I discovered I had lowered my head. When I looked up, Tunnel Light was leaning back with her hands pressed together in her lap and Timmerman had his arms crossed. “Do you see?” he said. “Is there any doubt as to her intentions?”
She turned to him. “Alexander,” she said, “maybe I should speak to them.”
“Of course,” he said, and stood up. “Ms Birkett,” he said, “I really do feel honoured. And I appreciate your and Ms Pierson’s concern. Honestly. But believe me, it’s misplaced. We do know what we’re doing. Trust us.” He held out his hand and we stood up to shake it.
The three of us remained on our feet after Timmerman left. There was a moment of silence, punctured only by my own noisy breathing which I couldn’t seem to get under control, and then Alison said, “Whatever you’re going to do to us, I want you to know that it doesn’t matter. You can make us feel, or think, what you want right now, but it will wear off. And we will keep pushing, I promise you that.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I don’t want to control you. I came here to help.”
I could feel myself yearning to believe her, to just drop everything and go off with Alison. We could go back to my apartment, switch on the blessing fan and let its breezes stir the waters in us as we lay in the bed. I made myself think of Paul, of the snakes in the elevator. “Help us how?” I said.
She took a half step forward. “You are frightened that I have come to harm Alexander. To sabotage his work. But I tell you that his work does not concern me. I help him in any way I can, but that is not why I am here.” She seemed to be looking only at me; when I asked Alison later, she had felt the same thing. Tunnel Light said, “Human beings are starving. Your souls need a special kind of nourishment, the release of ecstasy found in sexual expression. I tell you this freely. I have come here to help humans fulfil their sexual hunger. Are you shocked? You should not be. You yourselves know this. You have let yourselves taste a small portion of what is possible for you.”
Alison’s hand took hold of mine; or maybe it was the other way around. She was shaking as she held on tightly to me. The Being went on, “Humans starve themselves because of their fear. You live in a culture which teaches you to lock yourselves away from your bodies and everything that can release them. My purpose here is simple. I only want to help you overcome your own starvation.”
Alison said, “Your kind of food is killing people. It’s too strong.”
Tunnel Light nodded. “I accept that we have made mistakes. Sometimes we have acted too quickly. That will change. But we will not change our purpose.”
“Why Timmerman?” I asked. “Why not, oh, the Congress? Or the Revolutionary Republican Party?”
“Alexander seeks liberation,” she said. “He seeks many different forms of liberation, many of which do not concern us. However, he includes among these the liberation of sexual expression. And he provides a way for the Beings to touch the people who come to his rallies. They come just for that touch. We give them something to hold within them, like a quick-spreading virus, one that heals instead of hurts. It is possibly a small thing, but it helps, if only in a small way.”
Alison said, “Do you know how you came to Timmerman in the first place?”
She shrugged. The motion was small, delicate. “Carolyn Park-Wu summoned me.”
“And gave you your purpose?”
Tunnel Light shook her head. “She dedicated me to Alexander. For that I am grateful to her, whatever her own motives were. My purpose is my own.”
I thought, which means that they built the purpose into the configuration itself. She can’t be dissuaded. It’s part of her nature.
Alison said, “And you know that Park-Wu works for Arthur Channing, and that your Alexander is investigating Channing?”
“Of course. I told you, those issues do not concern me. And I have told you that I will do nothing to hurt Alexander. Whatever plan Park-Wu may have expected me to fulfil, I will disappoint her. I do not serve Carolyn Park-Wu, I serve Alexander Timmerman. Why won’t you accept that?”
I thought, because we know who you really are. But she didn’t. All the way down, she believed in herself as Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel 23. Could they have planted some sort of suggestion in her, ready to turn her back into Lisa Black Dust 7 at the right moment?
I said, “Suppose a Malignant One could take your place with Timmerman. Maybe Channing has some method to dislodge you now that Timmerman trusts you. What could it do?”
Her face crinkled and she looked in genuine pain. “That cannot happen,” she said.
“Humour me. You want to protect him, don’t you? If Channing has some scheme, shouldn’t we try to anticipate it? What could a Malignant One do to him? In your position.”
“Stop it!” she shouted, and I jumped back, my face scalded, my chest feeling like something had smashed into it.
Alison put her arms around me. Her body felt a little shaky, but she managed to keep her shoulders back as she looked at Tunnel Light. “Please forgive her,” she said. “She doesn’t understand that you can hurt.” To me she said, “You can’t ask her to do that. Anticipate what a Ferocious One might do or plan. Thinking like the enemy is too painful for her.”
The pressure on my chest relaxed and I got myself upright. The enemy stood with her feet together and her hands clasped below her waist. She said, “Be calm. I will not harm Alexander. It is not possible for me to do so. Nor will I allow anyone else to harm him. Alexander is safe.”
Alison and I didn’t speak all the way down the stairs from Timmerman’s office. When we reached the street, I started to say something until Alison put a hand on my arm. “Not yet,” she said. A few blocks from Timmerman’s office stood a Teller’s Hall, one of those huge stone and stained-glass buildings from before the Revolution, a “church” as it was called, converted to sacred space by Marion Firetongue, so that a statue of the Founder now stood just inside the doorway. We stepped into the dark open space, lit only by the daylight from the high windows. With our arms crossed over our chests and our hands on our shoulders, we touched our heads to the sides of the statue.
“Guard us and conceal us,” we said. “Shield us and seal us from all alien presences.” Alison sighed as she stood up. “Well,” she said, “I guess we’re about as safe from interference as we’re going to get.”
Whatever the building’s interior used to be had long since vanished when the Faceless Workers came and cleansed the city in the Time of Fanatics after the Revolution. Now, the great open space of the main hall had been transformed into a replica of the garden where the mysterious “Uncle Jeffrey” had sat talking to Firetongue over five days and nights, persuading her to “break the blood”—leave her family—and join the Army of the Saints. In the middle of the floor computer-animated statues of Firetongue and Jeffrey sat on a bench under a stone tree. They moved their heads side to side, constantly whispering. Alison and I sat on wooden chairs by a pair of small potted bushes off in the corner, ready at last for our own whispering.
The fact is, there wasn’t all that much to say. I suggested to Alison my idea of a pre-programmed switch at the right moment, Lisa Black Dust 7 re-emerging to destroy Timmerman. Alison said, “I just don’t see how they could do that. You can’t just…hypnotize a Bright Being. For one thing, they don’t have brains.”