Part 18 (2/2)

”Not boys,” she said, in case the gesture hadn't already amply proved her point.

”I guess not,” he said, whistling appreciatively, which was more than usually effusive of him but I suppose was intended to make up for his former lack of enthusiasm. ”Which of the many perils females imagine they face that men don't were you two avoiding with this ruse?”

The women looked at each other and shrugged. He had forgotten himself and lapsed into English.

”Sterilization?” I ventured, using a complex mixture of the Tibetan words I knew that I thought might mean that. The girls nodded.

”Yes,” the s.h.i.+rtless one replied in Chinese, in which she seemed more fluent than in Tibetan. ”Many other ladies also pretend to be boys. It has been the custom in our villages for some time. The philing invaders wondered once how there came to be young ones when there were so many men and so few women. Someone said we must be hermaphrodites and so our village has been jokingly called since.” To Marsh she said quickly, ”But we are not hermaphrodites. We are normal women. We want babies and there are few men among us who are not close kin. You aren't bad, for a Westerner. And you're sure not a relative. How about it?”

I excused myself and left Marsh to defend his own honor.

PBB, DAY 45 (probably mid-October 2070 by old reckoning)-THIBIDEAUX Most of the time I stick to my old prisoner schedule, spending every other day belowground helping Tea excavate, and alternate days in the garden, clearing my lungs and thinning vegetables. The plants grow in greater profusion all the time, like the bottomless purse in old fairy tales. Another small herd of yaks, six in all, and five deer have somehow found their way into the valley. They are kept in pens and guarded carefully from the snow lions, and one of the yaks and several of the domestic animals have been carefully sacrificed to leave as offerings for the cats so they won't starve. Tsering wanted to recapture them but Terton, familiarly called Ama-La by the Tibetans, vetoed the idea. The cats are half grown now and wouldn't survive, she said-which is certainly true, especially if Tsering has anything to do with it.

The valley looks like an old nature film, fast forward from planting to harvest, exaggerated animated springtime quickening to life over and over.

Tea works harder than ever, and every day we make new discoveries which add to our resources.

Last week we opened another pa.s.sageway and found, not another series of storage cells, but two huge rooms. In one were spinning wheels and enough bales of wool, bowls of cotton, and bats of silk to satisfy Rumpelstiltskin. The raw fleece basketed in one corner still smelled nauseatingly strong of lanolin and ancient sheep s.h.i.+t. In the other room looms hulked up like robotic monsters and shelves and baskets were filled with yarns so dusty the colors were impossible to tell apart, bits of vegetable matter and a witch's laboratory full of what I imagine were dyes and mordants, since they were shelved near a hodgepodge of large ceramic and enameled pots. Further along, oh joy, oh happiness, was thelonged-for room of farm implements and gardening tools. Why they were not put next to the seeds is beyond me. So much for the all-knowing wisdom of Shangri-La.

Still, my chief consolation, recreation and hiding place remains the library. Last night after a long day in the garden (I had to weave myself a hat of barley stalks-my nose is brighter red than the reddest of the rhodies in the valley) I crept down the cool foot-worn stone stairs of the command bunker, previously so frightening, and with my b.u.t.ter lamp in hand slipped down the chilly, dusty pa.s.sages which smell less like incense and sweat and more like freshly butchered wood and mildew these days. No one forbids us to go anywhere now, although most of us stay within the compound at night because of the snow lions. I needed to flee from that ma.s.s of people crowding, jostling, crying, arguing, laughing and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, and lose myself in a nice sane book.

It was not to be.

The glow and distinctive stench of two b.u.t.ter lamps greeted me as I opened the door. A figure huddled in the shadows between the lamps and the shadows jumped like jack-in-the-boxes as pages flipped in the book the figure held before it.

I was greatly tempted to ignore the figure and isolate myself behind a huge stack of Tibetan language reference books, but then I noticed that the hand nearest me was making big sweeping gestures across the surface of the table so I walked a step closer and Thibideaux glanced up. He looked no happier to see me than I was to see him, so of course I had to make conversation.

”Hi. What are you doing?”

”Trying to find something that shows the order of colors on a peac.o.c.k feather,” he said. Once a bird person always a bird person, I thought.

”Oh?”

”Yeah. I got to thinking about it. Something reminded me, I don't know-oh yeah, the colors on the lake this evening- and I thought, that's just like a peac.o.c.k feather only the colors are in another order.

But I couldn't remember the order and none of the books here seem to have a color close-up.”

”Too bad.”

”Yeah. Ain't it? Because there are no peac.o.c.ks here and if the rest of the world is kaput, there are no peac.o.c.ks anywhere anymore. Shame for a kid to never know about somethin' as pretty as that. And the same kinda thing is going to make it hard to talk to them about other things, unless it's in these books.

Maybe they won't miss it but ...”His voice trailed off.

I nodded slowly. He was right. The children born here would have a totally different frame of reference, even, than the children born in the villages. The generation gap between them and the adults would be a doozy, even though we wouldn't look too much older than they would once they grew up (I'm sure they do grow up-Pema's been growing as fast as the crops), since we supposedly will age very slowly. The world we knew is gone, I suppose, and the proper att.i.tude with the kids should be ”Long live the world” as we'll come to know it. But it's going to be a tight little, constricted little world, limited even in the memories of those of us who are left, and that makes me sad.

”I guess there's not much we can do about it, is there?” I asked.

”I dunno,” he said. ”I always been real good at art. I'm goin' to start drawin' everythin' I canremember. Maybe get the rest of the folks to do it too, or help me draw things for them. Give me somethin' to do once everybody gets well. Doctorin' is pretty slow around here most times. Somethin'

else. These underground rooms are fine but I can't help feelin' like this place is still a prison because it looks like one. Soon as things settle down a little, I'm goin' to make me some plans and see about buildin' some proper houses and such around here.”

I think Thibideaux's att.i.tude is commendable as h.e.l.l. I admire the industry of the refugees. I respect the stated motives of Dr. Terton and the other compound administrators, but right now I'm downstairs in our old cell, writing by the light of my little lamp like I used to do. Sometimes I just need to stay the h.e.l.l away from everybody. I'm happier working by myself these days, without even Dolma or Tea around.

When I'm not needed I study or read in the library, though sometimes I find myself weeping uncontrollably over a book for no apparent reason except to think that Huck's river and the island and Agatha's and Sherlock's London and all of the other places and people are gone forever. Which is silly because they were gone forever by the time I was born, in the sense that they appeared in the books.

Perhaps in some ways it would have been easier if the loss was more personal for me, but I have no one specific to grieve for, unless you count Sammy maybe. But I don't think of her dead but still wearing that stupid hat, conning me with her Calvinist-rooted no-nonsense psychology into enlisting. My mother, my grandparents, have been dead for years. I believe I mentioned earlier that a virus killed my grandparents. I always wondered about that virus. It seemed particularly to hit people in their late sixties and early seventies, people with good minds and still a lot to offer but who continued to embrace an outdated value system. My mother didn't outlive them by many years. I had barely enough money to see me through four full-time years of college and graduate school before they upped the fees, and from then on I was always scrambling for cash. No real friends. No long-term lovers.

But even though n.o.body special is left behind, everybody seems special now. I wish I'd known them better. I wish I'd told that one history prof how illuminating I found his remarks. I wish I'd told Sammy to f.u.c.k off. I just can't help thinking what their faces must have been like when they saw the flash, not from a protected distance, as I did, but close up, just before they turned into human X-rays and ashes, in that moment they had to realize ”This is it.” The big one. Surprise, surprise. You didn't have to be in the military after all to be at risk. Or did you? Was NAC, somehow, s.h.i.+elded? I guess I'll never know. So. What do I do? Live out my elongated span in this small place enclosed by mountains among a lot of very strange people.

I guess I know how the Colonel feels, at least a little. Somehow, it was easier to keep going in the prison camp, where even if my life was limited, it was still just one kind of life in a big and varied world-some people were much better off than I was, some not as well off. But that this is all there is, maybe all there will ever be...

PBB, DAY 60-TARING AND THE TERTON.

I've stayed aboveground lately, and I suppose I've overdone the gardening bit. Guess it's part of my grieving. I keep seeing my grandfather's hands doing what mine do and find myself bawling into the radish bed. This morning was warm and hazy and I kept working, hours it must have been, until once when I reached up to wipe my eyes, in the moment that they were closed, I heard a roaring in my ears that sounded like the foghorn chanting I'd heard so long ago in my cell, and behind my closed lids points of light glittered in a deep maroon darkness. Not keen on being the first case of heatstroke in Kalapa, I washed my hands in what was left of the water for the plants, dumped the rest of the containerful on a grateful bean vine, and decided to retire to the library for the rest of the day. Lately when I've read I'vesought a rock by the lake or headed for the cheerful solitude of the stream in the rhododendron jungle, but today the idea of the library's darkness and cool seemed more attractive.

Once more, someone had beat me to my sanctuary and sat laughing softly at what lay between the widespread covers of a largish book. But this time the light was better and even if it hadn't been, the laugh was a giveaway.

”Tea, what are you up to? Research?” I called as I walked toward him.

”Of a sort,” he said, swallowing chuckles long enough to answer me. ”Come and look. Look at this funny fellow.”

I looked. He pointed to one of several head-and-shoulders portraits in what appeared to be a yearbook. The one he indicated had a shaven head, prominent cheekbones, a distinctly Asian cast to his features and a bad case of acne.

”You?”

”Yes. From Montana School of Mines. Not a former life, you see, but it is sometimes seeming so.”

”Might as well be,” I said, unable to match his mood. ”The Montana School of Mines is no more.

Like everything else.”

”Almost everything else.”

”Tea, how can the doctor be so sure the aftermath of the bombs won't reach us here? I mean, prayer is all very well but there was one avalanche already ...”

”Yes, the one that is occurring when His Holiness, the last Dalai Lama died, and Shambala was more needing than ever of protection and concealment. We believe that this was a beneficial occurrence-anyway, Ama-La and some of the rest of us so believe. It was coming as a great shock to Nyima. She wants everything to be unchanging, always. Me, her, Ama-La, the lake. Like your Colonel Merridew, she is liking to keep her enemies in their place and her friends as well.”

”Do you believe all this karma stuff and people living a really long time or one life after another? I mean, I know it's your religion and Dr. Terton is one of your leaders, your lama I guess, but do you really believe all that stuff?”

In answer he turned the cover of the yearbook toward me. Across the padded fake leather it said, Montana Schoolof Mines, Cla.s.s of 1969.

”Well, the long-life part, I guess you do,” I said, pretending that the revelation didn't affect me at all, that I really didn't care that the man was almost as old as my grandparents and looked no older than I was. ”But I just don't understand all this karma stuff. Who came and why. I mean, why Danielson, for instance? Why should he be chosen to come here and be a prisoner until he died trying to get out?”

”We don't always know why, Viva,” he said just a little impatiently. ”We are just people, you know.

Not some sort of G.o.ds or Superman heroes. Maybe Danielson was here so he would not kill other important people. Maybe he was here to learn something vital to his soul before he died. Maybe he was here just to be what he was to those people at his funeral-the representative of all they had lost and the death of the glory of war.But I know that he was here preparing for his next incarnation, as we all are for ours.”

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