walk past her; he in turn ducked his head to say something to Dulcie; Ana smiled absently to herself.
There was no TRANSFORMATION mural in this dining room, just a lot of mismatched chairs and tables in states ranging from new and cheap to old and rickety. The room had probably begun life as a ballroom, a place for the Victorian father's numerous daughters to display themselves and catch their husbands, but the decorative wallpaper, velvet drapes, and gilt-edged mirrors had all long since been removed from the walls and the wooden dance floor was worn and speckled with white emulsion from a clumsy paint job. It echoed; the noise in there during a meal would be riotous.
Richard dumped the last of their things and vanished. In his place a familiar tall, dark-haired, ascetic-looking figure walked into the room. Ana had been correct to suspect, when she saw the way the Change members in Arizona acted toward him, that Marc Bennett held a high rank in the organization, because here he was to give them their welcome speech—although very little welcome did it contain. He waited imperiously for their attention before he began his carefully composed talk, delivered in portentous tones.
'Before today, you have known Change as through a glass, darkly. Here, you will see what Arizona will eventually become, years from now. You stand at the very center of the Change movement, and you will find things here very different from what you're used to at Steven's place.' ('Steven's place,' thought Ana; was it imagination, or had that phrase sounded dismissive?) The Change compound you're used to is just getting started, and it has a long way to go before it makes Transformation. We've been here almost three times as long. Steven began his transformation here before Jonas sent him to Arizona, and he comes back here to continue his own Work.
'Age, of course, is no guarantee of either wisdom or authority.' Bennett flicked a brief glance across Ana, the oldest person in the room by nearly a decade, and she felt herself bristle at the implied judgment. 'However, here you will find a degree of concentration, a level of physical and spiritual activity that the Arizona community cannot begin to approach. We have been here for twelve years, and not a day has been wasted time.
'Dov has been with us before, but the rest of you were chosen to come here because in Steven's opinion, each of you is worthy of our greater efforts, capable of faster progress than he could give you in Arizona. We are on the edge of a great Work here, and Steven wanted you to be a part of it.
'I don't think I have to tell you what that means in terms of daily life here. I assume you all know that 'Great heat, great hope' is more than just a saying.' His eyes bored into each of them except for the small children, seeing comprehension in all, even Jason. Perhaps especially Jason.
Benjamin had clung to Ana during the disembarkation and as they passed through the house, and he still stood, clasping her hand and pressing his body up against her leg. The child seemed frightened of Marc Bennett. Behind Bennett a small cluster of men and women had appeared in the doorway, waiting for him to finish. One of the women moved slightly to see better, and Benjamin spotted her.
'Mommy!' he shouted, interrupting Bennett's dramatic monologue and startling them all. He flew across the wooden floor with his small feet pounding, missing a collision with the speaker by inches before he threw himself into the woman's arms, shouting his greetings and gladness, oblivious to everything else. His mother, however, was not. She tried to shush him, and when he would not contain his joy, she shot Bennett a glance of apology and more than a little apprehension before she ducked out of the door and away.
Bennett, expressionless, waited until the noise of their passing disappeared behind a closing door and picked up as if the interruption had not occurred.
'Here, 'Great heat, great hope' is an everyday reality. The pressures here are greater than you have known in Arizona. You were not ready for it there; now you are. It would have broken you there; now it will make you change.'
Ana shifted from one flight-swollen foot to the other, wondering uncomfortably why she had heard none of this in Arizona, and also what it was about men of religion that made them so damnably long-winded. Immediately his hooded eyes flashed back to rest on her. This time the scorn in them was clear.
'I'm not going to lie to you: you will not be comfortable here. You will work hard. You will sweat and strain and come to hate us all, but you will stay because you will be able to see and feel the results of your Work. Some of you will stay,' he added, and again his gaze touched Ana. She couldn't think what she had done to offend him, unless if, as she had come to suspect, there was rivalry between the two men, Steven's approval alone had condemned her in Bennett's eyes. Ah, well—all the better if she could turn his disapproving gaze from Steven's other protege, the teenager at her side. Even if Bennett was not the community's leader, he could make life difficult for Jason.
'I have nothing to say at the moment about the deeper implications of your life here. It is up to Jonas to set each of you on his or her Work, and tell you what you need to know. Jonas will speak to each of you alone over the next few days. If he thinks you belong here, you will stay; if not, you'll be going back to Arizona.
'In the meantime, let's talk about rules. Our pressures here are very intense, so it shouldn't come as any surprise to find that our regulations have to be tighter. It goes without saying that the same basic ground rules you had in Arizona apply—no drugs or drink, no music or distracting clothes, no personal possessions you're not willing to share, and absolutely no unauthorized jewelry. Beyond that, we have three requirements.
'One: Everybody works. If you're not carrying your weight, you go back.
'Two: No outside contact unless it's absolutely unavoidable, particularly in your first eight weeks here. In Arizona you welcomed outsiders, you came and went, you used the phone and wrote letters home, because you were at an early stage in your Work, where it didn't matter. Here we are higher. Because things are more concentrated, more delicate, outside interference can have terrible consequences. We have wrapped this estate around us to allow us to work undisturbed; none of us can endanger the whole by coming and going without supervision.
'Be aware, too, that the authorities are harassing us—issuing us with writs, plaguing us with financial enquiries, and just plain watching us. Some of you saw the panda car parked in the road, but they're a load more high tech when they want to be. Just assume that they're watching overhead at all times, and keep under cover whenever you can. When you're working in the fields, wear one of the hats we keep in the garden shed so they can't see your face. And never go near the boundaries—they have cameras.' Ana found that she was standing with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She wished Benjamin had not deserted her. She wished she were holding Dulcie. Most of all she wished she knew what the hell was going on. Why, for one thing, was Marc Bennett standing there pontificating? Where was Jonas Seraph? Both Steven and Glen had led her to believe that Jonas was in charge here, and Bennett's words had indicated that Jonas was present. Was he ill, and capable only of limited, individual interaction with the new members of Change?
Whatever the explanation, she did not like this at all. Forty minutes earlier she had been laughing in quiet pleasure at the gamboling lambs and the kittens, and suddenly here she was, listening to a speech about the terrible threats of the outside world that could have come from the mouth of any of a hundred mentally unstable leaders whose names went on to make the headlines. Cameras and spy planes? The abruptness of the change was shocking, as if she'd been dropped into an icy lake. She began to feel dizzy. Bennett went inexorably on.
'And rule three: You're newbies. Assume that anybody here knows more than you, do what they tell you, and you won't get in trouble. Once Jonas has approved you, you're going to work long hours, you won't get much sleep, and the only time you'll sit down is to eat or to meditate. Or in school,' he added in afterthought with a glance at Jason. 'And God help you if you fall asleep during meditation, because Jonas sure won't.'
By this time Dulcie was up in Jason's arms, hiding from her tiredness and confusion and the strange man's big voice. She cringed at his gust of laughter and turned a wary eye on him, but Jason was listening to Bennett with no small interest, and merely patted her absently.
'So,' Bennett said. There're the three main rules: work, apartness, and obedience. If you don't like it, tell us by lunchtime tomorrow, and we'll send you back to Arizona, nothing lost but a return ticket and a couple of days. Look around, talk to people, stay out of sight, and make up your mind. Steven sent you because he thought you needed the greater heat here to help your Transformation. If he was wrong, it's his fault, not yours.' The prospect of Steven's being wrong obviously pleased him. 'Any questions?'
Questions? Thought Ana. By God, she had questions, but they were hardly the sort Bennett would answer for her. Why hadn't she been warned? Oh yes, she'd been told that there were guns in the Los Angeles branch of Change and that a boy had been killed in Yokohama. But why had Glen neglected to mention the little fact that the English group was an armed camp run by a drill sergeant who saw camera lenses in the birds' nests? Damn you, Glen, she raged, though her face remained stiff and unrevealing.
She held the anger tightly, and fed it with the sight and sound of Marc Bennett and the thought of the flaying
