Part 8 (1/2)

Today Lobsang and a guard came to fetch me.

”And how is that hitch in your getalong, pardner?” Lobsang asked me. ”You are feeling less like a sick cat? Very good. We start today on another pa.s.sage ...”

I'm not sure how he managed it, but I'm back on the underground crew and I know he must have missed me because after we spent a few hours of coughing through dust and debris and searching uninteresting tiny cells, he said, ”Viveka, I am thinking you could be better used somewhere else. Large hombres and I are handling engineering s.h.i.+t with great adequacy. I am thinking you are handier back up in room three of pa.s.sage five-A. I will send Private Miss Dolma Yangzom with you to guard you from desperado tendencies and to help you.”

Private Miss Dolma Yangzom turned out to be the nice female guard who had helped me clean upwhile I was in solitary. She and I proceeded back to the room designated as three in pa.s.sage five-A, which turned out to be (oh, joy!) the library. Private Miss Dolma Yangzom, who wears thick spectacles and carries a couple of grenades in her belt along with the bandolier across her chest and the rifle slung over her shoulder, is a kindred spirit. She was both as cheered by the sight of all those books and as aghast at their sorry condition as I was. We took one look at the dark, disheveled room and the amount of work to be done and, as one woman, marched back down the hall to tell Lobsang we needed at least two of the work lamps in order to accomplish our mission.

We made quite a bit of headway, just today, grouping pages by language, or at least characters used. Dolma Yangzom seems as interested in languages as I am and although English isn't one of her best, we can communicate on a fairly elementary level. And, more important, we've found over a hundred books perfectly intact. I could have stayed there forever, but since I'm here, I want to make a private inventory of the day's finds. The books are an interesting a.s.sortment, not what I expected in a lamasery. Of the t.i.tles, mostly in English, that I recognize: Plato's Dialogues The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam On the Beach, Nevil Shute The Bible The Koran The Talmud The Bhagavad-Gita The Time-Life editions of the complete works of Joseph Campbell The Foxfire Books, Volumes 1-14 The pseudoleather-bound, gilt-edged Doubleday edition of the complete works of Agatha Christie.

These were much worn and only about five volumes were intact.

The complete works of Zane Grey The complete works of Louis L'Amour Isaac Asimov's books on the Bible and Shakespeare The Complete Mechanic The Complete Electrician The Complete Carpenter The Complete Plumber Some weaving books (in Danish, I believe) Two dictionaries and three thesauruses in Englis.h.i.+ wonder if Tea might let us borrow the computer again to log in our discoveries as we unearth them.

Surely such a fund of knowledge is a valuable enough resource that the camp will want to keep a record of it?

I'd better close for now. My fellow prisoners are watching me ever more intently with some of the suspicion I am beginning to realize masks rather kindergartenish hurt feelings at being ignored in favor of my journal. I'll simply have to persuade them to let me write about them, I suppose.

LATER: MARSH.

Since I'm already a prisoner, I see no reason not to develop light fingers, so I snuck a paperback out of the library. I just grabbed-didn't even notice what it was until I got back to the cell and could look at it. Fortunately, it was in English, a science fiction novel called A Canticle for Leibowitz. I snuck my b.u.t.ter lamp in to read by, but before I could settle down, Keith Marsh wandered over to lean against my bunk and nonchalantly look over my shoulder. He emitted an ”uh,” and I couldn't decide if it was an introductory ”uh”, as in a clearing of the throat, or literary criticism until he said, ”I don't suppose I could borrow Huckleberry Finn while you're reading that? And maybe have dibs on that when you're done?”

”Of course,” I said. ”Anything in particular you want stolen from the library, provided it's in the inventory?”

”Yes, I saw Taring come back for you today. You seem to have made quite a hit. I was hoping I might get drafted for that job after all but apparently he intervened with Wu so that he could keep you.

I'd watch out if I were you. He's Wu's husband, you know.”

”Tea and Wu?” I asked. ”I'll be d.a.m.ned. I'd never have guessed. I suppose opposites do attract.

How do you know?”

”Wu told me. She and I used to talk quite a lot, back when I was under the impression I was negotiating my release-that the organization I worked for really was on the other end of the letters I wrote. Later, I made friends with this one guard and she told me the letters never went anywhere.”

This is the first time Marsh has ever had much to say to me. He's more solitary than the others, and most evenings squats with his back to the wall, twitching his mouth occasionally but mostly staring and thinking, I suppose. Sometimes he closes his eyes and pretends to sleep, but I think it's subterfuge to avoid having to talk.

Now he talked so fast I couldn't keep up with him. ”Wait, wait, slow down,” I said. ”What organization? Why would she tell you to write letters and then never send them?”

Marsh has something wrong with his eyes-he blinks constantly, like someone whose laser surgery has gone bad. He also tends to drum his fingers against his knee, which makes him seem fidgety at times, though usually he moves very little and seldom changes expression unless the men are having a particularly lively sports debate. His voice, as I have mentioned, is soft and quiet, although his opinions seem pretty original for a guy whom I might ordinarily mistake for someone's accountant. Certainly I wouldn't have taken him for a lady's man, though there is something rea.s.suring about him-not paternalistic, like Merridew, but more as if he understands everything I say to be perfectly sane and reasonable and even admirable at times.

But he blinked at me twice and said without changing expression, and without surprise, braggadocioor false modesty, merely with matter-of-fact candor, ”Oh, she took a s.h.i.+ne to me for a while there and was just stringing me along while she was trying to decide if I was her type. And she probably wanted to read the letters. She knew where the military boys were coming from but she was still curious about me and my organization.”

”You're not military.” I said, remembering he'd said as much when I first met him.

”No. I'm-I was-with the World Peace Organization. Food relief in India, the last time the Brahmaputra wiped out northern India and Bangladesh. Thibideaux was escorting me into a border village with a decontamination team while he took in some cholera vaccine. The Chinese had captured the village since the last time we looked. I think it was a mistake, me getting rounded up with the military escort, but not a bad enough one for anybody to try to correct it. Thibideaux and I are the only ones who were brought here. It's a top-security facility you know-POLPOW Advocates have no record of it, I can tell you that, I used to work with them.”

”What, were you an administrator or something?”

”Something. I got degrees in geology and engineering but I wanted to do work that counted. I'm good at languages too and I've used what I learned working my way through school.”

”Tell me a little more about yourself-where you grew up, how you got interested in the peace organization, that kind of thing.”

”I'm from Alaska. For the first few years we lived on Minto Village Corporation land along the Yukon. Mom helped her in-laws selling fireworks and cheap cigarettes and whiskey to construction workers and tourists. I think I was about eight when the money men foreclosed on the Native Corporation's loans.

”We had to abandon the villages-no war, no broken treaties, just some fine print and crooked lawyers-but while Mom was trying to convince the older ones they really had to leave- the village had been there since before gold rush days-Pop took off, joined the army, just in time to get his a.s.s s.h.i.+pped to Honduras. He had the honor of being in the vanguard during the Latin American ma.s.sacres. Of course, we didn't know that was what was going on at the time. The press was pretty cooperative with the government about keeping it shut up.

”My old man was reported killed in action but a cousin from Nenana came to see us later. He'd checked it out. Seems Pop was down in Brazil, got careless and stayed out past curfew in civvies and was mopped up with a bunch of half-Indian musicians. Later, when they were going over the bodies, somebody saw his dog tags. Of course, it was hushed up officially, but a guy from Huslia was with the disposal team and he saw the dog tags, recognized the name and told my cousin. Mom had moved us to Fairbanks way before that, and then over to Whitehorse. I was about ten or twelve, I guess. I'd thought my old man was a hero but my mom kept telling me Arnie said it was a stupid drunken accident. Every time I saw 'Brazil' on anything, I'd read about it. And by the time I was fifteen I had a better idea about the ma.s.sacres and the drug wars and how come there's only gringo park rangers down there now and n.o.body else except tourists and why that's one place where so much wilderness area has grown back, making, as the government brochures say, the Tropical American Park Service one of the largest tracts of wilderness, original and 'reclaimed,' in the world.

”I worked my way through college but one summer after my mom's dad died-he was one of the lawyers who had made a lot of money 'helping' the village corporations with their lawsuits- he left me a little money. A buddy and I went down to Brazil and later to Chile on a geology field trip and to interviewwith one of the oil companies that was hiring down there. We heard there were gemstones in the streams.

We found a couple of agates and a piece of human skull. A little farther down we found more pieces of bone. We walked upstream a ways and found a dam, crumbling away after all these years, of human skeletons jammed together and packed with clay. Made a real pretty little pool up above it. One day we got a little turned around, messing around in the jungle, and came upon this ruined city. I think maybe it might have once been Santiago. There was other stuff too-” He swallowed and blinked again and I waited for several minutes, about to make some comment to smooth over the silence.

”We had to come back before we planned. I got so I couldn't sleep down there. Couldn't eat.”

”Dysentery?” I asked.

”No ...” he said. ”No, maybe some kind of respiratory thing. I felt as if I was being smothered all the time, couldn't breathe properly. Maybe I wasn't getting enough oxygen because I had trouble moving too-I felt weighed down all the time, like I was swimming in mud. My buddy chalked it up to the heat but...”His voice quieted to a sigh, then gusted. ”The day we walked through Santiago-the stadium is still standing.”

”What stadium?” I asked.

”Well, the one where they used to have ballgames, concerts. We pa.s.sed it in broad daylight ...

ruins, half of what it used to be, of course, as impressive in its own way as the Mayan and Aztec ruins.

Except that there's no park ranger there to sell you pamphlets about the site. There was n.o.body there but us, so when I heard the singing, I was surprised, to say the least. I thought maybe it was a radio somebody had left behind somewhere. What we heard was singing, in Spanish, not really professional enough for radio, I thought, when I really listened. The guitar work was okay, but basically just that beguine-type rhythm you hear a lot on California ethnic radio stations, not much embellishment. The central voice was good too, very strong, but there were too many other voices, some good, some trying to sing harmony and getting it wrong. A crowd being led in a song by one reasonably competent musician. Just one song, over and over again until some other voices started talking loudly in the middle of it, in Spanish I couldn't understand because it was spoken so quickly, but it was loud, bossy and mean and broke up the song the way static would a radio transmission. There were some thuds, a sick, kind of gasping sound like someone so hurt he can't get enough breath to scream, and the song dribbled away, one moan, two cries at a time ... although a few voices always kept singing like background music in some movie.”

”What did you make of it?”

”I definitely think it was a relic of the problems the government used as an excuse to wipe out the people down there to begin with. You know, when they were subsidizing supposedly right-wing dictators to get rid of any 'undesirable' elements. 'Undesirable' to those bozos meant people who tried to think for themselves instead of following the party line. You had to have heard about it at some point, how they rounded up not just the politicians from former regimes, but the teachers and college students, the journalists, artists, musicians, anyone from kindergarten teachers on up who could loosely be considered intelligentsia. The death squads rounded up all those people and took them to the sports stadium for 'questioning.' Of course, what they really did was murder them, at first singly, after torturing them down in the offices below the bleachers, and later on, just opening fire. But when they first gathered the people up, at least once, one fellow who had been a nationally recognized poet and musician, who had written a song that was sung all over the world, tried playing his guitar and getting the crowd to sing with him so they could focus on something other than being terrified. I read later that the goons cut out the guy's tongue and cut off his hands before they killed him, although some sources claim they only crushed hishands. It didn't really matter, there was a lot of that going around.”

He s.h.i.+fted position and spread his hands on his knees. ”My buddy heard the song too. I suppose it might have been a tape, but there aren't any radio stations down there anymore, except the official bands. But on the plane coming home, we met a ranger who was on leave. He'd been having a hard time of it, he said. He was an agronomist and was trying to find the right chemical balance to counteract the residue of the defoliants that were used during the mop-up. Though jungle was growing back over the clear-cuts from earlier ranching and timber industry, the war had left a lot of the area barren. He said that some compounds the Vietnamese had developed counteracted the defoliants okay, but that his department was having a h.e.l.l of a time in some places trying to make any sort of consistent growing pattern, the kind that would buffer hills and streams and trails from erosion. In spite of the antidefoliants, some patches of ground simply wouldn't grow anything, and when the rangers dug down to take soil samples, they ran into ma.s.s graves. The guy said that of course these would have been okay for the vegetation except that the bodies had been covered with chemicals to destroy them and where the chemicals had been sown into the earth, nothing could take root, not even gra.s.s.”

I nodded, saying nothing because there was nothing to say. You heard the stories, of course, from the media, saw photographs, occasionally might see something disturbing from the air, as I saw the formerly sacred lake Siddons pointed out to me, but it was never so immediate or personal as it was for Marsh, or even secondhand, for me, as I listened to him.

”It's not like the ghost of my old man came pointing a finger at me, warning me or anything, but I knew I didn't want to be like him,” Marsh continued. ”I also knew I was going to be drafted as soon as I got out of college. The Terrorist Wars were going on then. So I skipped graduation and called a woman with the WPO in Vancouver. They found a place for me out of the country, in Haiti, and from there to the Middle East. They were glad to have my skills. Most successful engineers had cushy jobs in the States or in Toronto or Vancouver, other big cities. Most of the less successful were in the military.”

”And you mentioned they needed those other skills you had used to work your way through school too?”

”Oh, yeah. It was part of the engineering, in a way. I picked it up back home, when I was a kid, with the gold miners and oil boomers. So when I took the courses in demolitions, I already pretty much had an acquaintance with and some skill handling explosives.” He smiled a very small, brief smile, a little embarra.s.sed. ”And I like it-the edge, I mean, being right there where you could die at any time. Go a.n.a.lyze that if you want to but I finish disarming something and realize I'm still here and want to go have a huge meal and f.u.c.k something...”

”Yeah-well, so what did you disarm?”

”Bombs, unexploded mines, 'dud' grenades and later on, after a lot more training the organization paid for, nukes-that's how I started working with the military after all, especially in remoter regions where they didn't consider it cost-effective to send in their own people on the basis of unsubstantiated reports. We'd swap favors and get hospital supplies, food, in exchange for taking out a hidden device.”

”I see. Were you really helping with the flood relief or was it something to do with that when you were captured?”

”Does it matter? A nuclear device isn't any better for people's health than cholera.”

I couldn't dispute that. ”So how long ago was that?” I asked.He rubbed his forehead, and his voice was dimmer, as if he'd worn it out telling me his story. ”I'm not sure, really-you know how it is.”