“Great,” he said. “Can I watch TV?”
“TV! Yes! Yes! Turn it on!” Then, a soberer thought: “It probably won’t get any stations, though. I don’t think we’re really back home. I think they just hooked up the electricity.”
“We could watch a tape,” Clifford said.
“God, yes! Play a tape! Turn it up loud!”
“What should I play?”
“Anything! Anything!”
He took a dusty tape from the top of the stack by the TV, untouched for months. No label. He plugged it in.
It was the last thing his mother had recorded, and it was nothing special, a Friday installment of The Tonight Show she had meant to watch Saturday morning, back in June.
The theme music startled him. It sounded amazingly realistic. He was afraid someone outside the house might hear it—but that was stupid. All over town, people must be playing videotapes or records or CDs or whatever noisy thing they felt like.
The colors on TV were supernaturally vivid. Clifford sat mesmerized by the screen. He didn’t listen to the talk, just relished the sound of the voices. It was all so boisterous, so carelessly happy.
The sound of the TV was like Christmas in a box, and Clifford didn’t understand why it made his mother cry.
Evelyn wore her new dress upstairs and looked at herself in the standing mirror.
She liked the way the new light reflected from the peaks and shadowy valleys of the cloth.
“It looks very well,” Symeon said. Not good or nice but well. She liked the way he talked. He was very courteous. Very old-world.
“Thank you.” She tried to sound demure, not too brazen. “I feel like I haven’t thanked you enough.”
“The dress,” Symeon said. His smile was enigmatic, his eyes obscure.
She said, “The dress—?”
“Take it off.”
“You’ll have to help me with the stays.”
“Of course.”
His hands were large but deft.
CHAPTER FIVE
Linneth Stone followed Dex to the high school and sat at the back of his morning classes, flanked by the sullen Proctors in their brown woolen uniforms. (She called them pions—according to Dex’s French-English dictionary, a “checker” or “pawn,” but she used the word respectfully.) For two days Dex discussed the Civil War while this petite woman in Victorian dress took notes and methodically filed them in a calfskin binder. Each day, attention in the classroom migrated away from Dex and toward these apparitions seated at the rear.
Dex had hoped the situation would improve now that electrical power had been restored, but it didn’t; the fluorescent ceiling lights only made her presence seem more exotic. Today, at lunch, he told her so.
They sat in the staff cafeteria. There was no hot food, but the artificial light dispelled some of the gloom of the cavernous space. Dex had brought a bag lunch. Linneth, flanked by her guards, sat without eating and listened to his complaints.
“I understand the problem,” she said. “I didn’t mean to create a distraction.”
“You have, though. And that isn’t the only problem. It’s not clear to me what you’re hoping to achieve here. Obviously,” a nod at the Proctors, “I can’t stop you from sitting in on classes. But I’d like to know what the purpose of it is.”
She paused a moment, her expression angelic and distracted, collecting her thoughts. “Only to learn from you. Nothing more sinister. To study Two Rivers and-—I don’t know what to call it—the place Two Rivers came from. Your Plenum.”
“All right, but to what end? If I cooperate, who am I helping?”
“You’re helping me. But I see what you mean. Mr. Graham, it’s really very simple. I was asked to write a social study of the town—”
“Asked by whom?”
“The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse. The Proctors. But please remember, I’m a contract employee. I work for the Bureau but I don’t represent the Bureau, not directly. There are several of us in town, civilian workers I mean, mainly academics. For instance, there is a surveyor, an electrical engineer, a documentary photographer, a medical doctor—”
“Each one writing a report?”
“You pose the question with too much malice. If the circumstances were reversed, Mr. Graham, if one of our villages had appeared in your world, wouldn’t your government do the same thing? Compile records, try to understand the miracle that had happened?”
“People have died here. In good conscience, I don’t know if I can cooperate.”
“I can’t speak for your conscience. I can only say that my work isn’t harmful.”
“In your eyes. It’s certainly a nuisance to my work—we’ve already established that.”
“Lieutenant Demarch sent me to you because he thought a teacher of history would have a broader grasp of cultural issues—”
“Did he? My guess is that he was hoping to piss me off.”
She blinked but forged ahead: “I won’t attribute motive. The point is that I can go elsewhere if I’m interfering with the school. I really don’t care to cause trouble.”
Her meekness was maddening. Also deceptive. She was relentless, Dex thought. He looked at her over the trestle table, searching for something in the composition of her features: a glimpse under the porcelain exterior. She came from the world outside Two Rivers, but she wasn’t a Proctor or a soldier—and that made her nearly unique, potentially interesting.
Too, her curiosity seemed genuine. She might or might not be a tool of the Bureau, but there were obviously questions she wanted to ask. Fair enough. He had a few questions of his own.
He said, “Maybe we can compromise.”
“In what way?”
“Well, first of all—you’d be a lot less conspicuous if you lost your bookends.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The gentlemen attached to your elbows.”
Both guards gave Dex a stony glare meant to intimidate him. He smiled back. He was tired of the Proctors. They dressed like Boy Scouts and swaggered like hall monitors: pions, a good word, he thought.
“I will have to talk to Lieutenant Demarch,” she said. “I can’t promise anything.” But the idea seemed to appeal to her.
“You might consider changing the way you dress, too. It draws attention.”
“I have considered that. But I’m new here, Mr. Graham. I’m not sure what would be appropriate, or appropriately modest.”
“You’re staying at the Woodward Bed-and-Breakfast?”
“Nearby. The motor hotel.”
“You’ve met Evelyn Woodward?”
“Briefly.”
“She’s about your size. Maybe she can lend you something. She seems to have a new wardrobe these days.”
“Yes. Well, perhaps. Do you have any other requirements?”
“Certainly. A quid pro quo. I want something for my time.”
“And what would that be?”
“A map of the world. An atlas, if possible. And a good basic history.”
“Your history for mine?”
“Right.”
She surprised him by smiling. “I’ll see what I can do.”
His fever broke the night the lights came back to Two Rivers, and Howard Poole emerged from his sickness feeling fragile but immensely clearheaded. It was as if the disease had starved all confusion from the bone of logic.
He waited a day for Dex to show up, but the schoolteacher didn’t come. That was all right, Howard thought. It wasn’t always easy for Dex to get away; he might have been followed. It didn’t matter. It was time to take some initiative on his own.