Chapter 2
It is said that Jesus Christ showed his feminine and masculine sides equally, by simultaneously wearing long hair and a beard.
—The Alternative History of Jesus, UWW Press
“You’d better be in school when I call, young lady,” Camilla Vale shouted, from the base of the hall stairs.
Leaving her bedroom door closed, the fifteen-year-old didn’t respond. Lori wore red-and-white pajamas, and having been awake for a few minutes, she sat on the edge of the bed. Her microdisk music player was on, but not loudly. Taller than most girls at Seattle High, Lori had long auburn hair, lavender eyes, and a heart-shaped face, with soft features. She had her father’s height, not the stunted body of her mother, whom she loathed.
“Do you hear me, young lady?”
Lori turned up the volume on the microdisk, and her room filled with the throb of Sister Moon, one of the new space-rock groups.
Moments later—predictably—her door slammed open (with the handle hitting a dent already in the wall), and her mother roared in.
“Turn that music down!” she commanded.
Lori did so, but as she went to sit on her bed again she shot a contemptuous glare at the small, feisty woman, who wore brown slacks and a beige sweater. Camilla Vale could be so difficult at times, without any understanding of the problems of being a teenager.
“I’m going to call your school in an hour,” Camilla said, “and you’d better be there. If you aren’t, I’ll send the police after you again.”
“Oh, right. Like they’re your personal cops—the Camilla Vale Police Patrol. I could run away again and they wouldn’t start searching for days.”
A hurt look crossed Camilla’s face. A woman of slumping posture, she had a small nose and light brown hair. As she sat beside her daughter she said, in a voice suddenly fragile, “You should appreciate what I do for you, dear. All the hours I work to put clothes on your back and food in your belly, and this is the thanks I get?”
“You’re so out of touch, Mom, I can’t even talk to you.” She blinked her long eyelashes, shook her head. “All I ever hear is the same old garbage, over and over.” Lori felt a little guilty over these harsh remarks, but not enough to apologize. Her mother wasn’t that old, but couldn’t seem to remember what it had been like to be a teenager.
“Get ready for school,” Camilla snapped. She glanced at her watch, left hurriedly. Lori heard the front door close. Her mother worked in a clerical position, as she’d done for years.
The videophone jangled, and Lori waited to read the caller identification screen before touching a button to answer. The video screen went on. It was her best friend, her rainbow-colored hair cut short and jagged.
“Hey, Alicia,” Lori said, speaking first.
“How’s it going?” Alicia asked.
“Wonderful. Some guy left a message threatening to kill me.”
* * *
In a previous incarnation, the two-story stucco building had been a convent for Roman Catholic nuns. Now it housed families . . . the surviving parents and siblings of the special children. Situated on a hillside outside Salonika in northern Greece, it commanded a stunning view of the Aegean Sea. Over the years, many of the red roof tiles had been replaced, so that they didn’t quite match, and there were discolorations and streaks on the stucco exterior walls.
It was mid-afternoon, with the fresh aroma of the saltwater beach in the air. An old woman stood on the balcony of the second floor library, her age-spotted hands resting on the sun-warmed iron railing. Dr. Katherine Pangalos watched as a sleek black Mercedes—her personal limousine—passed the guard station and pulled onto a paved circular driveway in front of the building. Her own elaborate villa, built in the eighteenth century, graced an adjacent property, beyond a grove of olive trees.
Before her chauffeur could go back and open the rear door, it swung open and a small woman stepped out, carrying a dark briefcase. Despite her lofty position, Amy Angkor-Billings preferred doing things for herself. Dr. Pangalos went inside and crossed the library to an elevator that would take her down to the main level. Personally, she’d been blessed with servants since childhood, and couldn’t imagine what life would be like without them. But Amy, from her impoverished upbringing in Cambodia, came from an entirely different background.
As the aged doctor awaited the elevator, she thought about how curious it was that two women of such divergent backgrounds—herself and Amy—now found themselves on the same path. The she-apostles were responsible for that . . . the unusual babies they had gathered from around the world. Some six months ago, Katherine’s own non-profit medical organization had brought the first two children to the UWW’s attention—babies born to poor families in backward countries. Babies who babbled a strange language . . . ancient Aramaic.
This alone had been astonishing, and the translations even more so, revealing the existence of others like themselves . . . highly unique female children.
It turned out that the eleven children they had so far—who called themselves “she-apostles”—were not all the same age, and that one more had not yet been born, but soon would be. The first two children had told Katherine’s people where ten others could be located, and what their birth names were, or would be, when born. Armed with this information, Katherine had dispatched operatives to bring them in, by ruse or even by force if necessary. In the process, people had been killed, including two sets of parents. The UWW leadership had not wanted this to happen, but they had to locate and gain control over all of the she-apostles by any means.
Now they had all of them, with the exception of one.
Not surprisingly, this was the first thing Amy asked when they met in the foyer of the building: “Any news on Martha yet?” She was referring to Martha of Galilee, so named by the other she-apostles. Voices could be heard in another room: the families were gathering.
Katherine held onto the smaller woman’s hand in a long, warm handshake. “We think she’s somewhere in Mexico. You heard about the problem, I assume?”
“Yes,” Amy said as they separated, “the difficulty of translating from Aramaic—several villages with similar names—”
“We’re narrowing it down. I’ve dispatched teams to five peasant villages in the central highlands of Mexico. Something is bound to turn up.”
The epicanthic folds around Amy’s green eyes tightened. “With only one to go, we can’t let her slip through our fingers.”
“I understand how important she is. I’m sparing no expense.”
“And we all appreciate that. Too bad you can’t take a tax deduction for your contributions.”
“No matter. Money is no object.” Heiress to a huge shipping fortune, Katherine seemed to have an endless supply of money.
Amy followed Katherine through a wide doorway into an immense, high-ceilinged room that had once been the dining hall of the convent. Men, women, and children were seated in chairs . . . the surviving birth-families of the she-apostles. As the two women entered, a hush fell over the assemblage.
Amy climbed three wooden steps to a stage and crossed to a podium. On an adjacent table, she set down her briefcase and opened it, with four clicks of the air latches.
“I’ve brought holo-recordings of your children,” she said.
Presently the audience grew quiet and listened as Amy set up a projection machine on the podium and adjusted the transmitting ball on top. “I’m sorry we can’t leave anything with you,” Amy said. “We’ve explained the security problems to you.” She touched a button, and a little girl’s voice came on, a fifteen-month-old toddler speaking in Aramaic.
“This is Gina Michelli,” Amy explained, concealing the child’s apostolic name, Veronica, and the related information about her. That she-apostle, like the others, had renounced her birth-name when she began speaking Aramaic. Such facts had not been revealed to the birth-families . . . only a made-up story that the children were special, and the subject of a top-secret government study.
Now Amy stretched the truth even further when she gazed from the podium down at the parents—an overweight Italian couple in the front row—and said, “Gina says she loves you, and misses you.” In reality, the children seemed to have passed over a threshold, rising above familial concerns to a different level, one that affected all of humankind.
A woman beside them translated Amy’s words into Italian, and tears began to stream down the mother’s face. She said something, which was in turn related back to Amy: “She wants to know when she can hold her baby again.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t provide an exact time,” the Chairwoman replied.
This was true, because in this room only she and Katherine knew that the Italian baby and ten others formed the core of a rigorous academic research program, with no end in sight. In order to maintain secrecy, the families were forced to live here under guard for an indefinite time. With all of her wealth, Dr. Pangalos was providing them with amenities that rivaled a luxury resort, including a health club and swimming pool, meals prepared by world-class chefs, tutors for their other children, and even high-security Mediterranean cruises. This former convent had, in effect, become a velvet-lined prison for the families. They were not permitted to send or receive any type of mail or correspondence, to make phone calls, or to receive visitors.
As the first child finished speaking and Amy began playing a recording of the second, she paused, having heard something . . . the sound of breaking glass, followed by loud footsteps.
Suddenly men in silver-and-black uniforms burst into the hall, carrying automatic rifles. They sprayed the ceiling with bullets, and their leader shouted, in English, “Everybody on the floor, face-down! Now!”
Amy touched a button on the holo-recorder, destroying it. Smoke curled out of the machine.
* * *
In separate caves rimming the top of Monte Konos, monks wearing dirty, frayed robes murmured the Prayer of the Heart, over and over: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner . . . Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. . .” The sun, low in the sky, splashed golden hues across the mountains of northern Greece.
These men—a handful of religious hermits—had inhabited the caves long before United Women of the World took over the mountain. The council had allowed them to remain, considering them non-political and unthreatening. Two of the monks (who called themselves “musers”) earned food and simple personal articles by telling fortunes to the women, while others performed manual labor around the facility. There was no shortage of work needing to be done.
At the conclusion of his prayer one of the monks emerged from his primitive home and climbed a short distance up a rock, in cool shadows. Dipping his hands in a small natural bowl, he drank rainwater. Then he gazed uphill, at the streaked gray-and-black stone buildings of the ancient monastery, with its Byzantine arches and domed rooftops. The sun, just dropping below a mountain peak behind him, was glinting off window panes on the top floor of the Scriptorium Building.
Inside that structure, the women who controlled the mountain were particularly busy. He wondered what they were doing in there.