For a moment Wang is stunned. “Saint Kristin?” he finally says.
“Accounts have it that a disturbed young woman took a boat out to the place above the lake’s source, slipped into the water and never resurfaced. Her body was never recovered. Hundreds of people saw this. It was a highly unusual day, given the phenomenon of the previous night regarding the level of the lake, as well as other meteorological occurrences.”
“What meteorological occurrences?” says the geologist.
“People’s recollection of that day,” the intelligence officer continues, “is vivid. Everyone remembers the strange winds and a great deal of volatile storm activity, and, uh …” He stops for a moment. “That the sky was red.”
“Her name was Kristin?” says Wang.
“The young woman reportedly sailed a silver boat almost
waist, there in the passage right beside me but going the other way, being born
two miles along the Hollywood shoreline. Even on an overcast day, people high in the hills saw the boat on the water. Those following her from the shoreline — and there seem to have been hundreds — are consistent in their observations, such as the fact she wasn’t wearing anything. We don’t know much else about her except her name, that she was in approximately her mid-twenties, that there was nothing particularly remarkable about her except that she lived in the hills in a small house which she allegedly set on fire the night before.”
“You don’t think that’s remarkable?”
“There’s speculation that whatever it was that happened with the lake on that particular night triggered this woman’s final collapse into some sort of dementia that led to her suicide. Apparently she was already something of a local oddity, referred to by the other people of the area as the Madwoman of the Lake, the Madwoman in Red, that sort of thing, given her refusal to conform to the blue attire of the other residents. Regional legend has it that, some years before, she abandoned her small son out on the lake at the same place she drowned herself on this particular day, setting him adrift in the same silver boat in which she returned on the day of her own death.”
“If she set him adrift in the same boat,” Wang says, “how did she still have it?”
“That’s a good question,” the intelligence officer admits. “It’s a little confused.”
“So a religion sprang up around this crazy woman?” asks another officer. No one at the table says anything until Wang, still studying the toy monkey in his hand — Tribulation II, or III? — says, “Well, no cult was ever inspired by anyone who was normal,” wondering if he himself is the exception that proves the rule.
“At any rate,” Wilson says, pointing at the toy monkey,
into the lake that I’ve left behind me, expelled from the rubble and fire and
“on the morning the woman took the boat out to the spot on the lake above the source, every eyewitness has her sitting there for several moments staring at the water. Some say she appears to have been praying, but since no one was close enough to hear, we don’t really know. Many of those watching that morning report seeing her reach into the water and take something from it. It may have been what you have there in your hand”—indicating the toy monkey—“but we don’t really know that either. Accounts of those who saw her disembark from the shore don’t mention her taking anything with her, and recall the boat as empty except for the oars and pole. No one remembers seeing her take anything from the water as she sailed along the shoreline, but of course it’s possible she did and everyone just missed it. When she lowered herself into the water above the source and didn’t reemerge, others sailed out to retrieve the silver boat and found in it only the toy.”
Tapshaw turns to Wang. “I think the question now is what tonight’s broadcast means in relation to this.”
“I don’t understand what bearing,” says the officer who asked how it was religions spring up around psychotic young women, “any of this has on the Crusade.” This reminds Wang that it’s always good to include in such meetings one or two people with no imagination whatsoever; they ask the very obvious questions that force everyone to not overlook the obvious.
“Yes,” Wang answers, rising from the table as everyone else stands, “I’ll leave you all to ponder that very thing.” He picks up the little red monkey from the table. “I’ll take my icon with me,” pressing it to his forehead, “and ruminate upon its mystical properties. Or play with it in my bath.” Only the young female transcriber laughs; this sort of humor just confounds everyone else.
Wang smiles at her conspiratorially. He’s had to teach himself that too much irony just makes everyone nervous. He slips the monkey in his pocket with the extra disk of the night’s
confusion and terror and chaos of the new age’s single greatest moment of
broadcast, and one of the guards opens the door for him as Wang hurries from the room up the tunnel; finally breaking into a trot, he can hear in his head the chaotic discussion that’s no doubt exploded in his wake. He looks at his watch and thinks to himself, Be there. Emerging from under ground into the night and the ever-present sound of shelling, he heads for the dock down the dark embankment outside the barricades of the Tribulation compound. He glances over his shoulder to make sure Tapshaw isn’t following. Be there. If i’m a little late, my Mistress will punish me, he thinks with a small thrill; but he can’t be too late, or not show up at all, without jeopardizing the relationship altogether.
At the top of the embankment, at the top of the wooden steps leading down to the dock, a guard allows Wang to pass on recognition, but an officer — undoubtedly alerted by Tapshaw — presents himself as Wang starts down the steps. “Sir,” the officer says to him, but Wang doesn’t stop. “I can have one of the men accompany you, sir,” calls the officer. Resolutely Wang continues down the steps toward the lake; when he reaches the bottom, stepping out on the wharf he sees no one. Then the boatman is there. As always he says nothing, greeting Wang only with silence, maybe a nod although it’s difficult to be sure in the dark; even in the moonlight — and these assignations, like the broadcasts that trigger them, always take place during a full moon — Wang can never completely make him out, but the boy can’t be any older than seventeen or eighteen, maybe younger.
Like Tapshaw and the others, Wang takes the boy’s lack of verbal communication for a kind of dimwittedness. But if the boy is slow then he’s the lake’s idiot savant, a master of its strange currents that recently have gotten only stranger, gliding the boat among Zed’s dark zones that have gotten only darker, avoiding the full moon’s exposure and thus the notice of enemy search parties in the nearby hills.
horror, hurled through the birth canal of the lake in a full-force gale of ash
~ ~ ~
Then it occurs to Wang. Of course the currents have gotten stranger and the dark zones darker: the lake is draining. Immediately the young boatman pushes the vessel out into the water with one of the oars, then at his end of the boat begins to row.
Wang watches him. The lake is draining, he almost blurts to the boy but stops himself.
More and more everything strikes him as absurd. He wonders if this is because he’s fundamentally still a rationalist in a rational universe that renders the absurdities more salient, or because he’s changing into an absurdist. He thinks about his dream, his defiant stand for freedom before the eyes of the world and the way in which love is bondage, the way one happily trades freedom for it. He thinks about the woman who drowned herself and wonders what she did it to be free of, what she did it to be bound to. What bearing has it on the Crusade? one of the officers asked, not an unreasonable question if for sixteen years you’ve ignored how the lake has had a life of its own, how from the beginning the lake has manifested its own psyche, altering the surrounding psychotopography. There wouldn’t even be a Tribulation II or III if not for the lake because — although he can’t remember why — he’s quite certain that if not for the lake, there would never have been a Tribulation I or II. Well. It’s the business of soldiers, thinks Wang, to pay attention to trees rather than forests. Distracted by forests, they can’t be expected to tend to the trees.