Part 29 (2/2)

”Don't worry, Angy. Look, I got to go.” The line popped and hissed ominously.

”I miss you, Daddy.”

”I miss you double that. No, squared.”

She laughed merrily. ”I skinned my knee today at recess. It bled so much I had to go to the nurse.”

”Keep it clean, honey. And give your mother my love.”

”She'll be so mad.”

'I'll be home soon.”

She giggled and ended with the joke she had been using lately. ”G'bye, Daddy. It's been real.”

Her light laugh trickled into the static, a grace note from a bright land worlds away. Clay chuckled as he replaced the receiver. She cut the last word of ”real nice” to make her good-byes hip and sardonic, a mannerism she had heard on television somewhere. An old joke; he had heard that even ”groovy” was coming back in.

Clay smiled and pulled his hat down further and went quickly out into the street where Patil was waiting. India flickered at the edge of his vision, the crowds a hovering presence.

They left Bangalore in two vans. Graduate students drove the green Tochat from the previous night. He and Patil and Singh took the blue one, Clay again keeping out of sight by lying on the back seat. The day's raw heat rose around them like a s.h.i.+mmering lake of light.

They pa.s.sed through lands leached of color. Only gray stubble grew in the fields. Trees hung limply, their limbs bowing as though exhausted. Figures in rags huddled for shade. A few stirred, eyes white in the shadows, as the vans ground past. Clay saw that large boles sat on the branches like gnarled knots with brown sheaths wrapped around the underside.

”Those some of the plant diseases I heard about?” he asked.

Singh pursed his lips. ”I fear those are the pouches like those of wasps, as reported in the press.” His watery eyes regarded the withered, graying trees as Patil slowed the car.

”Are they dangerous?” Clay could see yellow sap dripping from the underside of each.

”Not until they ripen,” Singh said. ”Then the a.s.sa.s.sins emerge.”

”They look pretty big already.”

”They are said to be large creatures, but of course there is little experience.” Patil downs.h.i.+fted and they accelerated away with an occasional sputtering misfire. Clay wondered whether they had any spare spark plugs along. The fields on each side of the road took on a dissolute and shredded look. ”Did the genetech experiments cause this?” he asked.

Singh nodded. ”I believe this emerged from the European programs. First we had their designed plants, but then pests found vulnerability. They sought strains which could protect crops from the new pests. So we got these wasps.

I gather that now some error or mutation has made them equally excellent at preying on people and even cows.”

Clay frowned. ”The wasps came from the j.a.panese aid, didn't they?” Patil smiled mysteriously. ”You know a good deal about our troubles, sir.” Neither said anything more. Clay was acutely conscious that his briefing in Was.h.i.+ngton had been detailed technical a.s.sessments, without the slightest mention of how the Indians themselves saw their problems. Singh and Patil seemed either resigned or unconcerned; he could not tell which. Their sentences refracted from some unseen nugget, like seismic waves warping around the earth's core.

”I would not worry greatly about these pouches,” Singh said after they had ridden in silence for a while. ”They should not ripen before we are done with our task. In any case, the Kolar fields are quite barren, and afford few sites where the pouches can grow.”

Clay pointed out the front window. ”Those round things on the walls, more pouches?”

To his surprise, both men burst into merry laughter. Gasping, Patil said, ”Examine them closely, Doctor Clay. Notice the marks of the species which made them.”

Patil slowed the car and Clay studied the round, circular pads on the whitewashed vertical walls along the road. They were brown and matted and marked in a pattern of radial lines. Clay frowned and then felt enormously stupid: the thick lines were handprints.

”Drying cakes, they are,” Patil said, still chuckling.

”Of what?”

”Dung, my colleague. We use the cow here, not merely slaughter it.”

”What for?”

”Fuel. After the cakes dry, we stack them--see?” They pa.s.sed a plastic-wrapped tower. A woman was adding a circular, annular tier of thick dung disks to the top, then carefully folding the plastic over it. ”In winter they burn nicely.”

”For heating?”

”And cooking, yes.”

Seeing the look on Clay's face, Singh's eyes narrowed and his lips drew back so that his teeth were bright stubs. His eyebrows were long brush strokes that met the deep furrows of his frown. ”Old ways are still often preferable to the new.”

Sure, Clay thought, the past of cholera, plague, infanticide. But he asked with neutral politeness, ”Such as?”

”Some large fish from the Amazon were introduced into our princ.i.p.al river three years ago to improve fis.h.i.+ng yields.”

”The Ganges? I thought it was holy.”

”What is more holy than to feed the hungry?”

”True enough. Did it work?”

”The big fish, yes. They are delicious. A great delicacy.”

”I'll have to try some,” Clay said, remembering the thin vegetarian curry he had eaten at breakfast.

Singh said, ”But the Amazon sample contained some minute eggs which none of the proper procedures eliminated. They were of a small species-the candiru, is that not the name?” he inquired politely of Patil.

”Yes,” Patil said, ”a little being who thrives mostly on the urine of larger fish. Specialists now believe that perhaps the eggs were inside the larger species, and so escaped detection.”

Patil's voice remained calm and factual, although while he spoke he abruptly swerved to avoid a goat that spontaneously ambled onto the rough road. Clay rocked hard against the van's door, and Patil then corrected further to stay out of a gratuitous mudhole that seemed to leap at them from the rus.h.i.+ng foreground. They b.u.mped noisily over ruts at the road's edge and bounced back onto the tarmac without losing speed. Patil sat ramrod straight, hands turning the steering wheel lightly, oblivious to the wrenching effects of his driving.

”Suppose, Professor Clay, that you are a devotee,” Singh said. ”You have saved to come to the Ganges for a decade, for two. Perhaps you even plan to die there.”

”Yeah, okay.” Clay could not see where this was leading.

”You are enthused as you enter the river to bathe. You are perhaps profoundly affected. An intense spiritual moment. It is not uncommon to merge with the river, to inadvertently urinate into it.”

Singh spread his hands as if to say that such things went without saying. ”Then the candiru will be attracted by the smell. It mistakes this great bountiful largess, the food it needs, as coming from a very great fish indeed. It excitedly swims up the stream of uric acid. Coming to your urethra, it swims like a snake into its burrow, as far up as it can go. You will see that the uric flow velocity will increase as the candiru makes its way upstream, inside you. When this tiny fish can make no further progress, some trick of evolution tells it to protrude a set of sidewise spines. So intricate!”

Singh paused a moment in smiling tribute to this intriguing facet of nature. Clay nodded, his mouth dry.

”These embed deeply in the walls and keep the candiru close to the source of what it so desires.” Singh made short, delicate movements, his fingers jutting in the air. Clay opened his mouth, but said nothing.

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