As soon as Liberty and her father stepped through the glass doors into the Heliport’s waiting room, a tall, golden-haired lady of about thirty stepped up to them with hand extended. A girl with long, wavy red hair, who looked to Liberty to be just a little older than herself, was beside the tall lady.
“Hello! I’m Sister Nancy. How are you, Liberty?” she said, clasping Liberty’s hand warmly.
“Fantastic!” Liberty said. “This is my dad, Michael.”
“Greetings, Senator! How was your flight?” She said with a smile and shook his hand. Liberty could tell that her father immediately liked the lady.
“It was very pleasant! This place of yours is even more beautiful than the literature portrays, if that’s possible.”
“We try to keep it in good shape. This is Sister Brenda. She has offered to be Liberty’s guide and companion if you decide she should stay. Brenda just turned sixteen and is studying medicine.”
“Hi!” Liberty said to the slightly older girl.
“Hi, Liberty! We were thinking you guys might like to catch a bite in the dining room before it closes...” Brenda said.
“Could we, Dad?” Liberty pleaded.
“This is only your third dinner, Liberty!” he pointed out.
“I only had a salad the first time, and a miniature airline dinner the second time!”
The two Lyceum members laughed.
“You can order light portions if you want, or just a salad, or maybe just look at the dessert tray,” Sister Nancy said. “I know that when I have jet lag coming westward, I’m very tired the first evening, so I didn’t want to schedule anything important until tomorrow.”
“I feel ready for the evening!” Liberty said, grinning at Brenda.
“You’re fifteen. I feel like a hot bath!” the senator said.
“I believe there’s a hot tub in your room,” Nancy said.
“Well, well, another example of Lyceum hospitality?”
“Come on, Dad, let’s check out the dining room first!”
“Okay. Something sweet sounds nice. Have our bags been taken care of?”
“They’re already in your room.”
As Nancy and Brenda guided their guests along the carpeted, glass walled corridor away from the Heliport, Liberty listened to the two adults talking about their schedule for the following day. She already felt comfortable with the lady with whom she had been corresponding, and remembered with humor her earlier mental image of Sister Nancy. And she had a hunch Brenda was going to be a fun companion. They passed through the lobby of the Lyceum Lodge, where a number of people were relaxing or talking, and turned down a corridor that promised to take them to the Dining Hall.
Liberty realized that tomorrow would be a busy and important day, as her father would be deciding if he was going to let her stay to get to know the place and possibly be evaluated for membership, or if she would have to continue on to Tokyo with him... and then go to Texas for an evaluation at a place that looked more like a prison than anything else.
When they arrived at the entrance to the Garden Dining Room, Liberty could see the vast cafeteria where only a few people were eating at that hour.
Sister Nancy introduced them to the hostess, and then excused herself to make the arrangements necessary for their tours and other activities on the following day.
“Are you gonna eat with us?” Liberty asked Brenda.
“Yep! I even skipped dinner so I’d be hungry. There’s German food tonight!”
“Yum!” Liberty said as they were shown to their booth. Then she spied the garden full of miniatures outside the large windows. “Oh, look Dad! Isn’t it
beautiful?”
“See the inn in the little town down by the river? I made it,” Brenda said proudly. “It was sort of a trial project to see if I wanted to go into surgery or not.”
Liberty chuckled. The waitress arrived and they looked at their menus.
The senator just ordered a bowl of leber knoodle soup and a glass of Leibfraumilch, with the option of seeing the dessert tray later. The girls both ordered light portions of the bratwurst dinner, a bottle of chilled sparkling grape juice, and the certainty of seeing the dessert tray.
“So what are we doing tonight?” Liberty asked her guide as they sipped on their tart, bubbly drinks.
“I thought I’d give you a behind-the-scenes peek at things that aren’t on the regular tour tomorrow. I hope you brought a bathing suit. There’s tons of things to do, but if you want to stay up past midnight, you’re on your own. I go to work at four in the morning.”
“Four! What do you do?”
“Baking. There might be some of the torte left that I made this morning.”
“That’s what I’ll have if there’s some,” Liberty said.
“I get off work at about eight so I can have breakfast with you tomorrow and then I’m free for the rest of the day.”
Their food arrived, and they all fell silent as they sampled all the items on their plates.
“Excellent leber knoodle,” Senator Buchanan said.
“I’ve always liked bratwurst, but this is really good!” Liberty said.
“Brother Wilhelm simmers it in ale for about an hour,” Brenda said. “He loves it when he gets to cook — he struts around the kitchen speaking German and singing old marching songs. All the German language students sign up to help him.”
“Everyone here studies foreign languages, isn’t that right?” the senator asked, sipping his wine.
“Yes,” Brenda said.
“What do you speak?” Liberty asked.
“Latin, of all things!” she said with a chuckle. “I figured it would help with my medical studies. But I’m learning Arabic now also. At least that’s not a
dead language. I think by next year I’ll be ready to go over to the Middle East somewhere and do a residency. I want to speak the language well enough so I can study medicine at the same time. Isn’t this sauerkraut flavorful?”
“Yeah. Not just sour, like the kind you get in a can,” Liberty agreed.
Not much later they finished their food and requested the dessert tray.
Brenda’s twelve layer torte looked delicious, and luckily there were three pieces left.
As they were eating their dessert, with constant compliments to the baker, Sister Nancy showed up to guide Senator Buchanan to his room. He pulled out a credit card to pay for the meal, but was informed that they were guests and so everything was covered. Before the adults and the young people parted, they all agreed to meet for breakfast at 8:30 the following morning.
“There’s an interesting exhibit in the Art Gallery if you’d care to glance at it...” Sister Nancy said as she and the senator headed out of the dining room together.
“That sounds nice,” Michael Buchanan said.
As soon as the adults were out of ear shot, Liberty whispered to Brenda,
“Is she married?”
“Nope!” Brenda replied with a wink, and they both giggled.
“What shall we do first?”
“You like good music systems and light shows?”
“Sure!”
“Come
on!”
Brenda led Liberty to the Main Lobby where about a hundred people were talking and relaxing, and poked her head into the Information Center. “Hi, Brother Fred. I’m going to run a demo for Liberty in the Temple if no one’s in there.”
The large black man rolled his chair to a computer terminal and touched a few keys. “Nothing scheduled, and she’s empty.”
“Great. Thanks! See you in molecular biology!”
As they crossed the huge lobby, Liberty was looking all around. “This room is totally awesome. You could just sit somewhere and pretend to read a book and listen to all kinds of conversations in different languages!” She
gazed up at the sculptured fountain in the middle of the room as they passed.
“Fantastic! Who made it?”
“It’s on your tour tomorrow. Come on!”
They passed down a dimly lit corridor, through a small lobby, along another corridor, and into the lobby that surrounded the Lyceum Ecumenical Temple. A little ways around its circumference Brenda brought them to a door labeled Control Room, where she tapped a number into the lock’s keypad and pulled the door open. They climbed a steep, narrow stair, and Liberty counted thirty-six steps before they finally emerged on the balcony high above the floor of the Temple. Liberty peered over the railing at the giant amphitheater below, now dimly lit by walkway lights alone. Brenda stepped up to the complex control panel.
“I don’t know a lot about this thing, but there are some demo programs they show people who want to put on an event here. Let me see... Solemn Religious Service, no, Funeral Service, no, Popular Music Festival... that’s the one we want. Want to pick a disk?”
Liberty peered at the diverse collection of music disks in a rack beside the control console. “This one!”
“Yes!” Brenda said. “One of my favorites too!” She slipped the disk into its drive and typed some commands on the console to invoke the demo program.
As soon as the lights dimmed and the music began, she turned around to say something to Liberty, but Liberty was gone. She walked the entire circumference of the balcony, but still no sign of Liberty. Wondering what to do, she stepped to the balcony railing.
By that time the song was well into its first verse, the spotlights directed at the floor of the theater were pulsing different colors, and the beams directed at the ceiling were spinning in circles, all timed to the rhythm and color-coordinated with the pitch of the music. There, far below, was Liberty, dancing to the music in a creative free-form style on the circular floor at the bottom of the Temple. Brenda smiled and watched.
As the song reached its final crescendo, the lights whirled along with Liberty, and at the song’s abrupt ending, the vast auditorium suddenly returned to the near darkness of tread lights and exit signs. Brenda clapped excitedly as Liberty lay on her back and gazed up at the dark ceiling high
above her.
“Where did you learn to dance like that?” Brenda called down to Liberty.
“NOT at North Philadelphia Girls Academy, I’ll tell you that much!”
“Is that somewhere you went to school?”
“One of many places.”
“I’ll come down.”
Brenda shut off the control console and bounded down the thirty-six steps, then down another twenty, and emerged from the access tunnel right at the bottom of the Temple where Liberty still lay on her back.
“You don’t know how much being here means to me,” Liberty said. “All my life I’ve been bounced into and out of one school after another, one camp after another. They always say they know how smart I am, but I broke too many rules, so I have to go.”
“Well, if your dad likes the place and lets you stay, you’ll have two weeks to get to know Lyceum before evaluation week starts.”
“Great, I guess. But I can almost feel myself starting to worry because I’ll probably blow this too. Dancing in the Temple is probably against the rules, or something else I’ll probably do pretty soon.”
“Dancing in the Temple is NOT against the rules! We do it all the time.
There are rules here, but they’re different than other places.”
“Different
how?”
Liberty asked with suspicion.
“Our rules are general concepts that we figure out how to follow by applying our intelligence.”
“Example?”
“Okay. A general concept at Lyceum is complete respect of all persons unless you have a very good reason not to. What if someone had been in here praying or meditating when we arrived?”
“Easy,” Liberty said. “We would have played music and danced another time.”
“Easy if you have enough gray matter to figure out how to apply a general concept. Lots of people don’t. You’ll do fine.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah. Want to go dip into a hot pool way out in the woods?”
“Can we really?” Liberty said, sitting up. “But I don’t want to bother my
dad, in case he and Sister Nancy have something going, and my bathing suit’s in my luggage...”
“No problem. I’ll lend you one of mine!”
“Okay!”
They dashed out of the Ecumenical Temple back the way they had come, through the Residential Lobby and out along an outdoor path to the residence hall named Terrabithia and up two flights of steps to Brenda’s room.
“So this is where you guys live? Neat!” Liberty said as Brenda led her into her cozy studio apartment. It contained a mixture of adolescent decorations and medical student resources, with a few cookbooks thrown in for good measure.
“Catch!” Brenda said, tossing Liberty a bathing suit. “And here’s a bath robe to go over it. There are eight other residence halls too, and they’re almost full, but about a hundred people are moving to Georgia next year, and another hundred to Switzerland the year after that.”
“That’s right! I remember reading about all the campuses you guys have planned all over the world.”
“I think there’s supposed to be at least one on each continent in about ten more years. Except Antarctica. There’s an empty single room right next to mine that you get to use if your dad lets you stay.”
“Hey, fantastic! That’s almost like being roommates!”
“Yeah! You can get up at 3:30 in the morning and help me bake!”
“Fat chance! Well... maybe, if there’s coffee going.”
“There is. And I only do it three days a week. Ready?”
“Completely!”
The two robed girls returned to the Residential Lobby, and then Brenda guided them onto a paved path that led off into the woods. Small walkway lights close to the ground lit their way, and several times Liberty noticed painted animals, gnomes, mushrooms, and little houses built into tree trunks and stumps, many of which had lights on inside.
“I love it!” Liberty said. “It’s almost like being in the Hundred Acre Wood!”
“We have fun with things like that here. This is Brother Daniel’s garden.
He loves gnomes and things.” Then she switched to a whisper and said, “Shh!
Someone’s coming.”
Liberty looked and listened. Somewhere, way down the path, soft footsteps were coming their way. “Let’s hide!” she whispered.
Brenda looked around, spotted a thick bush they could get behind without going through the fantasy garden, and pointed toward it. Liberty nodded.
Quiet as mice they crept behind the bush.
For the next minute not a sound could be heard anywhere around except the approaching footfalls. Liberty found herself almost holding her breath.
The footsteps got closer and closer, and then just as a tall figure was passing their bush, it stopped.
“Good evening, ladies,” a deep female voice said. “I left the heater on for you. Dance and bake well!” And with those words the tall, robed figure continued on down the path toward the residence halls.
“How did she know we were here?” Liberty whispered.
“That was Sister Rachael. Sister Rachael always knows lots of things that no one else knows.”
“She might have heard us talking, and recognized your voice, but how could she know I danced?”
“Who
knows!”
The duo crept back to the path and completed their walk. When they arrived in the clearing, Liberty was surprised to find a beautiful fairy tale garden of lily ponds, cobblestone walkways, little fountains that trickled into the ponds, and in the middle of it all, a hot pool built into the ground under a gazebo. Everything was softly lighted, and a gentle steam rose from the pool.
“Wow! You guys really do go in for magical places!”
“Uh huh. This is Sister Patricia’s baby. We get reservations for it all the time, and so the members only get to use it about once a week. You hit the right day!”
Liberty looked at the ponds between her and the gazebo, with comets and koi darting about beneath the water, and a frown appeared on her face. “How do we get to it?”
“That’s the fun part. Follow me!”
On one side of the garden there were picnic tables and barbecues under mossy wooden roofs that almost looked like part of the forest. Near those,
Brenda led Liberty onto a stone and concrete path that wound its way out into the ponds, its top just an inch or two above the water. It didn’t go straight to the gazebo, but wandered amongst the lily pads and fountains and almost completely encircled the garden before it finally allowed the girls to reach their destination.
Around the gazebo numerous kinds of vines climbed up trellises and poles so that the bathers within had almost complete privacy. The hot pool was a good ten feet across, and the crystal clear water glowed from an unseen blue lamp somewhere under the water. Bubbles rose in the middle and the water swirled very gently clockwise. Liberty knelt down and stuck her hand in.
“Perfect!” she said.
“Thermostatically controlled. I’ve helped clean it several times,” Brenda said, hanging her bath robe on a peg. Liberty did the same, and they were soon neck deep in the relaxing water.
“Mmmm. I’ll sleep here,” Liberty said.
“Heater and lights go off at midnight,” Brenda informed her with a grin.
“Unless you reserve it, of course.”
“What does it cost if you’re not a member?”
“Somewhere between a hundred and a thousand bucks a day, as I remember.”
Liberty
whistled.
“But the thousand-bucks-a-day group also got some catering and other stuff. I baked for it and helped serve. It was really fun. They were all dressed up in Greek or Roman robes, and all the members who helped wore ballet dancing stuff that made us look like little fairies!”
“Neat! I sure hope I get to do things like that!” Liberty said. Just then a huge yawn escaped her.
Brenda giggled. “Getting ready for bed?”
“The magic water did it to me!”
It wasn’t long before they pulled themselves out of the bubbling water and talked or giggled about many things on their way back to the residence halls.
By that time it was nearly midnight, and Brenda guided Liberty to the Lyceum Lodge, passing few people in the lobbies and corridors. They parted at the door, with Liberty promising to try and join Brenda in the kitchen at four
o’clock the following morning.
As Liberty stepped inside, she discovered that the lodge room called Vesuvius was decorated in a relaxing southern Italian style with bunches of grapes hanging from decorative lattices and a mural of the massive volcano itself. A hot tub sat on a deck under the mural, and a big bowl of fruit and baskets of other snacks were neatly arranged in the middle of the large dining table. Liberty poked her head into the sleeping room and saw that her father was fast asleep in one of the double beds. She grabbed a kiwi from the bowl and plopped onto the plush couch.
The day’s events replayed themselves in her mind even as she started to yawn — the country house and saying good-bye to Mr. Neils, the drive to Philadelphia, visiting old friends and places, the airport and the flight, the helicopter ride, meeting Brenda, dancing in the Ecumenical Temple, relaxing in the hot pool out in the woods...