He felt like Adam, imprisoned by the Archons in a mortal body. And here, on this desk, was his Tree.

Its branches are the shadow of death; its sap is the unction of evil and its fruit is the wish for death.

His last question to the Censeur had been, “How far has this gone? Has the bomb itself been tested?”

“There is no bomb until you build it,” Bisonette told him. “The testing you may leave to us.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Until the spring,” Censeur Bisonette said, “pacify the town until the spring. Can we trust you to do that?”

There was an insult lurking in the question. Symeon Demarch looked at the telephone with a sour expression.

It was Evelyn Woodward’s telephone, finally connected to the external world through some sort of impedance transformer the military engineers had installed: no more radiotelephones. But the handset, pink and lightweight and obscenely curved, felt peculiar in his hand. It was made of a substance like Bakelite, but less substantial; an oil-based synthetic, the engineers said.

“The town is already pacified,” Demarch said. “The town has been pacified for months. I don’t anticipate a problem as long as the militia cooperates.”

“It will,” said Bisonette’s distant, metallic voice. “Corporal Trebach is not in a position to argue with the Bureau.”

“He seems disposed to.”

“He’ll be tamed. The weight of the Bureau is about to fall on his shoulders. The corporal has not led an impeccable life.”

“If you threaten him, he’ll blame me. I’m the one on the scene.”

“No doubt. But we’ll also tell him you’ve been ordered to report any obstruction. That should rein him in. He doesn’t have to like you, Lieutenant.”

“All right. What about the Ideological Branch? I’ve had complaints from the Ordinal attache.”

“Delafleur? A pompous idiot. Une puce. Pay no attention.”

“The Ideological Branch—”

“The Ideological Branch is under control,” the Censeur said. “I’m giving them what they want.”

“What Delafleur wants is to destroy the town.”

“He can’t. Not now.”

“Not until spring?”

“Precisely.”

“Is there a schedule?”

“Do you need to know more? There should be a packet from the Oversight Committee in a week or two. All I want is your guarantee that the situation is stable for a few more months.”

“It is,” Demarch said, understanding that his head had just been inserted in a noose: if anything went wrong now, the blame would fall on him. But he was trapped in his own momentum. He heard himself say, “I guarantee it.”

“That’s all, then.” The Censeur broke the connection.

Demarch hung up the telephone and sighed. Then he turned and saw Evelyn Woodward standing in the doorway.

How much had she heard? It was impossible to know. Or to guess what she would make of it. Briefly, he reran the conversation in his mind, sorting his own words from the Censeur’s: how much could she guess?

She seemed to look at him oddly, but that could have been his imagination. She was an alien, after all. Mistakes were easy to make with these people, especially in matters of body language.

She said, “I came to see if you wanted coffee.”

“Yes, please, Evelyn. I would like a cup of coffee.” He gestured at the desk, which had once been her desk, in a room in which she had once kept accounts for her auberge. “A little more work to do tonight.”

“I see. Well, I’ll be back in a minute.”

She closed the door behind her.

Demarch picked up the most immediate paper on the desk. It was the first of Linneth Stone’s reports, essentially her working notes. He had intended to read it tonight, but he wasn’t enthusiastic at the prospect. Linneth Stone was a career academic and wrote like one, tedious pensees in the passive voice.

On the evidence of Subject’s accounts and numerous contemporary published Works (cf. Time magazine, Newsweek, etc.), the Institution of Marriage in the United States was undergoing a process of rapid Change, from predominantly traditional, religiously sanctioned Monogamie (with a minority of exceptions) to a commonplace of Divorce and Re-Marriage and unorthodox Arrangements including unmarried Parenting and even a certain sanctioning of like-gender Relations.

Venery, bastardy, and sodomy, in other words. Demarch thought of his own wife and child in the capital. Dorothea had been instrumental in his rise through the ranks of the Bureau: she was a Francophone of good family, an essential career asset for someone like Demarch, born an Anglophone in a rural town. The Bureau de la Convenance was a vast, incestuous bureaucracy—a labyrinth of old families. Demarch’s connection had been tenuous, through his mother Celestine, who was cousin to a retired superieur ancien named Foucault; that and his university degree had been enough to get him in the door of the Academie at Belle He. Dorothea opened doors more arcane and significant. Her father, a Censeur, had shepherded Demarch through a long stint as an Ideological Branch operative. He had earned his bona fides there, had put in years and fought for promotion. Still, even today, aging Censeurs like Bisonette spoke to him with the disdain of a pure-blood for a halfbreed.

Dorothea had been essential to him and he could not imagine leaving her. Divorce was not altogether uncommon among Valentinians in the upper echelons of the civil service, but Demarch disapproved. According to Linneth, American literature spoke often of love. Well, so did every popular literature. But the educated classes were supposed to know better. Marriage had very little to do with love. It was an institution, like the Bureau or the Federal Bank. You don’t cease banking simply because you no longer “love” the bank.

Love fades; wasn’t that inevitable? And the demands of the body were fickle. One made arrangements to deal with the physical aspect. One did not, Demarch thought, indulge in melodrama or attempt to rewrite history.

Or maybe that was only the voice of his own buried conscience. His father had been a Sethian of the Order of Luther, a deacon of the Church and a moral pacifist. Hedrick Michael Demarch: the fierce Saxon consonants always made him think of the sound of a dog gnawing a bone. The name still echoed in the lieutenant’s mind, though his father had died ten years ago; sometimes, too, the voice itself, the tides and swells of its disapproval.

He thought of Bisonette’s nucleic bomb project, dramatically hastened by documents the Bureau had culled from the libraries of Two Rivers. Apparently there was enough in the generally distributed literature to advance the research by months. Once the Censeurs had given this strange documentation their imprimatur of authenticity, it had gone to the engineers and scientists, who had turned it into blueprints.

This was work Demarch had helped along; it had been his idea to archive the libraries first of all. Theologians in the Ideological Branch had still been debating the metaphysical status of Two Rivers while Demarch was shipping east its books. That was something else his father had taught him: the value of a book.

But what kind of a world had he hastened into being? His son Christof was eight years old. Now Christof would grow up under the shadow of this transcendent weapon, just as the inhabitants of Two Rivers had. Maybe it was the bomb that would unleash the other horrors: the anarchy, the drug addiction, the rampant immodesty.

An October wind rattled the window. Demarch looked up from his thoughts. Evelyn had come back with coffee on a wooden tray; she stood at the doorway waiting to be noticed. He waved her into the room.

She glanced at the window and shivered. “Cold out there. All the leaves are off the trees. It could be a cold winter ahead.”