Children of the Source (9 page)

    “Mary and Charles are my parents,”
  Judith said, coming out of the kitchen.

    Carson stopped.
  “I didn’t know.  Salt Lake Prison Camp.  I know who you are, Mr. Bareton.”

    Charles said, “After Salt Lake we stayed here a couple of days reprovisioning.
  Judith stayed with Laith and Jamie.”

    “Uniforms scare us, General,” Mary said, sitting down.
  Judith mopped up the spilled tea.

    “Sorry day in the United States when uniforms scare a citizen.
  Major Lee Wok mentioned you’d transformed Sky Haven into a model community.  I had no idea you were coming.”  He looked at Judith.  “How long is your stay?”

    Charles ran his tongue over his lower lip.
  “Permanently, we hope.”

    The General walked over to an old wood stove we used for a planter.
  “Will there be changes in leadership here?  You’re both strong individuals?”

    “I didn’t come here to lead,” Charles said quietly.
  “Patterns of leadership are well established here.  We only want to live quietly, fit in where we can, enjoy our last years here.”

     Will didn’t comment.
  He caught my eye.  “You still lead?”

    “Yes.”

    He set down the wolf carving Laith had made.  “These are peculiar times.  I need stability now above all things with these aliens showing up.”  He shook his graying head. “Who’d ever thought aliens really existed.” 

   Talker strolled in, surveying everyone. Fourteen years and going strong.
  She padded up to Will, voiced herself speculatively, arched her back, and rubbed up against his leg.  Will bent down, running his calloused hand across her back.  “Madame,” he said gravely,  “I’m truly honored.”  A loud purr erupted.

    Laith walked in, saw the proceedings.
  “General, I see you’ve been accepted into her select circle of admirers.  Sometimes I’m not sure if we’re enlisted or unknowingly coerced.  Anyway, I’ve never known her to show bad judgment.”

    The General chuckled.
  “Thank you, Laith.”  He traced a forefinger down her back almost absently, and looked at Charles.  “Stay, Mr. Bareton.”  But his smile was a warning, and he turned to me.  “You lead.”  He nodded toward the door.

    We walked out in silence.
  “I had a dream,” he said at length.  “The strangest dream of my life.  You know my son, Luke.”  He swallowed, jaws tightening, eyes bright with unshed tears, and anger at his sudden weakness.  “My son was killed south of Salt Lake two days ago in a firefight with jay hawkers.”  He looked up at the pine trees, mouth shaking uncontrollably.  “Christ,” he swore.

    “Your emotions speak the truth,” I said.
  “Do not deny them.”

    “I’m a military commander.
  I can’t  afford to do this.”

    “You can’t afford not to.
 Public displays trouble you and rightly so,” I replied.  “Do your crying in private.  If you don’t acknowledge your emotions, and let them run their course, you’re asking for trouble - public embarrassment and physical problems.  You are needed here.  We can’t afford to be without you.  Stability.  You mentioned a dream,” I finished quietly.

    He continued to stare at the pine trees.
  “In the dream I met some people.  Like an appointment.  I knew it was all prearranged.  We got into a vehicle and drove to this fantastic garden.”  He knitted his brow, concentrating.  “More like a fantastically landscaped botanical garden.  The buildings - never seen anything like them - they fitted into the ground and seemed a natural part of everything.  Then they took me to this place set in back and below a waterfall. Inside were many spacious rooms and Luke was sleeping in one.  I was so overjoyed I started crying and woke up.”  He looked at me.  “Damn dream leading me on.”

    “Not hardly,” I cut in.
  “Arthur Luke is quite alive and you dreamed true.  What struck you about the door knocker on the building your son was in?”

    His eyes grew wide.
  “Describe it,” he said.

    “A sunburst that moved.
  More than three dimensional.  It was alive and tingled to your touch.”

    “You were there.”
  He stared at me, stunned.

    “I want you to know your son lives, and it is a true dream.
  Yes, I was there.”

    “You must be the forerunner you told me of,”
  he said.

    “Nope.”

    Carson studied me excited.  “Luke looked like he was sleeping.  I could see him breathing and he turned over muttering.  Couldn’t catch what he was saying.”

    “Your son.”
  I stopped for a moment.  “In violent death great psychological shock can occur, especially where the personality believes there is no life after physical death.  Often the personality will set up a state of simulated oblivion, and then relive the death over and over as a dream or nightmare if you will.  The muttering you saw is this.  There is an order of guides or helpers that work with this problem.  They will insert themselves into his dreams to help bring about the change needed.

    “Now Luke has conflicting ideas on death and survival so it may not take too long for him to
wake up
so to speak.  Any rate, he’s in good hands.  I understand he is responding nicely.”  Will looked as though a great weight had lifted.  “You’ll dream of him again.”

    We turned up Fremont Boulevard toward the Main Gate and Carson’s chopper.
  The pilot stood drinking tea and talking with a couple of boys who eagerly looked at the machine.  The alien spacecraft now seemed oddly part of the landscape.  Then it hit me.  Their movement never deviated.  After a while they seemed to belong.  This was not an accident.

    Derek and
Hensley walked up.  Derek struggled, trying not to laugh.  Hensley looked about to explode.  “He met Joanne and Gary Hartman.”  Oh, crap.  Joanne and Gary are an ex-nun and priest who left the Church and married.  They had three children.

    “I don’t believe what’s going on here,”
Hensley said, voice hoarse. “This is a place of deviants.  A renegade priest and nun.  A wizard that doesn’t believe in God.  I met a gang of women chanting around a pine tree.  Worshiping a damn tree.  Then there was this skinny kid teaching a class in what he called Essence Memory.  What the hell is essence memory?”  Carson sat in the doorway of the chopper, an interested light in his eyes.

    I laughed.
  “As simple as possible, people are created by powerful source entities some called souls.  Each person is brand new.”

    “So there is no reincarnation,”
Hensley said, a triumphant sneer on his face.  “I heard you people believe in reincarnation.”

    “True.
  But it is the energy of the soul that reincarnates.  Now, each new person has the essence memories of its source or soul.  Lessons learned from other personalities in other lifetimes and other nonphysical experiences.  That’s why everyone has different likes, dislikes, interests.  Many of which seem to have no basis in living experience.  Attitudes and aptitudes that seem to have no point of reference in your current life.  This is essence memory.”

    “So,”
Hensley said, “no reincarnation and no karma.  It’s all a bunch of hooey.”  A triumphant gleam ruled his brown eyes.

    “Whoa Nelly, Mr.
Hensley,” I said.  “Karma simply means action.  Like attracts like.   Karma is spoken in your Bible as ‘you reap what you sow’.  So it is there.”

    General Carson stood and shook himself.
  “Hensley, there will be plenty of time to debate more of these ideas.  Jamie, could you come to the fort with us?  We have a problem with a couple of women who claim the same child.  A deaf girl who can’t communicate well.  I’d like you there as a friend of the court.  Can you come?”       

5

    An hour later the chopper took us to the fort.  Abe and Issac conned a ride.  Fascinating to see the area from the air.  Gives  a whole different perspective.  Kind of sets things in place so to speak.

    We set down next to Military Headquarters.
  Hensley stomped off without a word. I asked Abe and Issac to keep in touch.  Going to the fort, the uncertainty, always made things exciting, especially for the children who seemed to have more flexible and imaginative minds.  Abe and Issac nodded, grinned mischievously, and hurried off to explore the fort.

  
 Carson and Randolph accepted the salute of Will’s military aide Captain Leon Summer, a tall slim black man with a thin mustache and very military bearing.  He nodded to me and we exchanged pleasantries.  Everyone looked to the spacecraft.

    The fort bustled with new soldiery.
  Randolph mentioned he’d brought two undermanned companies of ninety men each.   One was already mustering to move north to the fort at Fredonia on the Arizona Strip.  Carson had assigned the reliable Lt. Colonel Jason Colt to patrol the Strip and Southern Utah.   Colt did his job, earned a promotion, and Carson kept him as well supplied as he could.

    We went into Headquarters, and while Carson concerned himself with duties, I wandered over to a raised topography map showing the entire military region.
  I liked the raised relief for it showed the areas maybe in slight exaggeration, but it also showed the areas in ways most maps don’t.  Perspective again.  The map covered a wall area of fifteen by twenty feet.

    The trial was held in a small almost bare room.
  Three officers sat behind a single table.  The two women each sat at a table facing the court.  I sat off to one side by the officer’s tribunal.

    Brigadier General William Christopher Carson stood as President of the Court.
  He rose and addressed the court:  “The problem we must solve is who is the mother of the young girl we will meet.”  He turned to the guard at the door.  “Please ask Lt. Shaffer to come in.”

    Shaffer looked forty-five.
  Actually he was ten years younger, and opted for an officers commission offered him by Carson after twelve years as a noncommissioned officer.  Mustangers (merit promotions from the enlisted ranks) were common in the Army.  Shaffer took the witness chair.

    “Please state your name, rank, and position.”

    “First Lt. William W. Shaffer, Commander Company B, First Battalion, Twelfth Infantry Regiment, assigned the Fifth Military Region.”

    “Thank you, Lieutenant.
  Please tell the court what you know of this case.”

    Shaffer eased his lanky frame in his chair.
  “Twenty June I was conducting a sweep of the old airport area and Pine Del down 89A to Fry Canyon when I came on these two women fighting over the girl.  Each claimed the girl as her own.  The girl can’t hear or speak, but she kept pointing to the Williams woman wanting to get close to her.”  He paused.

    The older woman jumped to her feet and shou
ted.  “Liar!  You goddamn liar!  You and this woman have something going on and that’s why you’re saying this.”  A feral cunning lit her eyes.

    The voice cut like a knife.
  “Mrs. Conners.  Shut your mouth.  One more outburst and I’ll have you bound and gagged.”  Carson and the woman locked eyes and she turned away.  If looks could kill.  Carson turned to Shaffer.  “What else happened?”

    “That’s pretty much it, sir.
  I couldn’t make an accurate judgment so I brought all three back to the fort.”  Shaffer looked at Mrs. Conners distastefully, and shook his head.

    Major Lincoln Whitbe, a heavy-set black man, and Carson’s Chief of Operations, spoke, “Did the girl have any identification on her?”

    “No, sir.”

    “Any other questions?”
   No one had.

   “Hazel Conners, please take the stand.”

   The earthy face looked at General Carson.  “I have no legal counsel.”

  
“Mrs. Conners,”  Carson said, “Consider yourself lucky you are being heard at all.  Please take the witness chair.”

    “If I don’t?”
  Her glittering eyes searched his face.

    “Then the court will assume the girl in question belongs to Clara Williams,”
  Carson replied easily.  Hazel Conners stalked to the chair.

    “Please state your name and where you live.”

    “Hazel Conners.  I lived with my daughter in the Verde Valley.  Until this creature,”  she pointed to Clara Williams, “stole my Janet.  I tracked the bitch here.”  Everyone cringed.  Clara went white.

    “We’ll get to that soon enough.
  You will curb your tongue when in this courtroom,”  the general said.  The expression in Hazel’s eyes never wavered.  Reptilian intelligent glitter.  “Mrs. Conners, please tell the court your side of the story.”

    “Very simple really.
   I was working in my garden when I heard a noise and turned.  This ...This ...” she pointed a lean brown finger at Clara, “was running away with my Janet.  Nobody does that.  I left everything.  Caught up with her at Pine Del.  Near the airport road.  Garden’s probably ruined.”  She stopped.

    “Is that all?”
  Carson asked.

    “It’s enough and it’s the truth,”
  she said firmly.

    “Thank you, Mrs. Conners.
  You may take your seat.  Mrs. Williams, please take the stand.”

    When she was seated, Carson said, “P
lease state your side of the story.”  Carson gave up swearing people in long ago.  People were going to lie or tell the truth as they wished.

    Clara Williams looked like a person trapped in a world not of her making.
  Just under thirty, she’d seen her share of misery or at least looked it.  With strong clean features.  I could tell she had certain rules she made and kept.

     “My daughter and I are nomads.
  Our community at Heber was over-run by jay hawkers nine months ago.  We were left for dead.  My husband disappeared. Probably taken for a slave.  Been traveling from place to place trying to find him.  That is until we were caught and sold as slaves to this woman.  She worked us in her gardens and chicken runs.  That was six months ago.  Then I overheard her discussing selling Janet to white slavers out of Zig’s Hole.  Janet’s beautiful and they’d sell her to a rich pervert to make a whore out of her. So we escaped and she caught up with us where the soldiers found us fighting.”  She paused, tears running down her face and then blurted, “I can tell you all about Janet.  Her scars, and how they happened. Please don’t let this woman steal her.”

    “How convincing.”
  Hazel sneered.

    Carson motioned to the armed guard at the door.
  “Ladies, please wait outside with Private Morrison.”   As the door closed on the three, he ordered the girl brought in.  She looked like a wild animal, eyes bright and darting.  A questioning gutturals sound escaped her lips.  Profoundly deaf.  Carson smiled gently and motioned her to sit down.  She was utterly beautiful, breathtakingly so.   Anita Whitbe, the Major’s wife, sat down next to her.  The child slipped her hand in Mrs. Whitbe’s hand.

    Major Whitbe spoke. “I think we can agree Clara is the mother.
  How do we prove it?”

    “Hazel has a short fuse,” I said. “Bait her perhaps.”

    Master Sergeant Larry Border, third member of the tribunal, said, “Conner’s invested a great deal of time and effort coming here.  She considers the child her meal ticket.”

    “True,”
  Carson said.  “Zig’s Hole.”  Zig’s Hole sat where Clarksdale used to be.  An outlaw town, in the Verde Valley below Flagstaff, it dealt in illegal weapons, slavery, drugs, prostitution, and everything else from gambling, and assassination to terrorism.  It was claimed by Zig, the proprietor, any service, article, or person was for sale.  Carson had destroyed Zig’s Hole three times, and each time Zig Holly had rebuilt.  Jay hawkers based themselves close by or used Zig’s as a resupply base.  “Linc, what’s intelligence say about Zig’s Hole?”

    “Still going strong, sir.
  G-2 has it there’s a detachment of Abraham Cielo’s men taking up residence.  Twenty fighters.  Pretty reliable intelligence.”

    Abraham Cielo had carved a state out of Northern Mexico, recruiting mercenaries, and thumbing his nose at a helpless Mexico City.
  He’d controlled the area coast to coast for over ten years using terror, extortion, and every criminal activity imaginable.  Considered a master of manipulation, he was on the move again.  Now north into Carson’s territory.  Major mistake.  “Major Whitbe, when we’re done here, get with Colonel Randolph and plan an operation to destroy Zig’s Hole.”

    The guard opened the door and looked to General Carson waiting in silence. “Private?”

    “Sir, a report came in that Maria Beck, the herb lady, has been kidnapped.  Funny, they said the jay hawkers sported red feathers in their hats.  They headed south.”

    Whitbe said, “Cielo’s men use red feathers in their hats as their symbol.”

    “That settles it.  Private, find Colonel Randolph.  Have him report here.  Thank you.”  He turned to Whitbe and Border.  “I didn’t think he’d have the nerve or stupidity to raid this far north.”

    Derek rushed in out of breath.
  “Yes, sir?”

    “Colonel, Abraham Cielo’s men have kidnapped Maria Beck, a lady who deals in herbs locally.
  Sounds like they’re headed for Zig’s Hole.  I want you to take two companies of men, destroy Zig’s Hole, and bring back Maria Beck and any other unfortunates you find there.  Cielo’s men wear red feathers in their hats.  Coordinate everything with Major Whitbe.  He can help you with whatever you need - planning, intel, supplies, weapons.”  He studied the ceiling fan.  “I want the place razed.  It must not be rebuilt.  Use your own judgment.”  Carson smiled at the girl.  “Anita, will you please escort Janet out for a moment?”  They left.

    “May I accompany the expedition, General?” I asked.
  “Maria belongs to our community.”

     “Suit yourself, Jamie.
  It’ll be bloody.  No quarter.”

    I nodded.
  “I know.”

    “We’ll finish with the women now,”
  Carson said.  “Show them in.”  Clara Williams sat on the edge of her seat.  Hazel Conner’s eyes darted around the room and landed on General Carson.  A hard thing.  Iron.  “This Court has had a difficult time making a decision.  Since we can’t agree who is  the real mother ... ”

    “You can’t steal my daughter,”
  Hazel screamed, rising to her feet, eyes feral, teeth bared.  “No one’s gonna do that.”

    “General, do anything with my daughter.
  Put her with the orphans, but don’t let that woman have her.”  Tears streamed down Clara’s face.

    “Seen enough, gentlemen?”
  Carson said.

    “Bitch,
  I’ll get you for this,”  Hazel howled and launched herself at Clara.  The guard took two bounding steps forward and grabbed the older woman.  When she spun out of his arms, he neatly knocked her out with a punch to her jaw.

    “Thank you, Corporal,”
  Carson said, promoting him with a word.

    “Thanks, General,” the guard said.
  “What should I do with her?”

    “Put her in a holding cell.
  She can go back on the train that’s leaving tomorrow.  Hate to do that.  God knows what else she’s done.”

    Sending undesirables out of the territory on trains worked fairly well.
  The military regions had no prisons.  Anything less than a capital offense was dealt with at the commander’s discretion.  Carson’s standing order had them deported by train.  If they returned, he hanged them.  They rarely returned.  There was a vast difference between theft by need and theft by greed. 

    The General turned to Clara. “Your daughter will be restored to you immediately.”
  He opened the waiting room door and Janet raced into her mother’s arms.

    The greeting ended with Janet basking contently in her mother’s arms.
  “Jamie, Janet is deaf,”  Anita said.

    Clara stared at me, eyes going wide. “You’re the Wizard?”
   I must have looked uncomfortable, because Anita and the officers laughed.

    “You blush so nicely,” Anita teased.
  I laughed.

    “Can you help Janet?” Clara asked.

    The girl turned and I knew the problem.  “She has an arthritic condition which impinges on the auditory nerves,” I said.  “Yes, we can help her.”

    “You’ll operate?”
  Clara asked.

    “No.
  With your permission my son, Laith, will do some healing.  Believe me, he is good.  If General Carson will provide an escort to Cheshire, it can probably be done today.”