Nothing Sacred Part 16

"Thank you, Viv. You may go now," the doctor said, and bent over Wu as if to comfort her.

A WEEK? WEEK AND A HALF? MAYBE TWO WEEKS AFTER LAKE.

We've been using hand pumps to clear the buildings. Tea works as hard as anyone on his turn at the pump. He actually seems to enjoy it. The harder and grubbier the job is the better as far as he's concerned. When I'm not pumping, I continue collating, cataloging and putting things back in order, working in the garden as if nothing has changed.

For a while I expected to be locked up again or even shot but no further mention was made of Danielson's escape or my nocturnal visit to the Commandant's office. The nights remain fairly pleasant, the garden producing at an even more fantastic rate then usual thanks to all of the readily available water, the weather warm despite the wind which howls all night around us and yet never seems to come inside the canopy. Its noise and the grumbling of the avalanches is the only manifestation we've had since the lake's emergence of the restlessness of the surrounding range.

I know firsthand about how the weather is all day and all night because since the flooding, we've continued to sleep outside, guards and prisoners alike. Taring insists that until his repairs are complete we are in danger of being buried alive if we sleep below. I don't find his cautions awfully rea.s.suring, when I have to work below during the day.

The repairs are progressing, however, and a group of the Chinese prisoners built a kiln from a plan in one of the Foxfire Books and began shaping replacement pipe to Tea's specifications.

The relief guard sleeps in the dining room during the day, but otherwise the guards and prisoners are working together now. Needless to say, discipline has become so lax it's pretty much a thing of the past, at least for the time being.

One of the guards, a young fellow, didn't see why we shouldn't use the books to sop up the water, and since he was illiterate n.o.body could make him understand and I had to physically wrestle with him to keep him from destroying the Agatha Christies. The doctor was pa.s.sing by just then and gave him a gentle but thorough chewing out. He helped me shelve for three days and I ended up promising to let him study Tibetan with me as I learn to read it.

Marsh and a crew of other prisoners and guards have been digging shallow irrigation ditches and channeling the flood waters from below into them as Tea's crew pumps the water to the surface. The barley crop is knee-high.

The present sleeping arrangements relieve me of the necessity of discussing anything with Merridew or the others. Even though we don't sleep too far apart, they never try to talk to me. Ears are everywhere, the Colonel told me once when I tried to tell him about the interrogation, and even if noguards are nearby after so many years of incarceration, some of the others prisoners identify more with their jailers than with each other.

I'm sure he's absolutely appalled at how the rules have been relaxed, and must be highly suspicious of the way the doctor and even Wu are encouraging the guards and prisoners to talk together. I confess, I'd dearly love to talk to Tea again. Somehow everything that's happened since I confessed to finding the seeds has sort of diminished his little deception to relative insignificance and I miss him. Though I see him several times a day, he's always much too busy to do more than nod in a distracted sort of way. I'd hate to think that if what I think I saw, actually occurred something might happen to the compound and or to one or both of us and I wouldn't get to tell him that I understand he was only trying to make peace, to give me a contribution to make of my own volition. Although there is a great deal I don't understand about this place, I really never believed that Tea was glorying in manipulating me. I hope I get the chance to say so soon.

TEN DAYS LATER.

The work load has lightened, the flood is contained, the pipes are installed, but still we sleep aboveground until, Tea says, the rooms below have a chance to dry out properly. This will take most of the summer, I gather, since the buried pa.s.sages are difficult to ventilate properly. Then too there are the little tremors, shaking the slope beneath us as if a large truck had just driven past, though of course there are no large trucks.

These days we do not automatically fall into bed after spending the day working. Sometimes we socialize, strolling by the lake or playing cards, gambling for those few bits of treasure so many of us had secreted that no one, not even Terton or Tea, took offense that some of the things were kept as personal property. Sometimes the gambling is for an extra onion from the next day's ration, or a portion of someone's personal yield from their garden plot. At first, people were rusty as they tried to simply relax together. On the other hand, prisoners become very good at hiding their anger, out of fear, and after a while it became apparent that this was all in fun, that there was no need for anger, since there was plenty of food to share and we could all see each of the treasures and it wasn't as if they were worth anything here, where there was no economy, not even in cigarettes, since there were none. So the games progressed with a great deal of giggling and laughter that had only a slightly hysterical edge to it.

Although no one refers to the night the lake reappeared, not even Samdup, who has said very little to us since then, every once in a while when I have settled down for the night, I'll see one of the sleepers or the gamblers rise to his or her feet, stroll over to the cliff edge, and look out at the mountains and down onto the lake, as if waiting.

The pack train has been gone for a very long time. As I count the entries in my diary and try to figure the days between events, it seems to me that the trains take about two months to go and return.

NIGHT OF TORCHES.

Tonight I was playing cards with Thibideaux, Merridew, and Tsering's daughter when the child lay down her hand and walked to the edge of the cliff. I did the same. I felt twitchy. Though the crops have been as abundant as ever, the night air has gone from springy and soft to almost too warm and now is almost too cold for the brocade hangings to be adequate protection. Tania noticed the hangings among our artifacts and suggested their use as blankets, rinsing them out in clear water, which took two days alone. The fabric is silk brocade, double and triple thick and fairly warm. Wu surprised everyone bydonating half of her personal soap supply to wash the hangings. After that we had rather elegant blankets, though lately these have not been quite warm enough.

This is not really a long-term problem. The flood was not from the lake, as we supposed, but from a hot spring which was apparently also unplugged by the subterranean activity-I try not to think of it as an earthquake-that freed the lake. Soon Tea will have a new valve made and will be able to channel the hot water through the new pipe to form a heating system similar to the original one. But I don't much like the thought of going below again. The distinctions between guards and prisoners and between prisoners of one cellblock and prisoners of another will spring up once more, I'm afraid. And I'm also afraid that we all, very badly, for whatever time remains, need to stand together.

So I stood behind Pema, looking out across the valley, my gaze craning upward to follow hers around the ghostly white peaks looming over us, as overpowering to me as I must have looked to an ant.

A phantom of snow trailed its sheet as it leapt from a cleft in the ridge opposite our guardian mountain.

"Did you ever hear what they call that mountain?" I asked the girl in Tibetan.

"Karakal," she said, and suddenly gave a childish hop and pointed. "Look."

As the veil of snow swept away on the wind, spots of light appeared within the darkness, one, two, three, four, stretching out longer and longer until it seemed a ribbon.

"It's the pack train!" I told Pema, totally unnecessarily since she simultaneously let out a screech and yelled to everyone that she had been the first to spot the train returning from the outside world with all the things we wanted.

And everybody left their games or their hammocks and came to line the cliff edge, watching the light spots bounce down the distant mountainside.

"There's too many," Pema said, counting with her raised finger. "Eighteen, nineteen, twenty-there were only nine people in the train, Dolma, Norbu, Kunga, Trungpa, Jamyang, Pema Jamyang..."

"Hush, we know," her mother said, holding her by her shoulders and stroking her hair as the girl continued counting.

There were many more than nine lights, many more than nineteen or twenty. Hundreds of the spots formed a serpentine ribbon of light dancing from the top of the ridge, winding in a circle along the cliff sides, spiraling down until, as its tip reached halfway down the mountain, we started moving en ma.s.se down the trail to greet it.

Behind each brave and beautiful light was a foot-weary, soul-sick traveler. Many new faces, and only a few of the old ones were among them, some reached the edge of the canopy while the rest brought up the rear, still high in the pa.s.s.

How would we feed them all, how would there be enough blankets? Where did they all come from?

I was relieved when I saw that each of them was carrying, besides a torch, as many personal belongings as they could carry, including animals in baskets and cages, clothing, children-these were refugees, then, rather than more prisoners.

And then I recognized, or thought I recognized, a coat I hadn't seen for months, since it had walked out of camp on the back of one of the youngest guards, one of the ones who had stayed behind when the rest of the pack train returned. He was one of the ones who would have walked out to the guerrilla campto learn what had become of the supply helicopter. He had returned with this party, or at least his parka, bordered with distinctive rainbow-stripped ribbon, had returned. I definitely remembered that the parka belonged to a very young guard, just beyond boyhood, but now the parka was on the back of a middle-aged man who resembled the boy enough to be his father.

I had not seen Dolma until I spotted this man, but she was right behind him, bearing one end of a litter.

The chest of the body on the stretcher still rose and fell, although the head was covered for warmth with one of those reflecting synthetic blankets.

Dolma hefted her end of the stretcher more securely and filed past me, unseeing without her thick gla.s.ses. Behind her shuffled more civilians, lugging everything from cooking pots to chickens, driving some of the more surefooted animals, chiefly goats, before them. Everyone looked like a sleepwalker.

LATER.

I suppose ignorance really was bliss in this case. We saw the missiles fired and we saw them explode in return, in the distance. We knew d.a.m.n good and well what it meant. But it is still stunning to hear about the obliteration from the lips of these few survivors, led through the mountains to the rendezvous point by the team who had walked back in to investigate.

The newcomers spilled out from under the canopy, sitting numbed and quiet while we pa.s.sed among them with soup and extra coverings, and helped them shed their packs.

Sometime later, after the bathtub soup kettle bore nothing but a greasy film where the soup had been, after the hangings had been torn in half to cover more children and infants, after the chickens and pigs and goats had been penned and the night of torches had turned to day and then into afternoon, I found Dolma, sitting beside the litter, tears streaming on her cheeks. I sat down beside her, my bones creaking wearily. A full soup bowl with a spoon in it sat at the head of the litter. The occupant's face was turned away, with only a straggle of fine white hair on an age-speckled bald scalp showing clearly.

Tea threaded his way through the crowd to join us and looked down at Dolma's red-rimmed eyes, much magnified by her salt-stained gla.s.ses.

"So," he said to her. "So, just how bad is it?"

"It's over," she said. Her voice quavered. Her hair was matted to her head from wearing a cap and a hood for so long and she absently brushed it out of the frames of her gla.s.ses. Tea watched her intently the whole time. They both knew what they were talking about, another part of a longstanding secret. I could only guess at that point. "We are alone," Dolma said. "Only these few were saved, and they found their way only because Rinchen Norbu and his companions met them when they walked out to try to find the helicopter. You can see from Rinchen's face what it cost him." She nodded to the middle-aged man wearing the youth's rainbow-trimmed parka. He sat looking over the heads of squalling children and the stony-faced adults who mechanically went about the business of settling in. He was staring at the lake as if by drinking it in with his eyes he was somehow healed. "These people lived in the settlements and camps near our border. When they saw the flash, they were far enough from ground zero to have time to begin walking in, with the guidance of Rinchen and the others. Three villagers, plus Sonam and Phurbu from Rinchen's party, were lost in an avalanche and later, the wind blew two people from the top of a cliffside pa.s.s.""Little Sonam?" Tea asked. "She is gone? And Phurbu?"

"The world is gone, Lobsang. Save for these few. Their fate was to be there for the arrival of our people and to follow them here. At first many were reluctant to come, since they could never leave, as a few of them had heard in tales of this place from their great-grandparents and grandparents, who remembered us from days when trade was easier. Within five days of our border, Rinchen spotted this one." She indicated the person on the stretcher. "He recognized the parka," she said sadly.

I followed her gaze to the mottled scalp and the ragged motion of the chest as it labored to breathe and couldn't believe someone so ancient had been wandering out in the mountains alone. Perhaps, as I had heard the Eskimos once exposed their elders, someone had left the poor old thing to die?

Dolma started to glance up at me once and lowered her eyes to the stretcher again.

"So tell me," I said. "Why did all these people spend their last few days mountain climbing to come here?"

The doctor had been moving, stepping over each person to reach another, her bag in her hand, Thibideaux behind her carrying an a.s.sortment of bandages and ointments, Pema tagging behind to run errands. Terton bent slowly over the figure on the stretcher, pulling the blanket down to reach for the wrist.

n.o.body answered me. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath as Terton examined the man.

Thibideaux stood well away from her and her body sheltered that of her patient.

I had thought that the big secret between Dolma and Tea had to do with the missiles, with the night the sky lit up with fireb.a.l.l.s and explosions. I thought they were talking around that, p.u.s.s.yfooting really, so as to avoid panicking the rest of us, which seemed an exercise in futility. I was trying to be direct, to let them know that even though we had not said anything, the prisoners-in my cell block at least-had an idea what had happened beyond the mountains. "I think I get it. They came to escape the radiation, didn't they? Because we're so far from everything. I guess they figure the fire storms and the nuclear winter and all that might not hit us up here." I paused, tried to swallow, found I could not and that I suddenly felt very shaky as I asked more calmly than I thought possible, "But even though we seem to be spared so far, all the fallout and stuff is bound to catch up with us pretty soon, isn't it?"

The doctor pulled the thermal blanket back up over her patient, turned slowly around so that she sat on the ground facing me beside the stretcher and said in a low, measured voice, "No. I don't believe so."

"You don't?"

"No. The rest of the world may die but in this one little place, we will continue. If I did not believe this, this place would not be here."

"But who wants to continue forever in a prison camp?" I asked, and added, a little wildly, "I mean, for a prison camp you've all been swell but it's a prison camp nevertheless."

"Does it matter what it is? You have no home to return to."

"Sherry-" The voice on the litter crackled like static, and Dolma hushed it and pulled the covers gently away.

"It is all okay now, Sergeant. We have brought you back. You see? Here are your friends Viva andThibideaux."

The withered little figure under the blanket was sweating, so she peeled back his outer parka. He wore orange pajamas, like me.

"Sherry, I'm sorry. Coming back to-help ..."

"Du?" Thibideaux asked and then, louder, "Du? What the- Colonel! Mars.h.!.+"

"Doc?" the old man on the cot asked and the bottom dropped out of my stomach, a boulder lodged in my throat.

"Danielson?" I asked.

"Sherry-"

"No, Danielson, it's Viv Vanachek."

"Sherry. Sorry, babe." A gob of phlegm had to be suctioned from his lips before he could continue but for a brief moment he looked up at me with Danielson's piercing blue eyes sandwiched between wrinkled, drooping lids. "Sherry, I can help. I-more than a killer."

"My G.o.d," Merridew said when he had fought his way through the refugees to reach us. "This can't be." He leaned over Danielson as tenderly as a mother with an injured child. "Sergeant Danielson?"

"Colonel, tell Sherry-"

"It's all right, son," he said, and although nothing was all right and the figure on the stretcher looked old enough to be his great-grandfather rather than his son, he didn't sound inane.

The Danielson on the stretcher fixed the Colonel with one of those fierce looks he had, exhaled as if he was sighing, and didn't inhale again. The doctor had her fingers on his pulse and shook her head, and finally Thibideaux closed the sagging lids over eyes from which the fierceness had faded "What did you do to him?" the Colonel demanded, his voice grinding the words to iron filings.

"Could it be some kind of radiation poisoning?" I ventured, "I never heard of rapid aging as a sign of radiation poisoning," Thibideaux said slowly.

"It is not radiation poisoning," the doctor said. "Your friend is a very old man. You are, Colonel, Doctor Thibideaux, Mr. Marsh, all of you, all very old men. So old that it was necessary when you were first brought here to give each of you posthypnotic suggestions so that the pa.s.sage of time would not alarm you."

"The headaches?" I asked.

She nodded. "Yes, a deterrent implanted in your subconscious to make time a literally instead of merely a psychologically painful concept for you to deal with. But believe me, Colonel, you and Mr.

Danielson particularly are very old men indeed. When Mr. Danielson strayed beyond our borders, the beneficial effects of this place no longer protected him and within a few days he reverted to his true age."

"That's a load of horses.h.i.+t if I ever heard one," Thibideaux said.

I'm not sure how long Marsh had been listening. Long enough to get the gist of the conversationanyway. He knelt beside the body and pulled back the cover and after a moment said, "It is Danielson.

And he is old. This isn't radiation poisoning."

"No, no, hold on," I said, feeling as if another avalanche was about to sweep my life away. The bomb had got the world and the doctor had disposed of my sense of time and personal history with a wave of her magic wand. Still, I had put together a few things for myself and if I could make sense of those, I'd be much less a puppet, I'd have regained some control. "Thibideaux, the oil spills were cleaned up when my mother was a young woman-say twenty. She had me when she was forty-three-I remember that because Grandma had her when she was forty-three and I was forty-three when I was captured so it's"-the doctor nodded encouragingly and this time the block that I had unthinkingly grown accustomed to when I tried to puzzle out time dissolved-"2069." I could see the chronometer on my map display in Siddons's aircraft as clearly as if I was sitting before it. "September twenty-ninth, 2069, I was captured. So if you cleaned birds as a boy, you must be-"

"Nearly seventy," he said, sitting back on his heels with his hands dangling limply over his knees, the equipment he'd been carrying for Terton falling nervelessly from his fingers.

The Colonel took up the game as grimly determined as if he was biting into a cyanide capsule, "And my father took his flight when I was twenty-four years old. That was in 1991."

At length I said, "Does anybody know what year this is?"

The doctor smiled. "It is 2070 by your calendar. But it no longer matters, you see." I didn't see and neither did any of my cellmates. We all looked at her blankly and she added, as if it explained anything, "Now that you are here, I mean to say."

"But where is here?" Merridew demanded. "What kind of trick is this? We can't be as old as you say and even if we were, we won't be getting any older. There's been a major nuclear incident so close that I saw the flash with my own eyes. We should all be dead now, and not of old age. This has got to be some kind of trick."

"There's Danielson," Thibideaux reminded him. "He's no trick."

"Please do not concern yourself, Mr. Merridew," Terton said kindly. "We will not perish here. We are protected by the power of this valley and this place, s.h.i.+elded by Karakal."

"What's that? Some heathen G.o.d?" Merridew demanded.

"Karakal is the mountain, Colonel," I filled in, remembering what the little girl had told me and then remembered something else. "It's a famous mountain, isn't it, Doctor, although it isn't the highest in the range?"

"We enjoyed an uncomfortable amount of notoriety for a time," she said. "Fortunately, the explanations given in Mr. Hilton's popular novel and the subsequent film were not scientific enough to convince the world of our existence and so we remain. The model for the hero of the book was one of my grandfathers, although he was not an Englishman, as Mr. Hilton had it, nor did he in any way resemble an American film star, since he was actually an Indian diplomat. But he was able to return, finally, and he and my mother remained here through two of my incarnations, until at last the avalanche killed them. By that time Tibet was occupied by the Chinese. The task of this place has always been as a haven for those besieged by the world, as a repository for the finest treasures of art and literature. My life has been stranger than I can easily tell you, but it has always been clear to me that the greatest treasure, and the most endangered one, is the human spirit. That is why I have gathered you here.""You're preserving us by force?" Merridew sneered.

"Had I not done so, others would have killed you by force. Would you prefer that, Colonel?"

"And the names I found on the computer," I said. "All the names of this place. None of them were the true name, were they? The name of this place is not Russian, Indian or Chinese?"

"Well, it is derived from Sanskrit." Terton said. "Which is vaguely Indian."

"What the h.e.l.l are you two talking about," the Colonel asked. "Whose prisoners are we anyway?"

"You are time's prisoners, Colonel Merridew," she said softly. "And destiny's. But please think of this place as a prison no longer. From now on, we must all help each other adjust to the terrible consequences that have befallen the outside world. In the meantime, we will make our home here, in this place we have known from ancient times as Shambala, although your Mr. Hilton for some reason refers to it as Shangri-La."

PART EIGHT.

OLD YEAR 2070, NEW POST-BIG BOOM YEAR 1, WEEK 2, EARLY.

AUTUMN.

(Late August? Who's to contradict me? So be it. Late August).