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and hitting him. The young man stormed around furiously for a couple of weeks
before he finally left, to the unvoiced relief of all.
Steven himself lived in the central building over the meditation hall, in the
northern quadrant of the upper floor. The other upstairs rooms were all filled
with the oldest, closest Change members. Most were men. The building to the
northeast of the center was the communal dining hall with the kitchen and
several offices, including Steven's, and upstairs the quarters for the
youngest children. Walking around the circle counterclockwise, the next
building housed older members on the ground floor and older kids above, then
came a building filled with earnest but inexperienced members, and finally the
recently completed building where Ana was housed.
It was a bit worrying: Ana had no intention of staying out her promised year,
but in a hierarchical organization where secret doctrine is given out in slow
degrees, it would not be easy to speed her trip to the inner circle. All she
could do was keep her ears and eyes wide open, and hope for a chance to bypass
the preliminaries.
It helped, being a teacher, particularly as she convinced the others that she
was best placed with the older students where her background of history could
be used and her less-complete but still broad familiarity with English
literature might assist in preparing the students for the state's standardized
tests. Even in an alternative community, test scores mattered.
Within a couple of weeks, Ana was well on her way to becoming an accepted
member of the Change community. She taught her kids, she participated in group
meditations, and she listened intently to Steven's nightly talks.
One morning when Ana went in for breakfast, small, blond Suellen was not at
her usual place behind the serving tables. When she did not appear again for
lunch, Ana asked casually if anyone had seen her, and received only tight lips
in answer. At the very end of dinner the young woman walked in, making an
entrance into the dining hall, her hair wet from the shower, her body moving
as if it ached all over, a small blister on the inside of her left wrist and
the light of a radiant vision in her face. Ana watched thoughtfully as Suellen
made her way proudly through the room, nodding regally at the respectful
greetings her passage earned. Steven came in a short time later, and over the
next ten minutes, Ana noticed three high-ranking Change members approach him,
exchange a few words, and then glance at the radiant Suellen with knowing
smiles expressions that were affectionate, experienced, and not the least bit
lewd. Whatever test the woman had faced during the day, she had obviously
passed it, and Ana would have sworn that it did not involve sleeping with the
leader.
Ana added Suellen's religious glow and the smiles of the others to her
growing store of Change evidence. She studied the novels in the library and
the paintings on the walls, she asked questions of the older members (most of
whom were younger in years than she) and listened for the hidden references
and intonations behind their words. She looked at the architecture and the
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arrangement of the buildings, at the TRANSFORMATION mural over the kitchen and
the shape of the meditation hall, at the intriguing, glittering gold sculpture
that was suspended over the hall and the way Steven and the higher initiates
gazed at it, and she began to have some interesting ideas.
From the first she had seized on Steven's continual references to heat and
fire and the presence of the round suspended fireplace at the center of the
meditation hall. Fire was not, she decided, merely one metaphor among many; as
a symbol, it lay at the heart of the Change process.
That suspicion had led her to consider the phenomenon of fire worship, which
was why she had talked about Agni at the crucial meeting in Steven's office,
and not Shiva or Jesus or any of the other figures she found present in
Steven's theological vocabulary. Steven and his three friends had spent time
near Bombay, where they would easily have met Parsi thought and begun to
develop a kind of neo-Zoroastrianism, fire-reverence with the Parsi tendency
toward secrecy and appreciation for the metaphysics of change.
However, wouldn't she then see more tangible signs of Steven's preoccupation
with fire, like a continuous flame in front of each building, or a ritual
involving the meditation hall's fireplace? Still she remained convinced that
fire entered the religious equation in some way.
And then one evening during Steven's talk he used a word that sent a shudder
throught the ranks of the higher initiates, and it all fell into place.
The chant that night was "Great heat, great hope", which started out with
four beats and ended up being little more than "heat" and "hope" with a brief
pause between the words. That night Steven spoke not before the chant, but
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