Half a block off the main thoroughfare where traffic whisked brightly through the night, the trees stood wet of bark and dry of leaf half an hour after the passing of the storm. Nothing gurgled in the gutters any longer. The Mission of Light Church stood full of stained-glass glow, and from it issued muffled bursts of laughter and applause.
A church had not been on Sanjay’s mind when he’d told his sister that there must be some place other than a motel where they could take refuge. Yet as they stood before it, the warmth of its light, the laughter, and the periodic applause seemed to promise safety. Sanjay, who wrote noir fiction and who, as a writer of conviction, therefore must believe in the essential darkness of the world and life, couldn’t quite commit to this church. However, he knew that his magic-realist sister would have no problem believing that here lay safety. He set aside his doubt and bias, putting his sister’s welfare first. Besides, he didn’t know where else they could go.
They entered the building through one of two front doors that stood open and found the narthex deserted. Likewise, the nave offered empty pews, and no one manned the altar under an enormous white-plastic cross that was lit from within.
Children’s voices came from a distance, a flutter of adult laughter, piano music, and then a chorus of youngsters singing.
Sanjay and Tanuja followed the center aisle to the crossing and stopped short of the chancel railing when they saw a bank of open doors to the left. They went to one doorway beyond which, in the north transept, an exhibition hall had been transformed into a makeshift theater.
Rows of folding chairs were occupied by as many as two hundred people. A choir of a dozen kids stood on three tiers to the right of the stage, the piano before them. On the stage were grade-schoolers in a variety of costumes, including three dressed as white rabbits.
Evidently, although Easter was almost two weeks away, they were presenting a production with a holiday theme. At least for the time being, the church had set aside such solemn considerations as crucifixion and resurrection in favor of lighter fare involving rabbits, girls dressed as daffodils, and three little boys costumed as eggs and standing in front of what might have been a papier-maché chicken three times bigger than they were.
Sanjay saw, to the right, a hallway entrance surmounted by a sign that promised restrooms. The hall appeared to be long, as if it led to more facilities than just the men’s and women’s lavatories.
He took Tanuja’s hand and drew her across the back of the room as music swelled and the rabbits began to caper among the daffodils. The audience was focused on the performers, but if a few shifted their attention to Sanjay and his sister, there was no reason for them to suppose that these two newcomers didn’t belong here.
Beyond the restrooms were classrooms where perhaps Sunday school was held and other instructions given. At the end of the hallway, another corridor opened on the left, serving a kitchen and church offices. Last of all, they came to a large storage room with eclectic contents: janitorial equipment, including vacuum cleaners and floor buffers; twenty or more six-foot-long folding tables standing on end, securely racked; a full complement of life-size nativity-scene figures, including three wise men, camels, a cow, a couple lambs, a donkey; and numerous other items.
Sanjay led his sister inside and closed the door behind them. “We’ll wait here. The play must be nearly over. They’ll all be gone soon.”
“You mean stay the night?”
“We have restrooms. Might be food in the kitchen, something the church staff has for lunch or snacks.”
“It feels weird to stay here.”
“It feels safe, Tanny.”
“Yeah, well…it kind of does,” she agreed.
“We’ll have time to think, figure this out.”
“But we could hide for a year and figure out nothing. And what if someone comes in here?”
“We’ll tuck ourselves in behind the nativity figures. No one will see us unless they come all the way to the back of the room.”
They left the light on in order to make their way through the gauntlet of stored items, and they sat on the floor, screened by heavy cast-plastic wise men and camels.
In the distance, muffled piano and choir crescendoed, and after a second of silence, the volume and duration of applause suggested the performance might have come to an end.
23
In the parking lot of an office complex in Lake Forest, sitting behind the wheel of the abandoned patrol car, Carter Jergen imports the contents of the vehicle’s camera archives into his laptop. The fore and aft recordings on police cruisers are intended to protect officers, so the department can easily disprove accusations of police brutality and misconduct of which they are not guilty.
As for the officers who recently used this cruiser, their offense is not brutality. Jergen isn’t affiliated with the sheriff’s department; ostensibly he works for the National Security Agency, and therefore he lacks direct authority over those deputies, although his federal credentials compel them to assist him. If he were the boss of them, he’d charge them with dereliction of duty—with sheer stupidity—for letting the Shukla twins steal their car.
What concerns him most is that both of the deputies who screwed up are among the adjusted people, those who have been injected with nanomachine control mechanisms, which is why they were called to support the conversion crew when everything went wrong at the Shukla house. All of them in fact are adjusted people, though they don’t realize it, including Lincoln Crossley and the two men with him, who allowed themselves to be hornet-sprayed by a slip of a girl who is a foot shorter and weighs only half as much as any of them.
Recently, Jergen has begun to suspect that when the weblike control mechanism self-assembles across the brain, something of the adjusted person is lost in addition to his free will. Maybe it isn’t lost at once. Maybe it fades away slowly. But it seems to Jergen that at least some of the adjusted are not as intelligent as they were before being injected.
Well, no, perhaps it’s not that they’re less intelligent. It is rather that the quality of their motivation has changed. They will do what they are instructed to do, but some—perhaps many—seem to lack the interest, the incentive, to do more than required.
Maybe this is not a bad thing. In his estimation, a lot of people are too smart for their own good, motivated by the wrong aspirations and desires, such as money and status and the admiration of others. The new world coming will be shaped by those who, like Carter Jergen, are most equipped to identify and correct all the errors to which human beings are so prone. It is likely the case that a fully corrected civilization can be kept stable more easily if a significant part of its population is motivated to perform only as they are instructed to perform and are shorn of any incentive to achieve more than others. The determination to achieve can, after all, lead to an inclination toward rebellion.
Bathed in the laptop’s pale light, scanning through the video from the patrol car’s front-facing camera, Jergen arrives at the moment when the Shukla twins walk away into the night, across the lamplit parking lot, onto the public sidewalk. They turn west and hurry out of sight, oblivious that they have left this first crumb of evidence that will make it possible for him to track them down.
Jergen switches off his laptop, closes it, gets out of the car.
Radley Dubose is waiting a few feet away, beside the Range Rover in which the two of them had unsuccessfully pursued Sanjay and Tanuja Shukla into the canyon. Radley appears angry enough and big enough to pick up the patrol car and throw it. He has a square Dudley Do-Right jaw and eyes as feverish looking as those of Yosemite Sam; though Dubose is a graduate of Princeton and dedicated to the cause, Jergen thinks he is cartoonish.