“Of course; who else? And then certain festivals which....”
“I suppose she’s dead now.”
“Why, yes. She died six years ago. She was the last of the original five.”
“Ah, yes, the five: Paul Himmell, Iris Mortimer, Ivan Stokharin, Clarissa Lessing and....”
“And Edward Hastings. We still use his introduction even though it’s been largely obsoleted by later tests. His dialogues will of course be the basis for that final book of Cave which our best scholars have been at work on for over twenty years.”
Hastings, of all people! I nearly laughed aloud. Poor feckless Hastings was now the author of my dialogues with Cave: I marveled at the ease with which the innumerable references to myself had been deleted. I began to doubt of my own existence. I asked if Hastings were still alive and was told that he too was long dead.
I then asked again about Iris.
“Some very exciting things have come to light,” said Butler. “Certain historians at the Dallas Center feel that there is some proof that she was Cave’s sister.”
I was startled by this. “How could that be? Wasn’t she from Detroit? and wasn’t he from Seattle? and didn’t they meet for the first time in southern California at the beginning of his mission?”
“I see you know more Cavite history than you pretend,” said Butler amiably. “That of course has been the traditional point of view. Yet as her influence increased in the world (in Italy, you know, one sees her picture nearly as often as Cave’s) our historians became suspicious. It was all perfectly simple, really: if she could exert nearly the same power as Cave himself then she must, in some way, be related to him. I suppose you know about the Miami business. No? Well, their Resident, some years ago, openly promulgated the theory that Cave and Iris Mortimer were man and wife. A great many people believed him and though the Chief Resident at Dallas issued a statement denying the truth of all this, Miami continued in error and it took our indoctrination team several years to get the situation back to normal. But the whole business did get everyone to thinking and, with the concurrence of Dallas himself, investigations have been made. I don’t know many of the details but my colleague probably will. He keeps track of that kind of thing.”