The boy scowled at Asach. “Yu save long tok Anglis, a?

The girls stopped, unsure, then clustered nearer to Asach, who answered simply, “Yes. Do you?”

At this, the little ones erupted: “Me too! Me too! I speak Anglic too!” then ran around the windmill and giggled, playing hide-and-seek from behind the pole.

The boy scowled again. He was at best a year or two older than the others, but very serious. “Are you a pilgrim?”

With puckered eyebrows, Asach matched his earnestness. “I’m waiting for Collie Orcutt.”

This seemed to satisfy him for the moment, but he clearly felt the need to assert some kind of authority over the situation. He picked up a pebble, and with one vicious swipe from where he stood, hurtled it against the polished white stone still lying within the scratched ring. With a crack the white stone went flying across the gravel. He stalked over, picked it up, pocketed it, and said, “Mine now!”

The littlest girl, still clinging to the windmill pole, shouted, “That’s not fair!” She began to sob. “It’s my best one! It’s my favorite! It’s mine!” She stamped a foot.

The boy shrugged. Asach assessed the situation. Pulled a handful of stones from somewhere within the cloak. Opened one hand to reveal a child’s treasure of purple, pink, green, and speckled red. “Double or nothing,” Asach said. Eyes wide, the boy nodded.

Asach played skillfully—or rather, lost skillfully. By the end, the boy held all the colored stones; Asach held only the white one. “You win!” Asach said, folding the white pebble into the little girl’s hand. Unsuspecting and smiling, the boy counted and re-counted his new stash as the little girl bounced over to Asach’s lap. “I’m Jolly!” she announced.

“Yes, I can see that.”

“No, silly. My name is Jolly”

“Her name is Jo-lynn,” the second one said. But everyone calls her Jolly.”

“And what’s your name?”

The girl’s eyes widened in horror.

Damn, thought Asach. I forgot. Never ask a child’s name. She’ll think you are trying to steal her spirit.

“Never mind honey. Don’t be scared. I forgot. We—we do things different, where I come from. Names don’t mean the same thing there.”

The boy nodded, sagely, promoted to ally by his recent acquisition. “The Anglis, they don’t know anything.”

The horrified girl regarded Asach sternly. “What’s your number?” she blurted at last.

Mystified, Asach gambled. “Three hundred and fifty-seven.”

The horrified one giggled. Jolly peered up from Asach’s lap, little brow furrowed. “Are you a boy, or a girl?” she said.

Asach looked down, smiling. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re a big silly!’ she answered, exploding in a frenzy of knees and elbows to run rings around the pole. “You’re a bi-ig sil-ly! You’re a bi-ig sil-ly!” The third girl, obviously her sister, joined in. “Sil-ly, sil-ly, SIL-ly!”

No-longer-horrified girl bounced forward. “I’m a four. We’re all fours. Well, four is really nine, but we say fours. Only papa says we’re too little to Gather. But mama says this is the big one, so we should, and wouldn’t you be sorry if it was and they not even there? But you’re a pilgrim. So you must be a four too. Only you look old. Are you a three? Mama’s a three. Did you Gather before? Sometimes people are really old before they Gather.” Her eyes went wide again. “But you’re waiting for Uncle Collie. Maybe— are you a Seer? You’re never a Seer, are you? Like cousin Laurel?”

At which the other two gasped and stopped running. The little boy’s face went white. Un-horrified girl looked re-horrified, and just stood gaping.

Asach thought fast. Whatever was meant by the question, there could be only one answer. Asach took a calculated guess about the rest.

“No, honey, I’m not a Seer. I’m going to visit your Uncle Collie, that’s all. And I hope to get to meet Laurel while I’m there. We have some things to talk about.”

Color returned to the boy’s face. He nodded sagely again, then leaned over to stage-whisper into horrified-girl’s ear: “They’re gunna talk about the Gathering.” Then he announced: “Well, I’m a four, and I‘m not too little to Gather!”

With that, horrified girl broke into a gale of giggles, and led the trio in a new romp around the windmill. “Sil-ly’s gunna Gath-er. Sil-ly’s gunna Gath-er.”

Asach leaned back and smiled as dust boiled toward them from the distance. Threes and Fours and Seers, oh my. They’d have a lot more to talk about than mining claims.

9

Angels in Heaven

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels. We become very tired with pretending we like to earn a living, with the ordinary objects and events of our lives.

—Jim Harrison, Letters to Yesenin

Saint George, New Utah

The Librarian also had an early start, punctuated by a scary moment entering the TCM Security Zone. Entry was controlled by double barriers. As his FLIVR was held up between them for inspection, the guards suddenly dived behind the concrete bunkers, leaving him stuck like a little rat in a have-a-heart trap. He thought for a chilling moment that they’d found an explosive in the undercarriage. It was a deadly-force-authorized zone, so he also thought it inadvisable to simply leap from the vehicle. He slowly opened the windows, then the doors, to ask what was up. Finally, a shivering clerk motioned that he was to come inside. Apparently, mortars were falling somewhere so distant that he could not even hear them. After five minutes they received the all clear, without actual incident. It was his first brush with the dark underside of Saint George that they had all felt, but never seen, on previous arrivals.

He questioned the clerks, but they were not very forthcoming. “Troubles!” they answered, shaking their heads. “More troubles! It starting again!”

“What’s starting again?”

They just looked disgusted. “You people, you Imperials come, it starts. Before you come is OK, but then you go away again it starts. Like last time.”

Barthes frowned. They were suddenly frightened; quick to clarify. “Not you! You OK, we know. But bad people—” he spit—“bad people, they start. From outside. We tell them: Go Away! If you want to kill Imperials, go away and kill them somewhere else. Stop killing us.”

But the Temple was closed that day, for some ecclesiastical procedure that he’d never heard of, as was the university. With nothing to be accomplished, he decided to return to his local office. And then “it started” in earnest. He drove back amid reports of bad fighting in the East of the city, and sporadic outbreaks elsewhere. So they closed up early, his assistant grabbing her skirts and running full bore down the street, now empty of anything but the usual stench and swirling dust.

It was a rough night. He was repeatedly awakened by explosions rattling the building, from where he could not tell. One was close enough to send spent gravel pattering gently against the glass. He gave up trying to sleep and, with some sense of irony, watched an old war video. He was somewhat reassured by the lack of actual gun ships, police sirens, or ambulances. His street was a major thoroughfare, so had anything really bad happened nearby, it would have lit up. He heard distant shouting; a rattle of gunfire. Then the generator died.

Still sleepless, he switched on a battery lamp; pulled out the charred old conference paper, and settled in to read. He got about half-way through before his eye began to droop. It was a somewhat more interesting, and clearly more valuable, document than he’d thought. As he fell asleep, two phrases whispered in his mind. New Utah would not now be dependent upon selenium supplementation….this data is directly relevant to questions of how life begins on and propagates across many worlds.