A Meeting At Corvallis

e-creationist before the Change, one of those who played at medieval combat, and the odd Wiccan had
overlapped with that set.
Extremely odd, some of them, he thought with a smile.
Then he raised his gaze to the brooding, feral face of Pan, and the smile died. The heavy-lidded eyes
were shadowed as they stared into his, given life by the flickering firelight. They brought with them a hint
of green growth and damp, moldering leaves; the dark scented breath of the wildwood, and the fear that
waits to take the souls of men who wander too far beyond the edge of the tilled, tamed fields.
That isn't just good carving, he thought.
It reminded him of medieval art in ancient churches; not the style or the imagery, but the raw power
of bone-deep belief. The Wiccans he'd known in England before the Change had mostly seemed at least
slightly barmy to him, when they weren't playacting. He didn't know what Juniper and her friends had
been like before the modern world perished, but they weren't putting it on now. Not in the slightest.
Juniper's green eyes twinkled, following his thoughts with disconcerting ease; she linked her fingers
around one knee and considered him with her head tilted to one side.
"It wasn't like this when I inherited it from my great-uncle, that good gray Methodist," she said, her
tone mock-defensive. "We didn't have much to do but carve, those first winters after the Change, and it
was useful with so many new Dedicants, sort of a visual training aid. At first it was just me and my
coveners and a few friends like Dennie. Then we had to help other people, get the farms started again
and make tools and save the livestock, fight off the bandits and Eaters and … It all just sort
of … snowballed."
"I had the same feeling of riding the tiger in directions unpredictable over in England, my dear," Nigel
said. "I've seen it elsewhere. While things were in flux, one strong personality with luck and, hmmm,
baraka, could set the tone for a whole region, like a seed-crystal in a saturated solution. As Charles and
I did in England, until I fell out with His Majesty."
Juniper shivered very slightly as she looked around. "And as I appear to have done hereabouts."
"I should think you'd be glad to see more come around to your way of thinking?" he probed gently.
"The Craft never did hunt for converts the way the religions of the Book do; we waited for those who
were interested to seek us out. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Then suddenly there
were so many … "
"Are you sorry?" Nigel asked.
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "No … no, I'm not really sorry. The old world was
dead the instant the machines stopped working. The new one needs a strong belief, a hearth-faith to
strengthen folk through hard times. That's helped us make as good a life here as humankind can live
nowadays, I think. Or it would be if there weren't robbers and hostile neighbors, sure."
"It's certainly taken on your, ah, coloration, your Clan Mackenzie." He nodded at her pleated kilt and
the plaid pinned at her shoulder with a silver brooch. "Symbols become important at a time like that."
"That was Dennis!" Juniper protested, laughing; then she grew grave. "Do you remember that flash of
light and the spike of pain, when the Change came?"
"Indeed I do," he said. "It was the middle of the night in England and I was asleep, but—"
Inwardly, he shivered a little at the memory. He'd woken shouting, with Maude's scream in his ears.
The pain had been over in an instant, but it was as intense as anything he'd ever felt, even when the RPG
drove grit into his eyes in the wadi back in Oman, and he'd thought he was blind for life.
Every human being on Earth—and every other creature with a spinal cord— had felt the pain and
seen the wash of silver fire. Half London had been screaming. The sound had come clearly though the
window, in a place where the throb of machines was absent for the first time in centuries. Then the
beginning of the city-consuming fires had broken the utter darkness … The failure of everything electrical
and of all combustion motors had been obvious within an hour. It hadn't been until troops under his
command tried to put down rioters and looters next day that it had become apparent that explosives
didn't work either, starting with CS gas and baton rounds and moving up to live ammunition.
Juniper shook herself, casting off dark memories of her own; anyone who'd survived had them. "I've
wondered whether that moment, the white light and the pain, didn't do something to us. To our minds,