She had pulled herself out of the dust to shake her fist at the cold and uncaring stars, had worked herself raw for the chance to get close enough to pop one in the nose. And now she was, what, a nursemaid?
Lamont edged over to Constance, who was watching the spectacle with an expression somewhere between fascination and horror. “Blimey, love,” Lamont whispered to her. “Is that what you sounded like?”
Constance grimaced. “Could be. I don’t rightly recall.”
“It was,” Abner Wade confirmed somberly, his eyes locked on the ecstatic couple. “It was just like that, except more kinda passionate and torrid.”
Constance jabbed the young man hard in the gut with her elbow.
“Miss Beckett!” Rosemary exclaimed scoldingly, rushing to the aid of the young man, who was bending over now.
“I apologize,” Constance said flatly. “I suppose I feel a might ticklish about making a spectacle of myself like that.”
“Aw, shucks,” Abner said, the words coming out in a pained gasp. “We all get caught up in the spirit on occasion.”
Lamont’s mind traveled back to the Wednesday night service he had stumbled into on the colonist deck, and Abner’s breathless invitation to join in the strange proceedings. “Stone the crows!” He whispered to no one in particular. “This place, and these people…”
He looked at Barney, who returned his gaze earnestly and said, “With a fervent heart and an illuminated mind, I found myself standing at the threshold of revelation. I glimpsed the countenance of divinity, an enigmatic visage shrouded in enigmas and revelations. The eyes of the divine bore into my very essence, reflecting the kaleidoscope of existence, revealing both the divine and the human, the Alpha and Omega, the womb, the cave.”
Lamont snapped a photo of him with his recorder. “This too shall pass,” he assured Barney philosophically.
“It’s dangerous,” said Anna, who had made her way over to their group after detaching from Betty, who was continuing to expound on her experience at the same time as her husband. “It’s bad enough that there’s precious little to wholesomely occupy the time in this place.”
“Have you tried it?” Lamont asked.
“No,” Anna assured him. “And no force in heaven or earth could make me.”
“I hate to tell you,” the newspaperman said, drawing a cigarette from his shirt pocket, “But I rather doubt either has much influence here.”
“I’m next!” Proclaimed Walter Ames, who stepped toward the beckoning entrance of the grove. Faster than Lamont would have thought possible, his way was blocked by the small body of Rosemary, who had leapt from Abner’s side to interpose herself.
“Oy! That’s enough for now,” She said authoritatively, raising her voice above the ecstatic rambling of the Downs couple and the murmurs of the group. “No one else is going in there right now.”
“Yeah?” Barked Jackson Clyde, bristling at the uniformed medic. “Where’s the cavalry?”
Rosemary looked at Jackson, then at Anna, her green eyes registering confusion. “Who’s side are you on?” She asked.
“Our side,” the large man answered firmly. His thick finger jabbed in the direction of the moss-like floor beneath their feet.
Lamont, standing near Anna, hesitated. It was becoming clear to him that Jackson felt the need to place the self-direction of the colonists above all other considerations, even if that meant allowing them to do something that he felt was not in their best interest. He turned his eyes to Rosemary, who was looking at him imploringly, still blocking the entrance to the grove with her arms stretched to either side. The newspaper met her eyes and shook his head slightly. “Stand down, love,” he said, doubting that she could hear him over the restless din of the colonists.
The medic bit her lower lip, a sign that she was struggling with indecision. Finally, with visible consternation, she lowered her arms and stepped aside. “Fine,” she said, “Do what you like.”
Ames eagerly stepped toward the grove, his eyes bright with anticipation. He found himself stopped again, not by Rosemary, but by the strong arm of Jackson Clyde. He looked up at the larger man, puzzled. From what Lamont had observed, Jackson and Walter were cronies, Jackson being the clear alpha.
“Now, hold up, Walter,” Clyde said gruffly. “You’re supposed to be directing the construction of an enclosure for the livestock. How’s that project coming along?”
The veterinarian worked his jaw uncomfortably. “It…it ain’t done yet,” he admitted.
“And what of the men who’re supposed to be helping you with that? Where are they?” Jackson pressed.
Ames glanced around at the small crowd through his wire spectacles, which were slightly incongruous with his bony, chiseled features. “They’re here,” he muttered, waving a hand weakly toward the cluster of colonists.
“So are we to understand that our animals, the ones we depend upon for the establishment of our colony, are cooped up there, cold and untended, while they wait for you to commune with that piece of modern art?” Jackson pressed.
“Well, I…I guess I kinda forgot,” Walter admitted, casting his eyes downward.
“We all did,” agreed Constance Beckett, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “Betty, Joan, don’t you think it’s time you checked on your youngsters?”
Betty Barnes, who moments ago had been babbling ecstatically, looked around as if someone had slapped her in the face.
“Now, just a minute,” Barney objected, putting an arm around his shame-faced wife. “For all we know, we’ve just stumbled upon the most important thing we could ever find. You should know—you’re the one who brought us here.”
Constance looked at the older man fiercely. “I’m not saying it ain’t important. I don’t know one way or the other. All I’m sayin’ is that we’re like to have plenty of time to figure it out after we get our work done.”
There was murmuring and shuffling among the group as they weighed the novelty of this new experience over their obligations to the colony. Pair by pair, eyes met the determined gazes of Constance and Jackson, who now stood side-by-side in front of the grove. One by one, the colonists broke away from the crowd and returned in the direction of their appointed tasks. After a few moments, the unlikely allies were accompanied only by Lamont, Rosemary, and Anna Lightfoot-Owens.
Constance stuffed her hands in the large pockets of her baggy jumpsuit and frowned at the steadfast matriarch. “I didn’t set out to cause trouble,” she said.
Anna smiled softly. “I know, girl.”
Jackson folded his arms and turned toward the arched entrance of the grove, peering darkly at the shadowy form of the monument inside it. “Question is, how are we gonna cork this bottle now it’s been opened?”
“Who says we got to?” Constance objected. “Just ‘cause we don’t know what it is doesn’t mean it’s bad. What happened to me didn’t feel bad.”
“How did it feel?” Lamont asked.
Constance hesitated. “It felt like…”
Her blue eyes flashed around at the small group, who were all watching her intently. The challenge of making herself vulnerable gave her the aspect of a trapped wild animal. Lamont suspected that at any moment she might throw an indiscriminate punch and run for it.
He stepped in, lowering his recorder and placing himself physically between Constance and the two other colonists. “It feels as if you’ve been looking for something your entire life without really knowing it, and you’ve just found it,” he said quietly to Jackson and Miss Anna. “It feels as if suddenly, everything is about to be made clear. As if everything you’ve been through up to this point was part of a plan leading to this precise moment. As if every failure, every disappointment, every bitter loss was not only valuable and necessary, but…”
He glanced at Constance, who was standing rigidly off his shoulder. Her face was a mask of suspended tension, but her eyes, meeting his, glittered wetly. “But okay,” she whispered. “Everything’s okay. And everything is going to be.”
Some time later, Constance found Lamont sitting atop an outcropping not far from the boundary of the garden. The only visible indication of the tower’s cylindrical hull was the thin, vine-like columns that stretched from the mossy floor to the vaulted ceiling high overhead. Beyond them seemed to be empty space, vivid and three-dimensional, unbroken by any glare or reflection. The outcropping looked something like a giant, squat toadstool made out of coral, the largest in a cluster. Not far in the distance was the sound of falling hammers, laughing children, women’s voices joined in song. It was accompanied by the subtle sounds of the garden, quiet pipings and rattlings and tinkling chimes, every one pleasant.
Lamont was hunched over, his forearms resting on his knees, his brow furrowed as his eyes looked intently into the black expanse outside. A cigarette dangled from the center of his lips, burning down, forgotten.
“You took one for the team back there,” Constance said, settling herself down on a smaller mushroom-like feature that was just large enough to serve as a makeshift stool. “I’m obliged.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lamont said around his cigarette, not moving.
“Sure you do,” Constance prodded him. “We both got shells. That’s why we get along so well. Spittin’ fire is easy enough, but we don’t—we don’t trust people.”
“I don’t trust any of this,” Lamont said, looking around. He tugged the stub of his cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it into the strange quasi-foliage nearby to emphasize his point. Constance could just glimpse the smoking refuse being cheerfully absorbed by the pastel carpet. “Nothing is ever the way it looks on the surface. Good things, doubly so. This is all some kind of sleight-of-hand, and the maddening thing is we’ve got no choice but to play along.”
“What about your feelings?” Constance asked. “Do you trust those?”
The newspaperman chuckled cynically. “Those least of all, love.” Then, he seemed to pick up on something in the young colonist’s tone and raised his eyes to meet hers. “Why do you ask?”
Constance took a deep breath. She tried to remember what had happened after she’d ventured into the grove earlier that day. She had been acting on idle curiosity, wondering if perhaps she could find some substance or mechanism that would explain the effect it seemed to have on people. Mostly, she was just trying to be alone. Miss Anna had come to her in the morning and explained that she hoped to resume Wednesday night services to help preserve routine despite the abrupt change in setting. She had suggested that perhaps Constance might help put the younger children to bed if the service went late. And then she had walked away. The encounter had ignited a smoldering irritation in Constance that, by lunchtime, had become a bed of hot coals in her belly. Had anyone stopped to consider, she asked herself, that Constance was a Goddamn orphan? She had pulled herself out of the dust to shake her fist at the cold and uncaring stars, had worked herself raw for the chance to get close enough to pop one in the nose. And now she was, what, a nursemaid?
“When I went into the hollow earlier,” Constance explained quietly, “I was fumin’ so bad that I’ll bet there was smoke coming out my ears. I don’t know what I was planning. I was looking at the statue-thing and remembering how you had—you had started trying to pray to her. She looks so calm and graceful, standing there. And suddenly I hated her.”
Constance heard that her voice was trembling. Lamont was looking fixedly at her now, his expression one of open curiosity.
“I don’t know what I was thinking exactly. I had in mind that maybe I could break her open, topple her, find out what was inside or underneath. I put my hands on her and…” Constance hesitated, shaking her head.
“And what?” Lamont asked.
“And suddenly, it was gone. I felt like a little kid who was all wound up, expectin’ a scrap or a whippin’. But what I got was like big, warm arms wrapped around me. A feeling of forgiveness. More than forgiveness. Compassion. Understanding. Like—like she knew everything. And loved everything.”
Constance realized suddenly that there were hot tears rolling down her cheeks. She balled up her fist in the sleeve of her oversized coverall and wiped her face aggressively. “God,” she muttered.
“Or something,” Lamont agreed.
Constance looked up at him. He was leaning closer to her now, close enough that she could smell the lingering scent of his cigarette, mixed with aftershave. In his expression, she saw curiosity, empathy, uncertainty.
“I felt the same thing,” he admitted quietly. “Infinite compassion. As if everything that had seemed so cold and heartless before was revealed to be totally good. Absolutely safe.” He paused. “Full of grace.”
Constance sniffed, running her sleeve under her nose. “I don’t want to be tricked, Monty. But…But I’d do anything to feel that again. I don’t think I can stop myself. I want to believe…”
She hesitated, and Lamont finished her thought. “You want to believe that you don’t have to.”
Constance nodded weakly.
Unexpectedly, Lamont stood to his feet, cursing emphatically. “I’ve been moping about when there’s work to be done. We’re never going to know the truth if we stay here.”
“Where do you want to go?” Constance asked, her heart jumping at the sudden change in his tone.
“From here, there’s only one way to go,” Lamont smiled thinly, adjusting his suspenders. “And that’s down.”
“I’m glad you’ve decided to quit faffin’ about,” Rosemary said from where she was standing nearby. “But unfortunately you’re out of time.”