The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper

outside when the weather is nice, because I love the smell of sun-dried sheets. So, I had the first load ready, pegging them to the lines out back, and all of a sudden the purple smell filled my nose, the same hue I’d been smelling at odd times for weeks now.
    It was ten oh five by the kitchen clock when I went inside, prayer time. Maybe it was the power of suggestion, but I swear I smelled it. Not like wood smoke or leaf smoke in autumn. More like incense smoke, with its own faint fragrance, something resinous and unfamiliar, with this background odor hanging in it, powerful and purple, rising from millions of people asking God to reach down and solve all the world’s problems.
    I told myself it’s just more of the millennial fever we’ve been through recently. It will go on a while, and then it will fade. The purple smell won’t kill me; the prayers won’t hurt anything. Maybe Jerry’s new enthusiasm will turn out to be, as others have been, a passing phase.

10
at faience
    W hen Arnole vanished, Ayward stopped protesting the move to Faience, but that didn’t prevent his drinking too much on moving day and spending the afternoon arguing with Rashel. Dismé and Aunt Gayla exchanged glances and decided to explore the grounds. When discord threatened to become overt, it was better to be at a distance.
    The stone-floored loggia looked westward into thick forest. Graveled garden walks led beside grass-tangled gardens star-eyed with tiny tulips and blue squill. The entrance drive to the arboretum went over carved stone bridges where chuckling waters ran icy and clear from the snowmelt of Mount P’Jardas. When the shade grew chilly, they moved south into sunlight, toward the serpentine bottle wall, which Dismé avoided, though Gayla went along the wall, reading labels aloud.
    â€œMeggie Ovelon Voliant. I remember her. A great tall woman with red hair. Hello, Meggie. It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it? Jerome Clarent. There were some Clarents living down the street from Genna and me when we were in Newland. I wonder if Jerome was the son…Hello, here’s Cynth Fragas-Turnaway. Fragas was a minor family, not one of the big Turnaways…”
    And then, “Oh, look. All that argument between Ayward and Rashel, and the movers have already put our bottles here!”
    And indeed, there was a new section of wall containing Father’s and Gayla’s families’ bottles as well as Rashel’s…Not Roger’s, however. Not Mother’s.
    Gayla chirruped, “Mother Gazane, I know you’ll enjoy this place! Cousin Fram Deshôll! Isn’t it lovely today…Oh, Nephew Val, this is a beautiful place!”
    Dismé heard the words like a knell, hastening to lead Gayla south to the great yew maze, every aisle of it sentried by white marble statues standing in neatly clipped niches. Fearful of becoming lost, Gayla urged that they not go far inside, so they wandered northward again, across an extent of tufted grass to the dilapidated barns, stables, and storage sheds that occupied the northwest corner of the museum land.
    Everything except the museum and house was overgrown and unkempt and—so Dismé thought—quite marvelous. Arnole would have loved it. When they finally returned to the Director’s House, Rashel and Ayward weren’t speaking, though the house was more or less orderly and full of dinner smells. Rashel left immediately for the museum, and Ayward settled into his chair to wax sarcastic about the place and its manifold “conceits.”
    Conceits or not, Dismé liked them. Her walk had made her unusually happy, a worrisome pleasure, for with Arnole so recently gone, should she be happy? Since the Regime did everything it could to inculcate guilt, a task in which Rashel was an expert confederate, Dismé had more acquaintance with regret than she did with joy. Even asking “why” usually brought rue as an