perienced death. Yes, we experience dying, each one of us, from the moment we are born, and there comes a moment in our lives that is not followed by another one, but that last moment never becomes a memory.”

Robyn asked Yeshua, “Lord, why do you ask that I not resist my murder?”

“When you and Hunky escaped your prison what did you do to make the correct combination appear in your mind?”

She said. “First I had to begin punching in the numbers.”

Yeshua said, “Your death will be a similar beginning. But Robyn, I will not order you to do what you are unwilling to do, so let us speak of something else. Your friends will not arrive in Head- water until late tonight. Will you come alone with me? I can bring you to a reunion with your mother in almost no time at all.”

Dory remembered the jaunt she had made with Michael and said, “You should take him up on that offer, Robyn, it’s the only way to travel.” Gabriel heartily nodded in accord.

So Robyn, who felt a little guilty telling Yeshua no on the first thing, told him yes on the other.

After hugging her farewells Robyn hiked with Yeshua down to the bottom of the ravine and followed him into the dark cave, where it grew light again, a little warmer, and they were kicking through fallen leaves piled up to their knees. But there was still plenty of green.

“Christmas trees!” exclaimed Robyn when she saw a stand of Douglas Fir. Many more of them covered the mountains she could see through bare branches of maple and alder. They were standing on a mountain as well, near the top.

Yeshua said, “This is just a short side trip.”

“Where are we, Lord?”

“We are still in your country. Of the forty-eight states, this one is furthest to the north and west.”

“Washington.”

“I want you and your friends to put together a migration and move the Red Wing of the Church here.”

Robyn looked through the trees to the bottom land at the foot of the mountain laid down by repeated mud flows from a large nearby volcano and she remembered the Japanese-American fellow at Heart Mountain who helped her and Hunky escape by giving them clothing and advice. She said, “There’s a Mr. Kaneko who lost his strawberry farm when they sent him to the camp. I want to buy a new one for him, Lord, right there. Do you see?”

“After the war is over,” Yeshua said, and he produced a large en- velope somehow, perhaps by using the Gabriel trick. “Yes. Mr. Kaneko will have his land when the relocation camp is no more. That is a very kind thought, Robyn. But this money is for your mother, to return to the home of her own parents in the east.”

Robyn accepted the envelope gratefully.

Yeshua displayed a small object. “Robyn, if you choose to do what I asked, this will give you a temporary link similar to the one I have with with Binah. All your memories will be saved.”

Before she made her decision Robyn took a quick glance at time. She saw another version of herself eating lunch back there at Hell’s Half Acre. Yeshua said, “I have put us into a stream where you ate your lunch in peace and I never appeared. Do you feel like a mere copy, Robyn?”

“No, Lord.”

“So will it be when there is one Robyn again with the memories of both. Have a little faith that I am nothing like Keter or Daat. What kind of teacher would I be to deceive a student in a matter such as this?”

“Forgive me, Lord,” Robyn said, and she accepted the device and her death sentence. She saw it would resemble a large mole when it was installed.

“Be of good cheer,” Yeshua told her. ‘You alone among all the humans of Earth have the freedom to choose, because you alone can look ahead and go another way. And there is so much more than mere duty. You will soon find one benefit of the B’nei Elohim that even rivals a second life.”

Robyn opened the door of her home just before Kim knocked on it, but that went with the territory of being the Seer. Kim let herself come in, and why not? It was her house too. Kim was still wearing Mr. Kaneko’s clothing and she was still stinky from the road trip.

“Let me see the gadget Yeshua gave you,” Kim said.

Robyn dug it out. It was like half a ball of pink rubber. There was a 55-pin female connector on one side to match the male connector protruding from both girls’ heads. She said, “When Paul and Klaus show up I need to be wearing this. I’m willing to be the one who gets killed.

“But you have memories of meeting Mom here before she left,” said Kim, “and I want those.”

Kim unfastened her belt, which was really one of the Purple Cables. When they attached the ends to themselves they experienced a dual awareness, but it did not persist as when she and Hunky were linked together. The differences between each girl poured through the line but there was a definite rhythm to it, very much like a heartbeat. It took a brief time for each memory to be packed for transfer on the cable and then unpacked.

Soon Kim had Robyn’s conversation with Yeshua in Washington State. Since the Change her memories were stored with per- fect clarity, not merely as triggers to be re-enacted. The full emotional impact of meeting her mother again after six months, followed by their parting, brought Kim to tears, then Robyn started crying again too, just a heartbeat after.

The Purple Cable had set up a kind of feedback whine, but there was an 800 millisecond delay. Kim received back from Robyn the meta- experience of Kim receiving the memory of Robyn greeting her moth- er. This went around at least a dozen more times, growing weaker on each pass. As the loops cycled Robyn obtained Kim’s experience of the rest of her trip home in Peter’s station wagon. All of the dif- ferent experiences kicked off different loops as they were brought forward and absorbed.

After a time only two real differences stubbornly persisted: One girl was lying on the couch, and the other was lying on top of her. That situation got Robyn thinking. She was set to become the wife of Gabriel, and Gabriel was something of a sexual cafeteria line, one of these, and one of these. She wasn’t sure she would like ever- ything Gabriel had to offer, let alone know what to do. So without further ado she pulled Mr. Kaneko’s trousers down from Kim’s hips. Then Kim’s undies were brought up to her knees and Robyn became the first non-contortionist in Heaven or Earth to have oral sex with herself.

What Robyn was doing with her tongue, in combination with the Purple Cable loop back, reminded her of something the band once did. One time when Hunky set up her drumkit in the Squaw River canyon and did a drum duet with her own echoes.

The pleasure built so steadily Kim thought it was like cheat- ing. Actually it was cheating. Through the Purple Cable Robyn could feel exactly what she was doing to Kim. It was almost as though she was Kim. She wondered if this was the thing Yeshua said would rival the afterlife.

That was the last rational thought either girl had for the next ten minutes.

Robyn felt the first contraction of Kim’s orgasm 0.8 seconds after Kim did. At 1.6 seconds Kim felt Robyn’s experience of her first contraction precisely at the same time she felt her third one. And so the stack continued to build. Neither Kim nor Robyn even knew what was happening. They didn’t even breathe until Kim had a doz- en contractions.

When they did resume breathing, they could only make incoherent sounds. Purple Cable sex was never going to be a discreet thing.

The orgasm looped around and around. After three minutes the stack of orgasmic contractions and their echoes were no longer distinct pulses. The climax settled into a timeless high intensity electric sheen.

Only after another seven minutes did Robyn find it possible to un- plug the cable from her head. After that they lay still for anoth- er ten minutes trying to take in what just happened to them. Robyn’s face was soaked. Kim began to stir to get out from under Robyn. “I need to get myself cleaned up and then it will be your turn. At least we have something to keep us happy until Bergin kills you.”

Prophet Mark Lange’s very kind offer of a seat on the last remaining lifeboat on the doomed Reina Regenta was wasted on Rupert Keller. Returning to New York he gave a newspaper account of the disaster which had the Prophet kicking little girls off a lifeboat to make room for his gold, resulting in the sinking of the lifeboat, the death of Lange, and the death of everyone else with him. Indeed, Keller said the presence of the gold (which was only worth about a hundred thou- sand dollars) must have been the reason the ship was torpedoed by the Central Powers in the first place, lest it aided the cause of the Tri- ple Entente in the Great War, then in its third year.

Keller’s widely published lies did their intended damage to the popu- lar imagination of the American people. Many former supporters soured on the religion, and the growth of the Green Dome Church slowed to a crawl. Shortly after that, by popular referendum, the state joined a dozen others in banning marriages between first cousins and the first serious persecutions of Greendomites began.

That is not to say the Church of Green Dome did not conduct marriages between first cousins. They merely performed them on the Wyoming side of the Tri-State marker, nigh at hand, to make it legal.

Upon the death of Mark Lange the Apostle Peter Twofeathers became the second Prophet of the Church. Peter in turn appointed a new Apostle from among the elders of the White Wing of the End Dome Church, a man named Klaus Hansen. Thus the lifetime office of Prophet alternated smoothly between the White and Red wings of the Church, and assuming this rule was never broken there could never be a succession crisis.

But with Hansen as the Apostle relations between the Red and White wings of the Church seemed to grow sour. The Whites no longer made the weekly pilgrimage to the summit of Green Dome on foot, and drove to Temple by automobile. They began to tie up their pony- tails into buns as a further act of separation from the native faith- ful. Ultimately they refused to worship with the Red Wing at all and met seperately on Wednesdays.

The sinking of Reina Regenta with Mark Lange aboard, along with seven hundred other men who could not take to lifeboats, was one of the big- gest factors that changed American public opinion about the Great War from an attitude of cynical isolationism to moralistic idealism. Another big factor was an intercepted telegram from Germany offering Mexico a share of the spoils if they come into the war against Ameri- ca. A month later Congress approved a declaration of war against the Central Powers, and a month after that forced conscription began.

During Wednesday Temple the Prophet of the Church of Green Dome, Peter Twofeathers, declared he was setting aside the discipline of the Church, in a single case, so that Gabriel Shybear could marry Kimberly Zinter. With a loud outcry of righteous indignation the Apostle Klaus Hansen stood up and left the sanctuary, taking half the White Wing with him.

In short order Klaus Hansen declared himself the Prophet of the Re- formed Green Dome Church.

It went without saying that forbidding interracial marriage was one of the reforms, but there were many others. Listing them made up the bulk of Hansen’s sermon on the Sunday following just days after the disas- trous split in the Church.

Hansen said the curse of God lay upon all those who played cards. All who engaged in dancing were in danger of God’s holy judgment. Those who even permitted themselves to listen to race music would face the very fires of hell. He told his flock to let not one single drop of Demon Rum pass their lips.

To prove they were indwelt of the Holy Spirit, he encouraged the par- ishioners to roll in the sawdust on the floor of the barn out on River Road, near the bridge, that was their new ‘temple’. That was just as well, as there were not enough benches for everyone to sit. The beau- tiful white Temple looking down on them from the highest point in town seemed to mock them by simply continuing to exist. Many got up to leave during the service, but what was most alarming of all to the new prophet, the plate came back largely empty of cash.

The former Deacon Paul Bergin, now Apostle, went door-to-door to the homes of White Wingers passing out hastily-mimeographed tracts prom- ised eternal damnation to backsliders who were tempted to stay or to return to the mother church. Many of the white parishioners weighed the peril to their eternal souls if they remained in schism. Most found the barn situation to be intolerably pathetic. The pressure mounted on Hansen to approach the Prophet of the mother Church and negotiate a healing of the breach.

Paul and Klaus approached the Temple office door, but it was opened by Gabriel an instant before they could knock. “How did you do that, son?”

“The Prophet foresaw that you were about to knock.”

Inside the office Paul and Klaus saw only Gabriel, Dory, and Kim, and it was soon apparent the men knew only one of them by name, which was Kim. Quelle surprise that the former Apostle and Deacon never troubled to get to know anyone in the Red Wing of the Church.

“I want to talk to the Prophet.”

“She’s right there,” said Dory, pointing at Robyn.

“I just see three kids who broke into the Temple office and are run- ning loose. Where’s Peter Two Feathers?”

“He’s in a better place,” Gabriel said.

“He’s dead?”

“No,” said Kim, “but he blamed himself for the schism and stepped down.”

“He was absolutely right to blame himself but if he left you in charge he must have been wholly demented in the end.”

“Why do you say that, Mr. Hansen?”

“Call me Prophet Hansen. I say that because of what it says in the scriptures, ‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over men. They must remain silent.'” “Why are you here?”

“I came to negotiate an end to the breach.”

“Then you’re going to have to show me a little respect, Mister Han- sen, as I am indeed the Prophet of the Church of Green Dome, notwith- standing whatever Paul wrote in the First Century about womenfolk.”

“Prove it.”

Kim reached into a desk drawer and withdrew a leather-bound green book. “I know you’ve seen this before, Mr. Hansen. It’s Prophet Mark Lange’s handwritten copy of the Book of Green Dome. He called it the Printer’s Manuscript. The first few sheets on the inside cover are a Church document.”

She laid the book on her desk and flipped it open.

The first entry on the inside cover said PASTOR MARK LANGE, PROPHET, SEP 1, 1866, followed by Lange’s signature, and this in turn was fol- lowed by a mark of an individual unknown, in Hebrew script. Kim said, “We believe the Lord Yeshua himself made this initial.”

This entry was followed by the First Decree, which read, THE PROPHET OF THE CMURCH SHALL CHOOSE, FROM THE WING OF THE CHURCH OF WHICH HE IS NOT A PART, ONE WHO SHALL HOLD THE OFFICE OF APOSTLE. It was dated SEP. 1, 1866, signed and initialed by Prophet Lange.

This was followed in turn by the Second Decree, which read, IN THE EVENT OF THE DEATH OR RESIGNATION OF THE PROPHET, THE APOSTLE SHALL VACATE THE OFFICE OF APOSTLE AND ATTAIN TO THE OFFICE OF PROPHET, again dated, Sep. 1, 1866 and certified by Lange.

The next entry, in the same handwriting, read, CHIEF WANICA, APOSTLE, SEP. 1, 1866, followed by a ragged ‘W’ and again by Lange’s initials. Kim said, ‘We hold the first day of September to be the the day of the founding of the Church of Green Dome, seventy-six years ago.’

Her finger moved down to the next entry in the Printer’s Manuscript, which read, again in the same handwriting, APOSTLE WANICA, DECEASED, NATURAL CAUSES, FEB. 27, 1906, followed by Lange’s initials.

The entry after that was PETER TWO FEATHERS, APOSTLE, FEB. 28, 1906. This was certified by the signature of Peter and by Lange’s initials.

Kim’s fingers moved to the next entry, which was written in a differ- ent hand. It said, PROPHET MARK LANGE, DECEASED, SINKING OF REINA RE- GENTA, MAR. 6, 1917, and this was initialed by Peter and dated March 7, which reflected the delay in receiving the news.

A diagonal line was drawn through the remaining blank space to the bottom of the inside cover and this, too, was initialed by Peter.

On the facing page, the first line read, APOSTLE PETER TWO FEATHERS, PROPHET, MAR. 7, 1917 and this was signed and initialed by Peter.

The next line read, KLAUS HANSEN, APOSTLE, OCT 9, 1931 and this was signed by Hanson and initialed by Peter. Kim rotated the book to show Hanson the entry. She said, “Until I read this I wasn’t even aware the Church had gone nearly fifteen years without an Apostle. I suppose Peter found the choice to be such a difficult one he was willing to risk breaking the clear order of succession with his own death.”

“At the time you were too young to know or care about Church politics. The White Wing threatened to walk over his failure to appoint an Apos- tle, so we forced Peter’s hand. And we made him create the office of Deacon to prevent it from happening again.”

“I see. That explains the next line.”

Peter wrote the text of the Third Decree, dated the same day as the appointment of Hansen. It stated, THE PROPHET SHALL APPOINT, FROM AL- TERNATING WINGS OF THE CHURCH, A DEACON TO SERVE THE SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL NEEDS OF THE WHOLE CHURCH. IN THE EVENT OF THE DEATH OR RES- IGNATION OF THE APOSTLE, THE DEACON SHALL ATTAIN TO THE OFFICE OF APOSTLE. And Peter had signed and initialed this.

The next line read PAUL BERGIN, DEACON, Oct. 9, 1931. This was signed by Paul, and initialed by Peter. Kim asked, “Does everything appear to be in order, gentlemen?”

Paul nodded agreement, and Klaus said, “It appears to be so.”

Kim then indicated the next line, which none of the men had ever seen. ANY OFFICE OF THE CHURCH SHALL NOT BE TERMINATED EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF THE DEATH OR RESIGNATION OF THE OFFICEHOLDER. Signed by Peter and dat- ed January 10, 1943.

“Kim said, “Peter told us he never had to think about it before, but that the Fourth Decree became necessary following the events of Wednesday the 5th of January, when you went out from us. But let’s go on.”

The next line read APOSTLE KLAUS HANSEN, RESIGNED, JAN. 10, 1943, signed by Peter.

Hansen objected to this. “I never resigned!”

“I was there in that barn you call your temple,’ said Kim. “I’m White Wing, remember? You introduced yourself as the Prophet of the Reformed Church of Green Dome. When I reported that to the actual Prophet he took that to be your official resignation. How did he put it, Dory?”

Dory replied, “Peter said, ‘No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.’ In fine, if you’re an officer in the Re- formed Green Dome Church you can’t be an officer in the mother Green Dome Church.”

Kim nodded, and said, “That led to the next line.”

It read KIMBERLY SHYBEAR, APOSTLE, JAN. 10, 1943. Kim had signed it, and Peter had initialed after.

“The upshot, Mr. Hansen, is that in the eyes of Prophet Two Feathers you quit, and he chose me to replace you.’

Kim proceded to the next line, which read DEACON PAUL BERGIN, RE- SIGNED, JAN. 10, 1943. This was also signed by Peter. Kim asked, rhe- torically, “Do we really need to go over the same argument for the resignation of the Deacon as it was for the Apostle? No? Then let us go on.”

The next line read, EREL GABRIEL SHYBEAR, DEACON, JAN. 10, 1943, signed by Gabriel and initialed by Peter.

Kim said, “All perfectly legal, of course Peter’s Decree said the Dea- con shall be of alternating race. As you can see, that Sunday was quite the busy day, but now we’re in the homestretch.’ And she ad- vanced to the next item written on the page.

It read PROPHET PETER TWO FEATHERS, RESIGNED, JAN. 10, 1943 and it carried his signature.

That seemed to grab the attention of Bergin and Hansen. Kim said, “Now you can see how I closed out his rather eventful page.”

Kim flipped the page over and showed everyone the first entry. APOSTLE KIMBERLY SHYBEAR, PROPHET, JAN. 10, 1943. And this was signed and initialed by Kim, exercising her apostolic authority under the Second Decree established by Prophet Peter Two Feathers.

Underneath that was the final entry in the manuscript, which read, HASHMAL DORIEL, APOSTLE, JAN. 10, 1943. This was signed by Kim and initialed by Gabriel. She said, ‘And all this to show we are not just three kids playing in the Temple office, but actual officers of the Church. So now that I have done precisely what you asked, that is, to prove it, what have you and Mr. Bergin come to say?”

“How were your services yesterday, Apostle?” Hansen asked Dory. Your ‘Prophet’ must have told you ours were a clown show, but how were yours?”

“There were no ‘services’ as you imagine. Unlike you, we dare not car- ry on while the union of Red and White people lies in ruins, contrary to the will of the Lord who brought us all together in this place. There were sung laments, and Kim led the congregation in a prayer for a quick reunion.”

Hansen said, “I, too, pray for a quick reunion. Were the Golden Gift to alternate in possession between members of the Red and White Wings, even as the office of Deacon, presently does, that would go a long way towards sealing the breach.”

Kim said, “That is easily enough done.”

She took up a the pen to write in the leaves of the Green Book, THE SACRED RELIC SHALL REMAIN IN THE POSSESSION OF THE DEACON OF THE CHURCH, WHO SHALL BE MINISTER OF THE LAST RITE. And she dated it Jan- uary 18, 1943.

“Good,” said Hansen. “But here is our second, and most important de- mand: God’s sacred law of cousin marriage should be enshrined as the Fifth Decree.”

“Again, “said Kim with a gentle smile, “that is easily done.”

She inked the following into the manuscript: MARRIAGE IN THE CHURCH OF GREEN DOME SHALL BE SOLELY BETWEEN PERSONS WITH THE SAME GRANDPARENTS OR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS, ON PAIN OF EXCOMMUNICATION. She dated it Janu- nary 18, 1943 and signed it.

Hansen said, ‘Good. When do you announce the end of your engagement to Gabriel?” “Never,” Kim replied. “The decrees of the Church don’t work ex post facto.”

“The decree governs marriage. You haven’t married him yet.”

“Ah, but there you are wrong.” She showed him her wedding ring, and Gabriel flashed hez own. She didn’t mention they had been wed in Heaven, and they’d been married for a year already, because it would just confuse him. “Yeshua himself said if a woman puts aside her hus- band to marry another she commits adultery against him. That’s non- negotiable as far as the Lord is concerned.”

Hansen dealt with this news in his usual way, by storming noisily out, followed by Bergin.

The Zinter house on U Street turned into a ransacked mess. A hooded invader held Gabriel at knife point while two others searched through it, but they didn’t find what they were looking for. Gabriel was grateful his wife had seen this all coming and made herself scarce.

She had already laid out the broad outline of how it would go. “This attack is important to Michael’s plans,” Kim had told him. “You should just let things happen.”

After Gabriel’s attackers had searched the house che was taken into Kim’s backyard and hung by small ropes wrapped around hez arms from a basketball hoop. Despite hez great height, Gabriel’s feet, tied to- gether around the ankles, dangled a few inches over the concrete of the patio.

“Cut his shirt off so he’s not wasting my time.”

Gabriel recognized the voice as belonging to that of Johnny Sunkel. When hez shirt fell away in strips another voice said, “Look at that, he’s got little titties!” Gabriel knew that voice too. It was Larry Porter.

“Where’s the Golden Gift, Gabe?”

“It’s in the Temple.”

There was a whistle and a crack. Gabriel grunted. It took about a second to fully disconnect from the sudden slash of astonishing pain.

“Of course it’s in the Temple. But we just came from there and turned that place upside down too. So where in the Temple is it, exactly?”

“I don’t know, Johnny. When I need it for the Last Rites, Kim just gives it to me.”

The whip struck again and this time the skin on Gabriel’s back split open with a cloud of red mist.

“Bullshit! And you don’t know my name!”

Gabriel should have screamed with that blow, but he was silent, so Johnny hit him again, harder. On the backstroke the whip caught one of the other boys and that kid did scream, although it merely hit the back of his leg and he was wearing blue jeans. When the boy cursed Johnny out, Gabriel recognized his voice as belonging to Scott Hill- ing. Scott said, “You Red Wingers don’t get to marry our white girls, Gabriel. That was the arrangement going way back.”

“Your white girls, Scotty? Sure. When was the last time you got laid?”

That earned Gabriel another stroke. Instead of screaming he just laughed because the whip came back and bit Johnny across the chest and it was his own turn to scream.

“You ain’t staying hitched to that Zinter gal,” Larry growled.

“After I pass out make sure you fellows keep going until I bleed to death. Then hide my body, because I’m in this club, see. We look out for each other. If they find out you did this to me they’ll pick over your feet for two or three days with a sledgehammer, blowtorch and knives like they were leftover turkey.”

“This is gonna pinch some.”

Johnny hurled his whip at Gabriel’s back again, two more times, whis- tle and snap. The boys kept waiting for Gabriel to scream, but instead they started to see a white layer of fat underneath the bloody split skin on hez back. Scott and Larry turned away and started puking.

Gabriel knew it was time to make his move. With hez right hand che reached into the space-time pocket that always tracked with him and came back out of it holding the Macro. Che extended the shaft long enough to cut the rope binding hez left hand. Then che switched the Macro to his free hand and cut hemself down from the basketball hoop.

Johnny swung the whip right at hez face but Gabriel let it fly into the Macro while it fully deployed as a shield. The black dome simply ate the whip, leaving little more than a riding crop for Johnny to swing. Then Gabriel cut hez legs free. All three of the boys ran away, but Gabriel was in no condition to run after any of them.

The neighbors had heard and seen the whipping and called it in, so the boys who attacked Gabriel only just made it away in time before depu- ties arrived.

At the little hospital that served Headwater, Sheriff Roddy Walker asked if Gabriel saw who it was that messed up him up.

“I don’t know, sir. They wore black hoods over their faces. And they also messed up my house and they told me they messed up the Temple.”

“Did they tell you why they were doing it?”

“They said didn’t appreciate me marrying one of ‘their’ white girls, sir.”

“How do you feel, Gabriel?”

“Not any better than the last time it happened, sir.”

“The last time? You’ve been flogged before?”

Gabriel nodded, and stared at Doctor Wanica.

“It’s a Kuwapi thing, Sheriff Walker. They camp out on the plains overnight and have at each other to see how much they can stand.”

“Ah, so it’s like the Vision Quest?”

Gabriel nodded again, but Dr. Plenty Practice rolled his eyes.

Five Kuwapi youths paid a visit after the sheriff left. River Rawdon gestured at Gabriel, who was lying on his stomach in a hospital gown with his back was all bandaged up. “What the hell is this?”

“Keystone Cops, with a whip.”

“Who?”

Gabriel wasn’t sure he wanted to spill it. Che knew what would follow next and had given the three white boys fair warning, but Michael and Yeshua mightn’t like it. River ran a hand up the back of Gabriel’s hairless bare thigh affectionately but Gabriel warned him off. “I’m spoken for now, Riv.”

“Tell us who did this to you, Gabe. You know the rules. We gotta keep this from happening again. Frankly, I’m astonished it happened at all. Our deterrence seems to be fading from last time. It looks like somebody needs a freshener.”

“It was three Bunners,” Gabriel said. “Johnny Sunkel, Larry Porter, and Scotty Hilling. I told ’em they better finish me off, otherwise Thanksgiving would come way early this year.”

Rawdon unsheathed his ceremonial blade and held it up, smiling. Plains Indians knew something about torture. “Gobble gobble.”

Three days later Klaus Hansen came to the same hospital. Certainly it was not to visit Gabriel, who had been released the same day he checked in, but instead he came to see Gabriel’s attackers. Doctor Wahkan was still muttering about the “animals” who had slowly turned all six of their feet into just so much ruined hamburger, requiring a clean amputation of each one.

Every time the three boys were visited after their operations, first by their parents, then by the sheriff, and later by Klaus, they took to sobbing miserably. It was not so much from the pain they were still suffering but from the memory of the pain they had already suffered. They had gone through two days and a night in hell as their tormentors worked in shifts, just like Gabriel told them would happen.

Unlike themselves, who had been hooded and disguised when they flogged Gabriel, yet were somehow rapidly identified by hem, the ones who re- taliated on behalf of Gabriel wore no hoods at all. While they went about their bloody business they even openly called each other by their real names. Yet even now their victims refused to identify them at all, other than to say they were “Indians”.

“Where’s the Golden Gift?”

“Gabriel had it the whole time.”

“You searched him, strung him up like a pig, and horsewhipped him, but Gabriel had it on him the entire time? So where did he have it hidden, Johnny, in his asshole?”

“I don’t know!”

“Did you mention he ought to forget all about the Zinter girl, or did that slip your mind too?”

“I did tell him,”Larry whined, “but I don’t think he listened to me! What’s the world coming to when you can’t even get a little respect?”

Klaus Hansen, the Prophet of the Reformed Green Dome Church and the spiritual leader of the Bunners, said in disgust, “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch! Well, I guess it is true what they say, if you want some- thing done right, you got to do it yourself.

“I agreed to see you fellows again,” the Prophet said when Hansen and Bergin came to the Temple once more, “but if you act like a couple of high school students and storm out again when you don’t get your own way, it will be the last time we ever meet.” And Kim was perfectly able to follow through on that threat. Seeing the future, she could simply refuse to go anywhere Hansen or Bergin went.

“It is you, rather, who have one slim chance to reunite the Church,” Hansen said with his trademark insufferable arrogance. “Paul and I must get our old jobs back, or the reunion will never come to be. That point is non-negotiable.”

Kim sighed and turned to her husband. “Will you, Gabriel, resign the office of Deacon?”

“I will not.”

Hansen shrugged, said, “You can’t push a rope” and he prepared once more to leave the office with Bergin, muttering a string of curses that completly obscured what Dory quietly said. Kim asked Dory to repeat harself.

“I said, I will resign as Apostle of the Church.”

Kim opened the Printer’s Manuscript of the Green Book once more and penned the following entry: APOSTLE DORIEL, RESIGNED, JAN. 20, 1943. Dory signed it, and Kim entered her initials.

“It’s done,” Kim said. “The office of Apostle is vacant. Will you, Klaus Hansen, take har place, or is Paul not getting Deacon still a non-negotiable sticking point?”

Klaus turned to Paul and said, “A temporary setback, Paul, nothing more. It will be remedied soon enough.” Then he faced Kim once more. “Very well, Mrs. Shybear, make the appropriate entry.”

She wrote KLAUS HANSEN, APOSTLE, JAN. 20, 1943 and turned the book for his inspection and signature. When he was done, Kim applied her ini- tials. Looking at all the recently entries she said, “I just had a sudden image of someone in 2043 reading this page and wondering what it must have been like, this whole sudden flurry and tangle.”

And that image was no idle daydream.

Hansen said, “The Reformed Church of Green Dome is gathering this morning to meet down at our own temple. Will you meet with them, Prophet Shybear, and affirm that our schism has reached an end?”

“I will.”

“And I would have them meet the new Deacon. One of our parishoners passed away. I would have the Deacon perform the Last Rites.”

Dory was incredulous. “The Last Rites in that barn?”

“It would do much to bring healing between the Red and White Wings of the Church,” Bergin put in.

“I refuse to go,” Doriel said.

“Can it not wait a week until Gabriel can perform the Last Rites prop- erly in the actual Temple?” asked Kim.

“It has already been two weeks,” replied Hansen, “and the corpse is beginning to grow. . . unpresentable.”

Kim nodded her head. “We should do it, Gabe.”

“I have to retrieve the Golden Gift,” Gabriel said, “and I would not have Paul know where I keep it, as he is no longer an officer of the Church.”

Paul said, “This is not a problem. I can drive Prophet Shybear to our temple, and Apostle Hansen can bring you along in his own truck to fetch the Relic and meet us there.”

To this Kim and Gabriel agreed, and they shared a farewell kiss before they parted, knowing that it was indeed farewell.

As Hansen drove Gabriel off the mountain he said, “The sight of you kissing that white girl was disgusting. You’re not only not cousins, you’re not even of the same race. Hell, you’re not even the same spe- cies!”

“Sir,” replied Gabriel, “that whole cousin thing was always just a Church tradition, not a dogma or even a doctrine. In fact, it was es- sentially just Mark Lange’s personal preference. Note that it was not one of the four Decrees originally written in Mark’s Green Book.”

“Prophet Lange himself believed otherwise,” said Hansen. “As a result there was terrible persecution, and his pilgrimage halfway across the United States to this place.”

“The founder of the Church was Chief Wanica actually,” said Gabriel. “He took the Golden Gift from God with his own hands. And in recent weeks you went out from us, but you were not of us. If you had been of us, you no doubt would have continued with us.”

“We didn’t so much as leave the Church as the Church left us,” said Hansen. “Two Feathers slipped into a damnable apostasy when he set aside the eternal Law of God that only first or second cousins are to be married.”

“This racist streak of yours has divided the Church but it is nothing more than just a lot of silly nonsense over nothing, and God is not amused. There are no races. There is only one human race. The Bible and the Book of Green Dome acknowledge only ethnicities. In scripture we read only of peoples and kindreds and tongues, not Whites and Blacks and Yellow Menaces and Red Men. The angels of heaven are called Black Beards and Red Beards and so on, but they are all the same race, and indeed they are even the same species as humans. We know this be- cause they can still breed with us, producing the nephilim, and that will be true for many thousands of years.”

Hansen had no clue he was actually the presence of a nephil.

“What are you talking about, boy?” blurted Hansen indignantly. “There are indeed races. I can see them with my own eyes!”

“Then how many races are there?”

“I say there are three races: Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid.”

“Really? Are you sure those are not artificial things? Because it would make the dark people in India and Pakistan the same race as blond people in Scandinavia. And what about the aborigines in Austra- lia? They have Caucasian and Mongoloid genes, but they are as dark as Negroids. Jews look identical to Arabs. Mexican people are a mixture of Mongoloid and Caucasian. Even our Lord Yeshua is a lovely coffee- with-cream brown.”

“I’ll overlook that blasphemy,” said Hansen, “because you are young and ignorant. The three races can be traced right back to the three sons of Noah. We see evidence in the Bible that dark skin is the Mark of Canaan, who was cursed as a fitting punishment after his father Ham accidentally saw his grandfather Noah lying naked and drunk.”

“There are different levels of pigments in human skin and that is a good thing. My wife would not fare so well on the savanna in Kenya. Traits like color, or the epicanthic fold of Asians, are simply a ves- tige of the isolation of human settlements long ago.”

Hansen grew angry and pulled the truck over to the side of the road. “Get out.”

“I still need to get the Golden Gift,” Gabriel objected. “What about the Last Rites?”

“Fuck the Last Rites. Get out.”

Klaus Hansen peeled out in the snow, leaving Gabriel stranded on the side of the road halfway down the mountain. Che decided to hoof it back to the Temple where Dory was waiting.

A short distance northwest of Green Dome was a place where the borders of three states came together in a little fenced-off lot. When Hansen arrived he saw that only Paul Bergin’s truck was parked there, and only Bergin could be seen standing in the little corral. A bloody lump of dead and naked womanflesh lay at his feet.

Paul stood there staring at Kim’s body, not quite believing that he actually did it. He kept repeating to himself, “I’m going to hell!”

“Shut up, Paul,” Hansen told him when he drew near. “You’d only go to hell if you didn’t do it. Is that the knife?”

Paul nodded, the murder weapon nearly forgotten, but still grasped in his gloved hand.

“Throw it right now,” Hansen ordered. “Anywhere, but throw it as far as you can.”

Paul hurled the blade on the snowy wastelands lying to the west, some- where in Wyoming. The blade flashed once in the morning sunlight and disappeared from view.

“Now help me lift her on this.”

There was a short post and a little sign about chest high that marked the exact place where the three states came together. The sign was canted at a forty-five degree angle. They draped Kim’s body across the sign, letting her head and arms bend backwards and her legs droop down.

After that, Hansen circled the area a few times to make sure Paul had- n’t dropped anything. Good. Even the spot with bloody snow was clear. “Walk with me to my truck.”

Hansen dropped the tailgate. In the bed of the truck were two sets of coats, clothing and boots laid out beside a cardboard box. Hansen took off the boots he was wearing and threw them in the box, along with his blood-stained coat, shirt and trousers. In the cold of Janu- ary he quickly put on new outer garments, then sat on the tailgate to put on new boots. “Throw your gloves in the box, Paul. Then do ex- actly what you just saw me do.”

“How are you going to get rid of the box?”

“Trust me, I’ll have it done in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing will remain to tie this back to us, as long as you don’t for- get to dispose of the set that knife came from when you get back home.”

Paul nodded his head silently.

“Cheer up, Paul, we just saved the Church, you and I. Two Feathers couldn’t see it, but if that girl had children it would have meant the end of both the White Wing and the Red Wing. There wouldn’t be any- more wings, just an unholy hodge-podge growing like a cancer until it ate everything.”