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High Church Policy, it was called, to distinguish ourselves from the lower Church orders who spent their days giving dental hygiene lectures and searching Youth Vanguard backpacks for condoms. My glory days.
"They taught me a few mental tricks. Most of it involved planting suggestions in children to prove reincarnation, giving them knowledge they couldn't possibly have obtained otherwise. In an emergency I was taught how do induce hysterical amnesia. That's why amnesia is such a popular plot device on Noonside Passions, by the way. We've found it useful for rearranging the backgrounds of people who've engaged in activities that are better off forgotten.
"Better off forgotten," he repeated, taking another drink. "Then I lost my wife."
"I'm sorry."
"I was too. Caring was a wonderful woman. Never a stray thought or an idle moment. Her one fault was vanity. After the third child she put on weight that was very hard to get off. She wanted a leadership position in the local Youth Vanguard so she could travel on her own, and you had to look fit and trim and poster-perfect. She didn't want more pregnancies and of course you wouldn't catch me using black-market condoms, so she went to some butcher and got herself fixed.
"Of course matters went wrong and she had to be checked into a real hospital. Age and the source of her injuries . . . well, the rubric put her down for immediate drop. The hospital priest had more doubts about her case than I did. I signed her end cycle warrant myself. If there was any part of me that knew it was wrong, it stayed silent. I am almost jealous of you.
You have a conscience which you can trust to give you pangs. Doubts. Recriminations. I've no such angel on my shoulder."
uDid you regret it later, then?"
"I'm not even sure I do now. She was so conventional, I'm sure she was happy to be useful in death. No, I didn't come to regret it. Not even after Constance, my middle daughter, killed herself rather than marry that officer. It was the strangest thing. I was at a rail station. A brass ring's mother had been put on a train, and he had enough weight to argue it with the Archon, and he sent me, because as an Elector and a regional guide I had enough weight to get someone taken off a train and the nearest porter who didn't genuflect promptly enough put on."
He took another drink.
"The next car had a group of people being put on. They had to know. There was one girl in a wheelchair. She must have been sixteen or seventeen. When you get to be my age, youth and strength take on their own sort of beauty, Valentine. She had so much of it she almost shone. I wonder what put her in that wheelchair. The lie that day was that they were going to work on factory fishing ships, but I think most of them knew what the railcars meant. This girl was laughing and joking with the others.
"Just an ordinary girl, mind you. Beautiful in her way. I looked at her tight chin and bright eyes, saw her laugh with those white teeth as she spun her chair to the person behind-she had a green sweater on-and I thought, what a waste. What a waste. Suddenly all the justifications, all the proverbs from the Guidon, it's like they turned to ash, dried up and illegible, at least to my mind.
"If only I'd learned her name. I want to write an article about her. Something. I want her to exist somewhere other than my memory. But if I give her a name-well, that just seems wrong. Any suggestions for what to call her?"
"Gabrielle Cho."
"That has a certain ring to it. Certainly, my boy. Someone special to you?"
"She was."
"Very well. She'll become a part of our documentation. We'll try to tell the truth as best as we can for a change."
"So a girl in a wheelchair you didn't know made you give up . . ."
"Twenty-eight years in the Church. What's counted as a good lifetime now."
"How did you make it out?"
"From that point on it wasn't hard to plan my escape. I had travel cards, staff, and best of all, I was in no hurry. I could choose my moment." He straightened his back, jamming a hand hard against his lower spine. Valentine didn't need his Wolf-ears to hear the creaks and cracks.
"How do you perform, what do you call them, powers?" Valentine asked. "Like at the Mississippi crossing, or when you connected with the Kurian through Red Dog?"
"It's not the easiest thing to explain. You've got to remember, everything you see, smell, touch, it all gets passed into your brain. You can't see certain wavelengths, hear certain sounds, because your brain has no coding information. Much of it is simply planting new coding information into the target's brain. Of course the Kurians-and the Lifeweavers-can do the same thing. Every day, when they have to appear to us. It comes so natural to them they don't have to think about it any more than we do breathing."
Valentine nodded.
"As for me, it gives me a terrific headache. I hope your Cabbage fellow has some aspirin to spare."
Valentine watched Brother Mark totter off, wondering that the aging body didn't give in to despair.
The banks of the Ohio, October, the fifty-fifth year of the Kurian Order: The long retreat ended somewhere southeast of Evansville.
The events of the first week of October 2077 are still a matter of dispute among historians.
Clever shift or desperate flight? The Moondaggers juggled their forces with the energy and ferocity for which they were famous, cutting off each sidle by the spent Javelin brigade, shifting troops down the Ohio or up the Tennessee until the retreat ground to a halt near a small heartland city that seemed to grow more by virtue of nothing else within an easy distance than any particular advantage of situation or resource.
The Moondaggers accomplished all this even with their supply lines snipped and chewed, responding with harshness that to this day leads to a fall blood-moon being called a "Daggers moon" all across Kentucky.
