It was a good solid yellow soap, and it worked well enough in ice water. I took my change of clothes with me and washed out the dirty ones, carried them back to the encampment, and hung them on the community line, along with my washed-out, wrung-out towel.

Then Chuck came and got me for lunch. With his drooping mustache, he looked like a Scandinavian travel advertis.e.m.e.nt. Haris had made some deerburgers, fried with onion. They sat me at the middle of the table, where I could get the full benefit of the love-buzzing, the hush whenever I spoke, the smiles and eye contact and shameless flattery. Yes, they all knew as soon as they saw me that I would be a wonderful addition to the group. Just wonderful. Just what they had been waiting for. Persival and Alvor sat alone at the other table, talking in low voices.

The conversation was slightly strained, and I guessed it was because they felt they should not talk about Nicky, but he was ever-present on the edge of memory. I made a few fruitless efforts to steer the conversation toward politics and violence, but they fielded them deftly and threw to another base.

After cleanup, a screen was set up and a projector wheeled out. I thought I was going to hear a tape by the celebrated Sister Elena Marie, but it was a cranky old black-and-white motion picture about The Long March; with a noisy sound track, a voice-over with a marked British accent, a lot of running, shooting, and gesticulating. They marched across China and up into the hills and caves, while my chin kept dropping onto my chest and I kept waking with a start. It ended with a loud blast of martial music which roused me enough to get up and say good night and go back to my trailer. I couldn"t find the light switch and finally gave up and went to bed in the dark.

I was awakened by the click of the latch on the flimsy door of the trailer, a stealthy and barely audible squeak as it was opened. I wondered if one of the team had decided to correct Persival"s decision to keep me alive. I moved in the bunk until I had my shoulders against the wall, until I was braced to move as quickly as I had to.

The generator was silent, the encampment dark. Just enough starlight came through the window above the bunk for me to make out a pale figure moving toward me. It stopped a couple of feet away, and I heard a silky whisper of fabric, caught a faint scent of female, and realized that Nena or Stella was paying me a visit. I guessed I had been asleep for an hour.

She picked up a corner of the blanket and came sliding into the bunk, shuddering with the cold, reaching to embrace me. I faked a great start of surprise.

"It"s me, Brother Thomas," she whispered. "It"s Stella."

So I was being gifted with the sallow blond lady with the inadequate jaw. "What"s going on?"

"Well, whatever you want to go on. Okay?"

"Whose idea is this?"

"What difference would that make?"

"I"d like to know."

"You do a lot of talking, huh?"

I caught her questing hand by the wrist and took it away from me and said, "Is there anything wrong with wanting to know?"

"Look, are you okay? I mean, you make it with women?"

"I like to talk first."

"Jesus Christ!" she said. And then, "I"m sorry. That"s blasphemy. But, you know, you are something else."

She turned onto her back, trying to separate herself from me totally, but the bunk was too narrow. Hip rested against hip, shoulder against shoulder.

"All it is," she said patiently, "you"re new. Probably they don"t want you being restless and wanting to sneak off or anything. So you get food and shelter and, once in a while, a piece of a.s.s. What does it cost? Nothing but time, right?"

"You sound as if you did some hooking."

"I was into it. So?"

"Where was that?"

"So you"re another one of those."

"Another what?"

"When I was a hooker, there was always a trick who wanted to know how I got into that line of work."

"Stella, settle down. Where are you going, anyway? Why the hostility? I can ask about you because I"m interested in you, can"t I? Is there a house rule against that?"

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Well, okay. I"m sorry. When I came in here, I was really ready, you know? I don"t feel that way very often. But what happens, you want to talk. So I"m losing the edge. It"s fading on me. I think I got that ready on account of Nicky dying. Death does it to me in a funny way, I guess. When somebody you know is suddenly dead forever, then I want to get laid. I"ve heard lots of people are like that. Like in shelters when there"s bombings going on. Maybe it goes back to instinct. Like in animals. If people are dying, it"s time to make more people and keep the population up. But there was a couple of years there when I couldn"t have come no matter what."

"What do you mean by that?"

"If you want talk instead of tail, I"ll give you talk. I"m from an absolutely nowhere place. Opportunity, Montana."

"Little west of b.u.t.te? South of Anaconda? Flint Creek Range and the South Fork?"

"Hey, you heard of it!" She turned and settled herself more comfortably, fitting the nape of her neck to my arm, one hand resting on my chest. "Been through there. When did you leave?"

"A long time ago. I don"t know who"s left there, if anybody."

"Run away?"

"Sort of. With a girlfriend. We got in with some rough people in Miami. I got busted for possession, and when I got out, I couldn"t find her. A cop put me on the streets, hustling. Then one day he beat me up bad because he thought I was holding out, and I met some people from the Church of the Apocrypha."

"In Miami?"

"You"ll find the Church everywhere these days. What I was thinking, I could use the Church. They"d take care of me and keep that freak cop away from me. I"d been beaten real bad. What I was then, I was a dumb, selfish, ignorant teenage hooker. What I needed most was some rest from cruising the streets and taking the marks back to that motel room. When I was rested up, I"d take off. But the people in the Church, they knew what I was thinking every minute. They never gave me a minute alone. They loved me. They believed I was precious and they made me think of myself as precious to them. I was a lazy little s.l.u.t, and they cured me of that. My G.o.d, I never worked so hard and so long in my life. It made hooking seem like picnics. Dumb dreary food and not enough sleep ever. Fifteen hours at a stretch, selling stuff to strangers, walking the streets carrying candy and thread and junk, begging money, making quotas. My weight went down to minus nothing. A lot of my hair fell out. I had a scaly rash all the time. I forgot about s.e.x. I stopped menstruating. My t.i.ts and my a.s.s like to shrunk away to nothing. And when I was about to believe the life was going to kill me, suddenly I realized I was doing G.o.d"s work, and that I wanted to drive myself even harder than they were driving me. And once I saw the Light and heard the Word, I started to get better. I ate tons of that sorry food they served at the dorm, and it tasted delicious. And I began to sell more stuff. I made people buy it. I turned in big scores every night and slept like a baby. I smiled and sang all the time. The Church had put my head back on straight. For the first time in my life I was really part of something. My life had meaning. I worked hard for the Church and for myself, and finally, they picked me for a different kind of work."

"This kind? Guns and bombs?"

"It"s G.o.d"s work."

"You said you joined the Weather Underground, didn"t you?"

"I didn"t join them. It was sort of like cooperative, you know? They bought me a plane ticket out to Portland, and a fellow met me at the airport and drove me practically all day in an old car way down into empty country where they were. I thought I was in pretty good shape, you know? Talk about p.o.o.ped! I used to get so tired I"d cry. But by three months, I could like run all day, you know? And I felt really alive. Then, when I could move right, they started all the other stuff. Weapons, marksmanship, cover and concealment, grenades, b.o.o.by traps, reading a compa.s.s and maps, and all that. They taught me stuff I never heard of. You know, I could go into the average kitchen anywhere in the States, and in about twenty minutes I could build a bomb you wouldn"t believe, just using what"s already there."

"I forget where you said you went after that."

"First I went back to Miami, and they took me... someplace where I met Sister Elena Marie, and it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. She"s fantastic. She knew allnabout me. She even seemed to know what I was thinking. She told me I was doing very well and I was one of the special ones planned by G.o.d for a special purpose. They got me a pa.s.sport to Amsterdam and I went with a Brother who"d been there before and from there by car to Sofia, and he turned me over to some sort of official who took me out to the camp. It was a lot the same as Oregon, except different weapons and a lot of stuff I can"t talk about. And, well, I got back to Miami, let me see, this is right after Christmas, and so it must have been seven months ago, and so I"ve been here six months. And maybe it will be six more before we... begin."

"Begin?"

"You know. We have to be given our a.s.signments and we have to have a lot of time studying and working and planning so that it will all be automatic. Then we"ll just, you know, go do them. It has to be all coordinated in order to work. We all have to be terribly, terribly careful."

"I saw you practicing something, you and Nena, and I think it was Haris and Ahman. Chuck was coaching and timing you."

"Oh, hey, you shouldn"t have seen that! Please don"t tell anybody, or somebody will get in trouble for not figuring out maybe you could see it. We didn"t know what would happen with you, and we thought you would probably be killed. Maybe that"s why somebody got careless. But there is always the very small chance you could get away, and if you could make somebody believe you when you told what you saw, then it might make big problems here."

"What were you doing? Your a.s.signments?"

"Oh, no. That"s just the Circle of Fire. It"s all in the speed, getting ready. Then it"s tricky howyou set the weapons. You put them on full automatic but you have to learn to give just the quickest little touch. Bzzzzt, bzzzzt, bzzzzt, like not more than five or six shots each burst. You touch the trigger when the targets are thick enough in front of you. You keep it at belly level, because that"s the way the most damage is done in a crowd."

Yes, indeed, I thought. Get the adults in the belly, the kids in the chest, and the littles in the head bones.

"Will that be your a.s.signment?"

"Oh, no. That would be a waste of people like us. They say there are people to do that who know how to do just that, and they"re willing to do it. I think there"s a special place where they train. They don"t need as much physical training or training in a lot of different kinds of things. We were just doing it as a kind of a training exercise. That"s all. So we can do it if we have to someday."

"It would be hard to do."

"I know. I know." Her tone was subdued and thoughtful.

I didn"t know where to take it from there. I had to a.s.sume the trailer was bugged. Yet she would know if it were, and she wasn"t sufficiently guarded. She wasn"t hesitant in the way people are who know the tape is running.

"It"s hard to see the point in doing it at all."

"Doing what?"

"Well, killing innocent people."

"Innocent of what, Brother? If you kill soldiers or police, it doesn"t make enough difference. They signed up to take that risk. The people in this country are oppressed and they don"t know it, and they don"t give a d.a.m.n. All the rest of the world is involved in a bitter struggle, and here the people are fat, happy, and dumb. The captive press and the television keep telling them they are the best people in the world in the best country in the world. The dirt and pain and sickness and poverty are all covered up. No person has a chance against the capitalist bureaucracy. We"ve learned that little attacks here and there are meaningless. Like fighting a pillow. They actually think they"re free, the fools, even while they are supporting a regime that exports arms all over the world to the other oppressors. We have to make this fat dumb happy public sit up and take notice of the hidden tyranny that is oppressing them. How do we do that?"

Such a lot of it was by rote, repeated from memory in a sentence structure alien to her usual patterns. "How do we do it, Sister?"

"We make the oppressors visible to the people by giving them reason to show how cruel and tough they can be. We force them to react. Like Chicago and Kent State, but much much more."

"By going out and killing people?"

"That isn"t the purpose, Brother. To kill people. Our civilization has gotten too complicated. It"s full of machines and plastics. Brother Persival says it is very sick, and like a sick person, it can"t survive if a lot of other things happen to it."

"Such as?"

"Oh, we won"t go after things that are really protected, like army places and shipyards and nuclear power plants and government buildings. That"s dumb. You can bring everything tumbling down by going after things that would take years to fix. Big gas pipelines and oil pipelines. Bridges and tunnels and big computer places. Refineries and chemical plants and control towers. TV stations and newspaper pressrooms. Blow "em up and burn "em down. Targets of opportunity. Anyway, it"s all being worked out. And then we"ll know what our part of it is. I hope I don"t get stuff to do that"s too hard. I mean I want to be able to get it done. Then if I get away, okay, and if I don"t, okay. But I"d hate to mess up. I hope I don"t get a tunnel. I get really itchy going through tunnels. I think of all that water coming down on me."

"How do you do a tunnel?"

"Two people and two vehicles, right? The second one is an old truck. You"ve got a good big load of explosives, labeled something else. It takes a big blast. The lead car stops and you stop the truck and yank the wire that starts the threeminute timer. Then you run and get in the lead car and get out of there. It"s the same for some kinds of bridges. I really don"t want to do a tunnel. They make me so nervous I"ll do something wrong."

She had turned onto her side, worked her head onto my shoulder. Her arm lay across my chest, her knees against the side of my thigh. She sighed and said, "I didn"t have any interest in s.e.x at all until I was in training overseas. Then it started to all come back. It"s like that with most of the women who join. I mean the Church becomes the most important love life you have, and it wipes out everything else for a while. Then it"s never as important again as it once was to you." She kissed the side of my throat and said, "Enough of all this talking already? You want to make it now?" She snugged the length of her body against me. This was a frightening little engine of destruction, all trained, primed, toughened, waiting only for someone to aim it at a target. Her breath had a faint scent of the deerburger onions. Her hair smelled clean, and her body had a slight coppery odor of perspiration. I remembered noticing at the table that her fingernails were chewed down to the quick.

Poor little a.s.sa.s.sin. She had gone out into the world with an empty head, and somebody had crammed a single frightful idea into it, dressed up with a lot of important-sounding rhetoric. She couldn"t know the frightfulness of the idea because she had nothing by which to measure it. Fifteen to forty groups of from eight to fifteen? From a hundred and twenty to six hundred of them. So take the smallest number, cut it in half, and think about sixty people like this one, armed, mobilized, superbly equipped, and aimed at the pressure points of our culture.

I remembered one of Meyer"s concepts about cultural resiliency. In the third world, the village of one thousand can provide itself with what it needs for survival. Smash the cities and half the villages, and the other half keep going. In our world, the village of one thousand has to import water, fuel, food, clothing, medicine, electric power, and entertainment. Smash the cities and all the villages die. And the city itself is frail. It has little nerve-center nodules. Water plant, power transmission lines, telephone switching facilities. I was beginning to learn the purpose behind Brother t.i.tus, and the reason for all the extraordinary caution.

And if that extraordinary caution carried over to all things, and a.s.suming the trailer was not bugged, then Stella would be asked to give a report about her lovemaking with Brother Thomas.

"Oh, all we did was talk. He asked a lot of questions and we talked, and then after all that, he didn"t want to. He said he wasn"t gay, but he just didn"t feel like it."

She had begun to use her hooker skills, and I had begun to respond to her. After all, what the h.e.l.l. She was skillful and knowing. To her I was a tumescence of a certain length and girth, differing hardly at all from the many hundreds of others. Emotions need not be involved. I would think only of sensation. It did not have to have anything to do with mind and memory. As I began to switch roles from submission to domination, I told myself I could not, in any circ.u.mstances, think about the face and body and love of Gretel Howard.

I sagged back beside Stella and she said, "Hey, what happens?"

"I"m sorry."

"Did something about me put you off, honey?"

"No. It wasn"t anything like that."

"What then?"

"I don"t know."

"This sure isn"t turning out to be one of my better nights."

"I"m sorry."

"Look, I"m not sore. You know what I think it was? It was being conned into shooting Nicky like you did. Something like that, if you"re not used to it, can really shake you up inside. And then me coming in here like this when you weren"t expecting it. And after all, Brother, you are not some eighteen-year-old guy who can get it off before he"s unzipped. These things happen. Don"t worry about me. I lost it too. Too much talking."

"I"m sorry."

"Let"s just talk. I kind of like talking to you. And maybe we can have a little nap, and after that maybe we"ll both be okay again, you know? How about that?"

"All right."

"You sure I didn"t spoil it for you somehow?"

"No. You"re... an attractive woman."

"I"m not much. I"ve got a pretty good body, compared to most. But I"ve got this tough yellowy skin, and if you look close, one eye points out a little bit, the right one. And the receding jaw. You know. I was saving up for an operation, a fellow that puts some kind of bone from your hip or someplace back here by the corners of your jaw and that pushes it forward, and then they fix your bite. I saw before-and-after pictures. It would really make a big difference. But that"s vanity, isn"t it? I"ll be twenty-six in two months. I used to think about marriage and babies. I think I"d be okay with babies. Better than they were with me, I know. My dad broke two fingers on my left hand once, grabbing me when he lost his temper. They say if you"ve been abused, you abuse your own. I can"t believe that. I"d be okay with kids. But there"s no point in even thinking about it now, is there? By this time next year, I"ll probably be dead. Like Nicky. He just went a little ahead of the rest of us."

"Are they supposed to be suicide missions?"

"Not really. Everybody is supposed to do their best to get away. And we"ll be given a staging area to go to where we can be regrouped and reequipped and given new a.s.signments. But if a person keeps doing it, how many times can you get away?"

"Everything will be in a state of confusion."

"You can believe it."

"But you know who is going to suffer the most, don"t you?"

"Sure. The bottom layer of society. The poor and the minorities and the old ones. They won"t have the money to take care of themselves when the food and the water and the medicines run out. They won"t be able to run. That"s when they"ll rise up against the state. Then there"ll be some kind of burning and killing. That"s when the whole thing goes to h.e.l.l for sure."

"And who takes charge after that"s all over?"

"The Church has plans, Brother. Big plans. You just wait. Big plans." Her voice trailed away and her breathing changed and deepened. A woman of her times. Ready to aim the Circle of Fire, belly high. Happy to be caressed, glad to make love. Good with babies, and no good with tunnels.

I had blundered into something extraordinary. A cult that was a cover for a deadly activism. Supported by curious international cooperatior.s. I wished I could talk to Meyer about it. I really had nothing to go on. I knew the temporary location of nine people and a cache of arms and explosives. One out of fifteen or forty of unknown size and location, of unknown target date. Meyer had said, many times, that we run a strange kind of country in the modern world. Customs and Immigration are in a sense token services. Any plausible-looking person can find many ways to come and go unimpeded. Anything that can be flown or floated can be brought in or taken out. We are a wide place in the road in the middle of the world, and they wander through, back and forth, marveling at the lack of restraints. It is, Meyer pointed out, a paradox. The openness which endangers our system is the product of the policy which says that to close our borders and enforce all our rules and back them up with guns would change the system just as completely as any alien force.

I hoped there were enough tough young men like Max and Jake. I hoped somebody had this whole operation taped and wired. I hoped there were long lenses peering through the pine forests, and a lot of career people making little marks on important maps.

Gray daylight was seeping into the trailer when I awakened. She was standing beside the bunk, pulling the long T-shirt down over her head, smoothing it to the contours of her hips with the backs of her hands.

She smiled and leaned and kissed me lightly. "Hey, we slept too long. I got to go on kitchen duty. We"ll try it another time?"