TCE

E0

A bison gets thirsty eating grass all day out on the Great Plains and Squaw  River was a reliable source of water. A herd came near to  the source at the Island in the Sky where the stream was still fairly narrow. When the herd was taking drink Chief Wanica struck with the  Golden Gift,  taking  just one of them according to the needs of  the  Kuwapi People. It was done in such a stealthy way the rest of the herd barely noticed. In this way the Kuwapi were able to sustain themselves without ranging far afield to hunt.

Later the People saw the first wagon trains of white skin settlers use the ford at the river. The white skins used their fire sticks to drop some of the animals merely to clear the way and they did not even take the animals  for food. Fair enough, Wanica thought, there was  plenty  for all. But by the second year the herds had grown noticeably thinner, and many of the People remembered the fire sticks. The year after that no large game animals were seen at all. The People had to scratch a living from small game, or from the scrawny solitary black-tail  deer they sometimes chanced upon. A few of of the hunters murmured openly, recalling with glowing fondness the time of Chief Bad Heart Bull, perhaps forgetting that even during that lost "Golden Age" it was still Wanica who led the hunts.

The army of the Whites set up an outpost twelve river miles eastward of the Island in the Sky they called Fort Price. Captain John Smalley commanded a company of mounted  rifles  detached north  from the 6th Calvalry Regiment,  and despite his bitter  hatred for the dead-end post he had been assigned, snack in the middle of the biggest zone of nothing in the American West, Smalley maintained  good relations  with Chief Wanica and the Kuwapi. For one reason, they all  somehow  spoke  passable English, and the daughter-in-law of  the  Chief  actually spoke it better than most Whites. He considered the People to be relatively peaceful. But contacts were necessarily limited because  the People are so poor they have almost nothing to trade. "This fort ain't exactly a charity outfit," he was often heard to say. Ten Kuwapi women lived at the fort and the less busy the soldiers were the more busy the women were.

One day eight whiteskins came mounted on horses, cracking whips, two on  Point, two  on Flank, and  two  on Drag,  with a cook with his own wagon  in  the rear  and  one man riding out front picking the best path for  five  hundred  animals  bulkier  than  any game  animal save  the  bison. The whites drove  their herd to an island in Squaw River  where  the  best grass  grew. They did  this without the basic courtesy of  offering Chief  Wanica  one or two head as toll. Miffed, the Chief dispatched hunters to take payment in kind with a few well-placed arrows. The white men fired back and wo Kuwapi hunters were killed, which was more than Wanica could afford to pay to learn how the strange new animals  tasted. The Kuwapi withdrew halfway up the eastern flank  of Green Dome and watched as the herd was driven to the north bank.

John Morrison, the man  on Point who owned the cattle, told his  boys to stand fast and defend the herd while he rode hell-for-leather downstream  to Fort Price and told Captain Smalley he wanted  to  'donate' twenty  head  but there was the slight matter of  an  Indian  problem. Chief Wanica  knew what was coming, and made his  plans  accordingly. Then he rode back down to the river with a boy named Tashunka sitting behind him, They started to field-dress one of the fallen cows. E1

The bugle  sounded and  Fort Price  vomited seventy  mounted men plus  John Morrison. Wanica and Tashunka were slicing the guts out of a cow, and the  rest  of his hunters, maybe  twenty  men, were  watching from four  hundred  feet above it all. When the cavalry showed up the Kuwapi rode down the hill and down the river, commanded by  Jashen, with  his wife  Leliel leading the way before all the horses, amazingly, on foot. Smalley divided his forces and sent almost sixty of his men after the hunters, all led  by  Lt. Lambert Welles. But Smalley, Morrison, and twelve other soldiers begin circling Wanica and the  boy. They slowly closed in.

Along the river a chase ensued. Six river miles from Fort Price is a low ridge  running north to south, and the Squaw River, which is really  a large creek, cut straight through it in a short twisting little canyon with steep walls and no path except for the river itself. Here Welles got his T crossed. Sixty soldiers were riding in single file and ten Kuwapi waited at the mouth of  the  canyon firing arrows as they came  up  one-by-one. So Welles ordered  a countermarch, which was an even worse  tactic. The other ten Kuwapi rolled boulders down on them and broke the  legs  of their horses. After that it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The Kuwapi hunters left one soldier alive, tied to a tree,  with  one hand  free to scoop up river water to drink, but the knot was too  far away  to  unravel. Such was their custom, that tales  of their  ferocity would spread. Then the warriors of the People continued down the river to engage any reserve forces left behind at Fort Price. There were five soldiers on the sick list who didn't make  the  raid, they  were supposed to hold the fort. They sent forth the ten  Kuwapi women held as slaves and Jashen was entreated.

Back at  the ford Smalley and Morrison moved closer to  Chief  Wanica while  four  soldiers supporting the Captain orbited the  scene  at  a stately  trot. "God damn it Chief," he said, "you know better than to start acting like the Northern Raiders."

"What are you going to do to him?" Morrison asked.

"Take him into custody for cattle rustling. He’ll be hanged. That'll have to  do.  The boy can go. The rest of these red fellows were just following  orders.  They  got  families  to  feed. And  now they can pick themselves a new chief."

Wanica, thanks to the English lessons of Leliel,  understood perfectly  what Smalley wanted to do to him, and he decided not to  go peacefully. He had  the Golden  Gift in his hand and pointed it right  at Smalley. The black shaft leaped out with its hideous sucking sound and sliced off the head of Smalley's horse Then Smalley himself was rendered in two. That black line remained there, drinking in light and air, while five more orbiting horses and men ran right into it, including Paul  Morrison.

After that Wanica used the Golden Gift to get rid of the bodies of the men and  the horses he had slain. He knew the killing range of  the Golden  Gift  was  not much longer than a spear. Against a  troop  of whites armed with firesticks he would be helpless, and he did yet know the  outcome  of the battle downriver. He knew the Whites would  kill him, and his son, and his warriors, and no doubt all of the women  and children and old men in the camp of the People as E2

well in retribution for him killing the white chief. There were rumors of such atrocities happening  before. Then the army of the whites would have the  Golden Gift. Wanica needed to think fast. He didn’t know, at the time, that his son had solved his problem for him.

The pilgrims of Five Corners Free Congregation arrived at the foot of Green Dome at dusk. The four fallen warriors of the People, Left Hand, Half Yellow Face, Kill Eagle, and Hairy Moccasin, were lying on a bier of branches taken from woody shrubs. And it was on this solemn occa- sion  when  the Kuwapi People and the settlers of Mark  Lange's  group were  first  gathered  all together.

In full  view of everyone Chief Wanica, with words of  reverence  for Wakan  Tanka,  struck off the Golden Gift and made the bodies  of  his dead men disappear. The Whites were struck speechless. Coming as they did from a religious background, such a display could be nothing other than the  power  of God made manifest. "This is a sign!" they exclaimed. They recognized the Golden  Gift from the translation  of  the  White  Scroll read to them by Lange. It was  the  same  “killing relic”  wielded by  Prince  Melchizedek when he  first  encountered father Abraham. Not merely the same kind, but  literally the same artifact.

"God has brought us all together," Lange declared, "White man and Red man alike, in this land of His choosing, flowing with milk and honey." At Lange's words all the people looked around in the fading light and took in the barren, mostly treeless grasslands. Lange cleared his throat. "Here we all shall remain, and prosper with God's blessings!" Lange knew he couldn't just take the weapon outright, as it was holy, a divine gift, so it could never be defiled by base theft. Obviously the People of Wanica and the remnant of the Five Corners Free Congregation would have  to be permanent and equal (but separate) partners. The doctrine of  matrimonial consanguinity, or cousin-marriage, would  prevent  any joining between the two sides, thus salving some of the settlers' horror at any race-mixing.

After the funeral there followed a good old-fashioned mass conversion of  the entire Kuwapi people, followed by their assembly-line  baptism in   the cold waters of the Squaw River. They were each plunged  into the stream three times using total immersion, since Lange was at heart still  a Dunker. So a new congregation was born, the Church of Green Dome, with a White Wing and a Red Wing, "Two lungs by which the united people of the Creator draw new breath," Lange declared.

That night Wanica's people returned to their encampment at the  4,650 foot  level of Green Dome, on a wide bench on the eastern side of  the hill. In the morning, aided by the Whites, they began to turn it into a permanent  village. Eight sod houses were constructed within  the first  month, and these were gradually improved as time went  on,  but many of the Kuwapi continued to dwell in their tipis.

Gary Bergin and his wife Marge chose the valley of  Squaw  River   due south of Green Dome and begin  pulling  up  dead stumps of burnt trees to establish a farm, aided by their children Dale, Owen, Linda, Grace. Baby Megan was still far too young. The Bergins also had the E3

eager labor of some of Wanica's men, once Gary explained to them what he was trying  to  do. He proposed to his new friends a life free  of  any  reliance on roaming herds of animals. It would not be imposed on  the  Red  Wing, who traditionally relied on hunting, but it was   available to any of them who accepted it freely and were willing to work hard.

Alfred Porter,  his wife Caroline, and their three  children  George, Ida,  and  Rachel established their  farm near the place  where  Chief Wanica slew Paul Morrison and the five white soldiers, a little to the north  of the river ford. Water was plentiful there, diverted  by  a ditch from higher up the slope, and they grew a wide variety of  green stuff  as  though they  had an extended backyard  garden. Something about  the  Porters putting down roots made the Kuwapi People  forget all about the  Northern Raiders and the American soldiers.

Thomas Henry, his wife Melanie, and their four younger children  Kenneth,  Jane,  Faith, and Susan choose a spot for  their  homestead  at  elevation 4,400 on the slope of Green Dome a little below the  village of the People. At first they grew oxen, taken from the animals that accompanied   them on  the pilgrimage, but they also planted  rows  of apple  trees,  and  in the years  to  come their orchards  spread  all over the eastern  slopes  of Green  Dome. Their eldest son Lee Henry, together  with his  new  bride Tamara, raised a few  sheep,  purchased from  another  drive of livestock that used the ford  soon  after  the Stiffnecks arrived. The following summer a cattle drive also used the ford  and  the Henrys bought dairy cows. Their animals grazed in  the shade of their family's fruit trees.

David and Ann Krause, with their crowd of seven children Edwin, Linda, Gail, Robert, Carl, Helen, and Tom settled to the south of the  river ford and there they took to raising horses, having received back  most of the horses they loaned to make the pilgrimage. The younger Krause children became great friends with the younger Kuwapi children, forming bonds that would carry on through the decades.

The 6th  Cavalry Regiment came up from Texas looking for  the  blood- thirsty warriors who wiped out a whole company of their men and  found only a docile tribe of newly-Christianized converts helping white settlers grow some crops. When pressed, the farmers said they knew there was  an  empty fort nearby, but did not know how it came to  be  abandoned, and there was no evidence to give lie to their testimony. The bodies  of  the men and horses which fell along the  river  were  now  totally  gone,  with  not even rock cairns to  mark  where  they  were  buried, if they were buried. So the Army broke up the fort and left,  marking  the  whole  thing down as one of the spookier  mysteries   of  the  high plains.

The white settlers who did not take up the plow instead  platted  out the  town  of Headwater on both sides of the river  crossing. In the  beginning  these were Harry and Hester Hilling with their  four  chil- dren,  Brandon, Oscar, Roy, and Nancy, who  built  and ran  a  general store. Ivar and Anna Zinter operated  a blacksmith  shop. Like the Zinters, Mark Lange and his wife  Joanna were childless, but not  for much longer. In a few years a boy named Clark was born to the Langes, closely followed by David, who was born to the Zinters.

E4

Mark built a tabernacle on the summit of Green Dome, which  was  just under 5,000 above sea level, but only about 900 feet above the plains. From there one  could see nearly forty miles out over the grasslands, in  every direction. The tabernacle was built over the cairn of  the Artifact,  commemorating the very place where Wanica and  Jashen  came face-to-face  with  God. The white clam shell thing was considered  a holy relic to be hidden and protected by the altar, not for  outsiders to gawk at. Part of the weekly worship at the Green Dome tabernacle consisted  of arduous physical toil, an ascent of the small mountain by foot in  any weather,  which made the services there seem of much  greater  import. Only the very elderly and the infirm were taken to Sunday worship  by animal muscle.

On September 1, 1866, Lange declared himself the first Prophet of the Church Green Dome, and his growing  family  dwelt in a modest home near the tabernacle. Wanica also lived  near the summit of Green Dome, as he remained  the Chief  of   the original  inhabitants,  but  he was also  called   the  Apostle   of   the Church. If Mark Lange passed on before he  did, Chief   Wanica  would become  the Prophet of the Church and  choose  a new  Apostle from  among the Whites. Thus Church leadership, it was hoped, would alternate smoothly  between the Red and White wings. The Green Dome Tabernacle was the gathering places for all the people, Red and  White, every Sunday. With each homily the Prophet  and  the Apostle established the wall of Church doctrine steadily, like  laying bricks.

One of the doctrines, which was really a concession to the Kuwapi  people,  was that everyone, both male and  female,  must  wear their hair long and tied into a pony tail. So after a time, the members of  the Green Dome Church were called Ponies by  outsiders,  and later  even the Stiffnecks called themselves that. The Kuwapi  were also introduced to the Western concept  of  surnames. Jashen  remembered his original given name of Shy Bear and  chose  the single  name Shybear to be his surname.

In 1869  the rumor of gold was heard tell along the Squaw  River  and Headwater swelled with the influx of prospectors hungry for the  shiny yellow stuff. Some got rich, but most of the Sixty-Niners struck out. Some of these stayed in Headwater as converts to the  Church. After the rail line connected Headwater to the new Union Pacific line  run- ning across the country it was easy for cousins of the new converts to make  their way west to new lives as wives of the  former  prospectors and  even the children of the original settlers.

Gradually the tabernacle on Green Dome was expanded into a much larger wooden and whitewashed edifice called the Green Dome Temple. When it was complete Prophet Mark Lange was fifty-three years of age. Secondary tabernacles were established throughout the United States but all Green  Dome  funerals still took place at the  original  site. Chief Wanica  died at the age of 84. He lay in state in  the  Temple sanctuary  for  fourteen  days. Many Greendomites scattered across the country journeyed  by  train  or  even  by  the  newfangled horseless  carriages  to  pay  their  last   respects. When the  Prophet  Lange committed  the Chief's body directly  into  the hands  of God it was a sight that few but  the oldest members  present had ever seen, for the  Church  grew far  beyond the dreams of her founders. During the Last Rites Lange announced that Wanica’s son Jashen Shybear was the new Apostle. E5

For most of the attendees it was a ceremony they would not otherwise witness until they were well  into middle-age when their parents died, and of course everyone prayed they would  never  have to attend. But the Green Dome Church had grown  so large that every day except Sundays the Temple was booked for farewell Rites.

But not everything  was  so grim. During the fair held in honor  of  the Prophet's  sixty-fifth birthday a barnstormer came to  town,  offering rides in his biplane. Absolutely fearless, Mark Lange stepped up to be the first to fly, to the delight of everyone present. Few religious leaders have been so beloved, at least among his own faithful. Outsiders, however, considered Greendomism to be a dangerous cult,  on  the same order as Mormons, Satanists, or even the deeply-despised Roman  Catholics. Critics thought them to be non-Christian sun-worshipers who preserved the  commandments of the devil in their  new  'scriptures', thought  Jesus to  be both  male and female, and married  their  close kin. And the truth  be told, the critics were absolutely right.

Two years later the Great War broke out in Europe and many Green Dome tabernacles  in France and the Low Countries were destroyed  by  stray shells. At the bidding of the Prophet a special collection was taken up to bring succor to the wartime mission field. With these funds in hand, Prophet Lange boarded the steam liner Reina Regenta in New York with gold bullion to aid the faithful in nations torn by the conflict. It was the first truly industrial war on Earth, and  it  had grown  to  rage  across much of the world. Survivors of the voyage across the Atlantic told of the implacable patience of Prophet Mark Lange as he was dogged day and night by a news- paper reporter named Rupert Keller, who had an inexplicable  personal beef with Lange's "cult".

When the ship was in the frigid waters almost precisely in the  center of the ocean far from any help she  took two torpedoes from a German U-boat. The Reina Regenta listed sharply to the side, drowning half  her lifeboats. Frantically, the lifeboats on her port side were laden with passengers and released but there were not enough for everyone and no chance  of raising the floundering ones on the starboard  side. Women and children were saved first, and then old men were allowed  to board. Prophet Mark Lange was placed in the last lifeboat, but before it was lowered  to the sea he spied Rupert Keller standing on the  deck of the doomed  ship,  contemplating death. The Prophet bounded out   of  his place and offered his seat to the reporter. "Happy birthday, son," he said  with  a gentle smile. Lange was not joyful, since all living things tried to avoid death by their very nature, but he was encouraged by his memory of Heaven  and the promise of Lord Yeshua that he would see it once more. He spread his  encouragement  around  to the rest of the  doomed  passengers  on board. In this way he made their passing a little bit easier. There was just enough time for the last lifeboat to get away before the ship rolled completely over and took everyone aboard down to the frigid and murky depths of the ocean. The sinking helped spur the opinion of the American public to enter the war.

Erik Zinter was one of the merry but homesick doughboys  who   went  into battle in 1918 singing and whooping with all the enthusiasm of  a  college football team pouring out onto the field just before  kickoff. They came with six hundred aircraft plus one hundred forty-four tanks under  Col. George Patton. Three thousand pieces of field  artillery unleashed by the Allied side E6

and countless bombs dropped from the air tore  the battlefield into a pock-marked pigsty filled with mud. The Germans withdrew but they fought a rear-guard action with a ferocious bite.

Erik took two rounds from a Bergmann Maschinenpistole 18/1 that shattered  the bone in his upper left arm and he  developed  gas gangrene in the field hospital lying just out of range of enemy  fire. The amputation was performed in less-than-ideal circumstances. Afterward Erik rode a train to Paris with a hundred other casualties. The same train then carried soldiers fresh off the boat back to   the  Western Front, which had become a vast machine for mangling and  killing  men. In Paris Erik met a Red Cross nurse whose name-tag bore a surname  he recognized. While she changed his dressings Erik learned that  Clara was   of  the Hursts who had stayed behind in Pennsylvania  when the wagon train went west so she knew little about his Church. Soon they knew they shared the same great-grandmother. They were second cousins.

That and her all American girl next door good looks interested Erik. For her part Clara was pleased how Erik maintained a  good  attitude despite  his misfortune. He didn't feel sorry for himself, even after losing an arm. There was pain but right on through it Erik maintained a deliciously wicked sense of humor. They could not talk for long but Clara  passed along to him the address of her parents in  Pennsylvania after  he declared he wanted to stay in touch with her when they  went home. Their pen  pal relationship gradually blossomed into  something  they thought was love.

In 1922 Erik drove halfway across the country in his Model T. It took a full month. He used the Yellowstone Auto Trail and aside   from two big auto repairs his outlays averaged five dollars  a day. Part of this  money came from his veterans' 'bonus'  of  sixty  dollars   but some employers went out of their way to  give  returning vets seniority. Erik accepted a job in Headwater painting houses using his  remaining arm, and spent three years laying aside for the wedding. In  Clara's hometown Erik sold his tin lizzie to make up for what he still  needed to pay for the  nuptials. Pennsylvania was the first anti-cousin marriage state, but only first cousins  couldn't get hitched, not second ones. And they were so obviously   in   love  both of Clara's parents gave  their  blessing. But Erik's parents back in Headwater were a harder sell. After the train ride  west he became the black sheep of the family for passing over  a perfectly  good  (but horsefaced) local first cousin for  a  beautiful second   cousin  from back east. Why, any heathen would do as   much!

Kimberly Zinter was born to Erik and Clara in 1925. Kim knew her two best friends Sofie Krause and Dory Twofeathers from as early she could remember,  as  far back as the economically frothy days of  1928  when they   shared the same nursery while even their mothers  found   work. By 1932 the Depression really started to bite. Clara was fired first, but  soon  even Erik was jobless. Builders found applicants with  two good  arms  suddenly willing to paint. Still, Erik retained the  good spirits that had endeared him to Clara in that Paris hospital. There  were   rich seams of bituminous coal inside Green  Dome   hill  and under  Headwater itself but the geology of the area was so  folded  and  jumbled  there  will never be an economical way to  reach  it  by drilling a straight shaft. The coal was exposed only in spots. During the Great Depression Erik Zinter created twisting passageways  through  the bulk of Green Dome, E7

though at the time no one knew how he managed the  feat, and he absolutely refused to speak of it. By day other men followed  in his wake to reinforce the tunnels with timber and  remove the coal. In the heart of the Great Depression, Headwater  experienced a  boom. Great heaps of black gold from the mines began to pile up on docks in Chicago. Suddenly the unemployed, unemployable Erik Zinter had a brand new brick  red Ford Model B, his first automobile since  selling  his Model  T, and he also completely paid off his modest home. There was enough money left over to send Kim to the Green Dome parochial  school to  be with her friends.

In 1937 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. At 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,  everything from lunch to masterpieces  of amorous soliloquy.

Doriel Shybear. 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 Jashen, the Prophet of the Church,  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  insisted   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.

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  annoyed  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.

Kimberly Zinter: Auburn hair halfway between mahogany and carrot-top. Light green eyes. She had a pretty face but she was a little chubby,  or perhaps just Rubenesque. 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. Kim was an  infidel. She didn't really believe  any of that stuff about Chief Wanica  and the  Golden Gift written in  the Green Book,  which was testimony to how tightly her father Erik was capable  of keeping Jashen’s secret. But 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.'

E8

For science class the  teacher paired everyone off as  lab  partners. Kim ended up with Sofie,  and  Dory ended  up  with har brother Gabriel. But Sofie kicked Gabriel out of hez seat with   "no  offense  pally"   and  sent  hem shambling towards Kim,  an adjustment  in  the teacher's   choice. As time went on Gabriel went so far as to hold Kim’s 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 since bathing suits for kids were unknown there was no more keeping the Shybear family secret. Kim and Sofie learned that  Gabriel was  both  a boy and a girl   at   the same  time. The four of them stood naked in  a square, ten yards out into Lake 13 up  to  their thighs in  cool   water with no body modesty at all  because they  were good friends   and  nobody else was there. The boy part of Gabriel  was doing what  fourteen  year old boy parts usually do around girls. Kim asked about the one  ball. "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  decoration either. "Gabriel  is what  we  call  an ambi," Dory said. “A young nephil. A little bit older and he’ll be a jen.”

Kim and Sofie were stunned to silence. When Gabriel saw their  unbelief he 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 three, then said,  incredulously,  "You're saying you're  actually one  of the nephilim?"

Dory explaining they  both  had  copies of  their parent’s Z sex chromosomes.

"What about you?" Sophie asked, looking at Dory. "You're Gabriel's sister so why didn't you end up with a  dangler too?"

"I'm not a nephil, I'm an angel. That's why  I'm even  taller than Gabriel.” Dory looked  askance at both of  har friends.  "None  of  this should be new to  you, right Kim. Right, Sofie? Don't you two believe what’s written in the Book of Green Dome?"

"Of course I believe all  that stuff in the Green Book and  the Bible,"  Kim answered, annoyed at the insinuation she was an apostate. "God, heaven, miracles, the resurrection, everyone  believes  it happened, back then. But  nobody believes  it happens now."

E9

Sofie said,  "Kim is absolutely right. Everybody knows it, but nobody is ready to lose face and ever admit what they all know."

"If you were just talking about the  Bible you'd have a point," Gabriel  said. 'Half the Green Book is corrections  to the stories   in  the Bible. But the new claims  in  the Book  of Green Dome? Everything  in there really happened. It's like no other holy text  ever written."

Kim and Sophie  accepted  this rebuke  and nodded their   heads   silently,   unprepared  to  call  their friends  liars. Besides,  the evidence   was  there  for them to  see between   the  legs  of  Gabriel. Kim asked, "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.

Gabriel, Kim, Sofie  and  Dory were  all firmly  middle-class,   evidenced   by their attendance  at  the Church's private  school. Their parents  were sufficiently well-off  to provide  instruments when they  took  band  class, except Kim's  only  instrument was her  own  voice. She was a member of the Green Dome  Temple Girl's Choir,  an  expressive  mezzo-soprano  with a voice that belied her  fifteen  years  and  verged on  being too breathy  and  sensuous for spiritual music. Listeners compared her favorably to Peggy Lee. Dory  played   a   double-bass standing  on  an  end-pin   sha    had lengthened   to  be more  comfortable. Sometimes sha set  down   har  French bow and plucked the strings pizzicato  with  meandering  bass  lines,   a  soundtrack  to daydreams sha  was  a  black  cat  slinking around at night. Sofie Krause pounded the  skins with  all the power that made her   a formidable  offensive  guard,  yet  sha ran    effortlessly   in   and   around Dory's  machine-like bass,  averting expectations  and  punctuating    her licks with sixteenth-note drum fills as endlessly  unique as snowflakes. Gabriel Shybear had no  innate musical talent but che  figured   that was   the reason che was taking  band class,  after all. After a  semester  learning scales on a recorder Gabriel took up the  sax. Kim started dabbling on piano and soon the kids  had  a basic jazz  combo on their hands. Sophie Krause and  Dory formed the constant pulsing heart of the act. After Sophie changed  her name to Hunky  the  band would,  in   fact,  be  named   Hunky-Dory after  the  rhythm section.

Word arrived of the Doolittle Raid after five months of   unrelenting bad   news  following Pearl Harbor. In celebration,   the  conductor  of the Green Dome  Temple School  band class led a recital  of  patriotic John Philip Sousa marches, attended by half of Headwater. For an encore the class  tore into  a  cover of the  classic  Duke Ellington standard  'It Don't Mean  A Thing (If It Ain't Got That  Swing)'  with Kim  soloing on vocals and Gabriel on sax. It was the first real triumph of the future Hunky-Dory. For Kim the only  downside  in all  this was how her  father   didn't make  the recital despite his  solemn promise to do so. She could see  her  mother  sitting out there in the  gym and  how she  kept  a  seat  saved  for him, but even to the end of the  encore the seat was  never filled. Erik Zinter did not  come  home all  that  night and even   the   next morning.