Nothing Sacred Part 9

"No talking!" Two-gun Tsering barked before I could respond. Danielson released my elbow andveered away. I thought about what he said the rest of the day. I hadn't really considered that anyone was likely to tell that I'd given them something. Why should they? But then, from what the Colonel said, sometimes people in these camps looked for things to report so they could improve their own situation by currying favor with the guards. We had been kept isolated from the other prisoners. In our cell the Colonel maintained discipline and kept strict watch to be sure we maintained the mutually protective pact he'd outlined for me my first night in camp. The men in the cell seemed to be strong characters whose loyalty had been tested. Mine hadn't undergone any of the tests they'd talked about, and I had been given a great deal more leeway than any of them had in the past. I was being well treated and given access to the rooms in headquarters and the computer, and I was not under heavy guard most of the time. It could, I saw, be a setup, to lead me into some major indiscretion that would be discovered, whereupon I would be questioned and we could all suffer. On the other hand, if I didn't take advantage of the opportunities, or was too afraid to communicate with the other prisoners for fear of betrayal, I might as well have remained in solitary. For that matter, I might as well be dead already. Because I was here now and here was where I was likely to remain. This was my whole life and maybe my future and I had to make the best of it. Probably I'd change my mind if and when I was betrayed and beaten or tortured or brainwashed or any of the other horrible things they did to people in these places, but so far I had escaped all that and after I was beaten, tortured or brainwashed, I probably wouldn't exactly be in the mood to figure how to use my opportunities, if I still had any, to good advantage. So I had to do it now and I had to use my own judgment, despite the warnings and the fears of the others.

Back in the cell, I said to everyone, "I gave some seeds to the women working beside me. Some of the other prisoners have kids and I don't think it's fair to keep something as important as food to ourselves."

Marsh simply raised his eyebrows at me, Thibideaux shrugged, and the Colonel gave me a long, searching, slightly suspicious look, then turned away and began yoga postures.

All during yoga I couldn't relax because I felt Danielson staring holes through me.

I lit the b.u.t.ter lamp after the yoga session and pulled out my journal to write the first part of this entry. Thibideaux's voice made me look up. "Du, what's your problem? Stop starin' at Vanachek like she's an enemy sniper and snap out of it."

"She breached security," Danielson said.

"Yes, she did," the Colonel put in, "and she should have discussed it with us before acting on her own initiative. But it's done and it may be for the best. We'll just have to wait and see. Danielson, you do nothing without my order and my order will be given only after a vote, understood?" And when Danielson continued to stare at me, the Colonel repeated himself, more sharply. "Du, I asked if you understood? You will not attempt to silence her without a general agreement from the rest of us. Do I make myself clear?"

Danielson continued to stare stonily at me then nodded once, slowly, in answer to the Colonel's question. His expression, calculated to frighten me, instead induced a hot flash of anger.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," I said. "Silencing me? What is this? You guys don't wait for the so-called enemy to do me in? You just decide among yourselves whether you like how I'm conducting myself and if you don't, you save the bad guys the trouble? What the f.u.c.k is it with you?"

"Now, cher, you heard the Colonel," Thibideaux said. "Du's a little upset but he'll follow orders.""Du's upset?" I asked.

Marsh cleared his throat. "Du has seen a lot more action than most of us, Viv."

"Let me see if I understand, then, Keith," I said. "Colonel, Doc, Du, correct me if I'm wrong.

Because you've seen more action than the rest of us, Du, you've become this crazed killer who will snuff out life without a qualm and you are ready to snuff out mine because you don't like me talking to other prisoners? Only I'm lucky because the other guys aren't going to let you kill me unless they say so? Is that the deal?"

Thibideaux watched Danielson carefully, then ran his hand over his mouth and turned away. Marsh grunted, smiled sweetly and pretended to go to sleep. The Colonel stared first at Danielson, then me.

Danielson glanced at the Colonel, then back at me and shrugged, saying without anger, "Yeah, I think that's about it. You seem to understand."

LIBRARY, NEXT DAY.

I awoke from a dream of the mountain collapsing last night to feel the weight of a shadow and a pair of eyes pressing against me. From the men around me a chorus of snores and the light breath of sleep let me know that I was effectively alone with whoever stood over me.

A hand pressed against my mouth and the figure bent low, so that his lips were against my ear. "If I was going to kill you, I would put my arm around your neck like this," he said, doing so, "and my other arm around your head and snap, that'd be it. No time to peep."

"I don't have to peep," I told him, not afraid of him particularly, although I had no doubt he was dangerous. "You're doing plenty of talking. Why, Danielson? What's on your mind?"

"I'm sorry, Viv. I don't want to hurt you, really. But you have to know that's what I'm like. I believe you that you only wanted to share the seeds with the other women and their kids but you don't know what these places are like, how they can turn somebody against you for an extra bowl of rice." He'd sunk to his knees beside my cot and I rolled over to face him, incidentally removing my head from his incipient hammerlock the way I might once have gently but discreetly removed another guy's hand from my thigh.

"You've got a family, Du," I whispered back to him, my face a scant two or three inches from his, but still I could see very little of his features. The cell was chillier than it had been when I went to sleep, and I curled in a ball on the side of the stone cot, my hands cupped together under my cheek.

Danielson's posture was not so threatening now, but even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have felt safe going back to sleep when he wanted to talk. "If your kids were on a steady diet of momos and someone had a means to grow fresh food, wouldn't you want them to share it with your wife so she could keep your kids from getting deficiency diseases? When you were a kid, don't you think your mother would have wanted those seeds for you?"

He snorted derisively, "I didn't exactly know my mother, but I think if she'd known how I turned out, she wouldn't have given much of a d.a.m.n."

Now we were getting down to it. Psychology 101, childhood, the whole nature and nurture business. "Well, why do you think you've become somebody she wouldn't give a d.a.m.n about, Du? Wasit at least partly her fault? Did you have a bad childhood? Were you beaten? Molested? You seem like an old-fas.h.i.+oned sort of man, Danielson, but that kind of thing is so common. All of my friends had war stories about growing up and even I got groped by my great-uncle's old guru when I was six. He was way too old to do me any real harm, but I had no way of knowing that."

Danielson was smirking to himself and emitting more little snorts I took to be laughter. Psychology 101 also says the would-be shrink should ask the leading questions and shut up. I wished I hadn't said that about myself. I didn't want to give him ideas. Maybe he was a kiddie-p.o.r.n freak himself, this father of two. It wouldn't be the first time someone who loved children loved them a little more than they were supposed to ... My heart was beating hard against the stone beneath me. While I waited for his answer, a long time coming in the dark, the breath of the other men came slow as the chants and I caught the steady, rea.s.suring rhythm of it and felt my own bounding pulse quiet a little as I slipped back, only slightly, into the dreams of this place as it was before.

It could not have been more than seconds before Danielson answered, but real time was hopscotching between flashes of dream. "It's just you saying that about me being old-fas.h.i.+oned," he said, rubbing his face with his hands, his breath wheezing a little so that I couldn't tell if he was nearly laughing or nearly crying. "Lady, you don't know how funny that is. Fas.h.i.+oned is right. And no, I wasn't molested-at least not any more than most men who grow up in a barracks and there they call it toughening you up. See, I didn't exactly have a mother. The army has been mama and daddy both to me, but my original parents, I guess you could say, were the research laboratory that incubated my test tube and the chemical corporation it belonged to."

He waited for me to react to that but I just nodded and waited for him to continue. My psych instructor would have been proud of my nonjudgmental demeanor. To my knowledge, I hadn't previously met anybody who'd been born in a test tube. But in sociology cla.s.ses they told us that at one time predictions were that a great majority of babies might someday be born that way. The convenience of preselected genes and s.e.x appealed to many adoptive parents who were in some cases also the donors of genetic materials, making them also the natural parents. Besides circ.u.mventing the usual complications that prevented people from having babies, saving genetic material and incubating it at the time in the lives of the parents when they were ready to be parents, rather than when biology dictated, was extremely convenient, I suppose.

Of course, the born-again neoconservatives had as much of a fit over that one as they did over abortion. Couldn't seem to make up their minds about life, those people. Eventually they put up such a stink and brought so many lawsuits to bear that the research labs had to abandon the project.

"Anyhow, I got born but I never got claimed," Danielson continued. "Later, I got a hold of company records and tried to research the people who ordered me. I didn't find anything- they could have been from anywhere. But I did discover that right about the time I came along another one of those ultraviruses swept the country and took a big body count. The company was stuck with me for the first five years or so and I grew up in their day-care center with all these little brothers and sisters who got to go home at night. I don't know what they did with me. Maybe the security guards kept an eye on me. Then I got lucky and the Defense Department decided to take a bite off old Mao's apple and see if by raising some children themselves they'd be able to make better soldiers out of them. So I was brought up in the most extensive military academy yet. A lot of other tube kids and I guess some unwanted babies born the regular way were raised from infancy by the army but I was already a little older by the time they thought of it. I still remember the lab. The smell of disinfectant and formaldehyde always makes me homesick.

"The army school I went to was okay-heavy emphasis on sports, of course. It wasn't officer candidate school, you understand. More like a trade school-we learned about choppers, explosives,firearms, and of course computers. I always tested high and kind of thought they might send me on to officer school but then my cla.s.s got sent to Belize when I was fifteen." He paused, took a deep breath, and said, "I-um-I was the only one who graduated."

I took a deep breath too. He'd spent ten years with those people, the only family he had, probably hadn't liked them all but they would have been like siblings, and at fifteen he was alone again. "So what did you do?"

"Followed orders. Went to Libya with a strike force and spent four more years as a desert guerrilla.

Went back to Bahrain on leave and met Sherry-she was visiting her parents, who were both officers.

They w.a.n.gled a peace-type a.s.signment for me in Europe, and we had our twins. And I loved it-G.o.d, I really loved having a real, honest-to-G.o.d family. I was thinking, you know, football with the boys, Christmas presents, all that stuff. But when it came right down to it, I just couldn't wait for them to stop bawling all night, like they were some wog brats trapped in bombed-out buildings instead of kids with two parents and everything. Sherry was always doing something for them, forgot about me. I had a lot of time on my hands after I spent the day trying to tell people who'd been civilians since they were kids how to stay alive in the real world, which was what I did, that and push papers and take orders from more civilians. I guess what it all boiled down to was I just can't hack peacetime. I got bored, started drinking.

But the first time I took a swing at Sherry, she ducked away and cowered against the wall, and I saw her turning into some spic hooker-terrorist, just for a minute there. Then one of the kids toddled in with his diaper around his knees and a bottle in his mouth and she ran off with him into the bedroom and locked the door against me. I wonder if she knew how close I came to killing her. Probably. I did. And I figured if I ever touched her again, being me, I'd probably finish her off, so I walked out of the house and drove to HQ and asked for another combat tour. I'm not much good for anything else, I guess.

"They wouldn't send me right back into combat so I went to school and became a helicopter mechanic, but that bored me too. I took leave, went back to HQ in j.a.pan and talked to Sherry. She met me at the PX cafeteria, didn't even bring the kids. Brought the picture I showed you, though. I told her it wasn't working out, that I wanted more action, but I was sorry and I'd keep supporting her and the kids and I loved them, but they were just better off without me around. They can do pretty well by themselves living on post. I said I'd like to visit sometime. She said maybe later. But then she did kiss me before we left and I thought, maybe I'll try to get something closer, you know? But the next day I got orders to go to Tibet to train natives in hand-to-hand and small weaponry.

"I got to know those little gooks pretty well. I liked 'em even. Tough little b.u.g.g.e.rs and h.e.l.l, you know, ever since Belize I have not been able to stand letting anybody else walk point or check out an ambush. I guess I don't want ever again to be the last one left alive. I mean, s.h.i.+t, I'm no good for anything but killing people anyway ... I've read stuff where they call that survival guilt but the way I am, I think it's just plain loneliness. I don't want to be left to bail out alone. Anyway, we were out on a training mission one night and it turned into a firefight with some of the Chinese. They had some of my people pinned down, so I went in after 'em. My people got out, I think, but I was taken. It has even crossed my mind that maybe I was set up, but at any rate, I spent seven months nursing my frag wounds in a cage.

"Then they marched me for a long time until I got to what I guess might have been a salt mine or something and put me to work. I kept trying to escape and they kept beating me. That's where the kid I told you about came in. Later on, Wu told me that they had learned enough from what they beat out of me to find my records and discovered that I was what she called an 'artificial person' and in view of what a ferocious war criminal I was they thought they'd better send me to this place for further study. I've been afraid they were going to dissect me or something but so far the only time they really let me have it was when I killed a guard the first time I tried to escape. They questioned me a lot, and had me in solitary and all that stuff-sleep deprivation and so on-but I never could tell them why being an 'artificialperson' makes me any better or worse than anybody else. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The Colonel doesn't think soldiers ought to have families. He doesn't. But I wonder if Thibideaux or even Marsh would have an easier time trying to be civilians or peacetime soldiers, trying to live with civilians. It's a different world." I felt him grinning at me in the dark. "You're the closest any of us have come in a long time to a civilian, Vanachek. I guess it's been tough for me having you here to remind me that as much as I miss Sherry and the kids, if they don't need me to actually protect them from something, I'm no f.u.c.king good for them. I'm just not worth a d.a.m.n in peacetime ..."

I thought he'd gone to sleep but I asked, "Du, I'm wondering about something."

"Yeah?"

"You guys all seem pretty healthy and yet you've had all these beatings and been living on momos all this time. Weren't you ever as sick as I've been when you first came here?"

"Well, yeah. But we got over it."

"You just got better all on your own?"

"Mostly. Yeah, mostly on my own. Wu claims it's the air around here, because it's so pure and everything, but I think I started getting better when I began having these dreams."

His voice softened and even through the darkness I could see his features relax.

"See, I had these dreams for a long time. They're pretty hazy, but I dreamed about guys in long dresses coming and taking care of me. There were these noises. d.a.m.nedest thing. But they did a good job. My feet were deformed and raw from all the beatings and in the beating I took here after I killed the guard, my hands were crushed. I thought I'd never be able to use them again. Now look," and he closed and opened both fists and made claws with both sets of fingers and thumbs.

FIRST HARVEST.

The mountains are less white, cataracts tumble down their sides, the tangled rhododendron brush is flowing pink, red, purple, yellow and all shades in between, and tonight we enjoyed our first smuggled new vegetables-beautiful, crunchy, fresh-tasting things that smelled of the ground and greenness: beans, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, potatoes and onions. The vegetables have grown at a speed that astonishes me, when I remember the careful nurturing Granddad's garden used to take and how long it seemed between planting and eating. I regret not planting tomatoes particularly, since they would have been better than raw beans, but tomatoes need stakes and tying up and special pampering to keep them from cutworms, and that would have been impossible to do clandestinely. Du as it turns out is very fond of onions, which Thibideaux ate but did not like. Marsh grazed indiscriminately and the Colonel closed his eyes and chewed in o.r.g.a.s.mic bliss. Amazing how a dab of onion flavor improves a momo.

It promises to be one of the more gala evenings here in the heart of the Kun Lun Mountains. Our sumptuous meal will be followed, if all goes as predicted, by the arrival of another pack train.

Tea mentioned earlier in the day that the train had been spotted returning by the sentry posted at the pa.s.s. He seemed overjoyed and anxious at the same time.

"I am thinking they are returning very late," he said."They were supposed to be bringing the router you wanted, and some other tools, weren't they?" I asked.

"Yes, but the Terton went with them. She is my concern."

"The who?"

"You are calling her the doctor. Dr. Terton then. She is going with the pack train this time, you know."

"I know," I said glumly. Ever since the pack train left, taking the old woman with it, Wu has been her old high-handed and suspicious self. She keeps popping into the library as if hoping to catch Dolma and me smoking dope or doing something equally immoral. I have had very little time to read or write since the train left. It seems Wu is always lurking by the headquarters entrance when the day ends watching my pajama pockets for unauthorized bulges. Maybe she's monitoring Tea by keeping an eye on me. Anyway, I've sorely missed the old woman.

I've picked up enough Tibetan to augment my Chinese that I understand much of the conversation around me now, enough to realize that the camp is too isolated by mountains and distance for the usual long-distance devices. Making use of the orbiting satellites would give away the camp's position, so for security reasons as well as practical ones all of us, including Wu and the guards, are cut off from quick and easy communication with the rest of the world. Every time we find something like the bathtub or the ruins of a piano or the particularly large ivory Buddha we recently uncovered, Tea always turns to me and says, "Are you not finding it remarkable to think that everything, everything is being carried in on someone's back, Viv?"

But now he said, worrying, which is not at all usual for him, "The Terton was intending to take two days to conduct some business by helicopter and be returning with the train. But even so they are returning much later than we planned. The sentry is watching many days in vain."

Tonight as we came down to the cells, the sentries scanned the horizon constantly, their postures alert and tense. Usually they laugh and call to each other or hum to themselves or sometimes even play cards together at the more closely s.p.a.ced duty stations. Tonight each stood ready to greet the night with a trio of unlit torches stuck in the rock wall next to each sentry post. Most nights they carry flashlights, but the vigil is too long between the time the train is first spotted at the head of the pa.s.s and the time they arrive, and it takes too much juice from the precious batteries to use the flashlights as beacons.

DAY OF PACK TRAIN ARRIVAL.

The pack train straggled up the hill this morning, but they carried no tools for Tea and no computer disks for Dolma. Their backs were empty of anything except clothing.

This is apparently an unprecedented disaster. Wu called a general meeting of the camp this morning, under the beak of the canopy overlooking the slope. The doctor stood slightly behind her, slumping from exhaustion, her eyes hooded instead of fiercely boring into everyone around her as they usually did.

Whatever she had had to do in civilization had remained undone, apparently. Tough luck. She would just have to be stuck with the rest of us.

During the meeting, I realized for the first time that what, or rather whom, I've seen is apparently whom I get. All the camp was present but there was no one there I did not know either fromheadquarters, the cell or the field. While I hadn't consciously imagined vast catacombs of groaning cells, filled with the fallen fruits of the war, I somehow thought there were more of us than I've met. But there are only we few prisoners, and far more guards, most of them of Tibetan appearance, but some Chinese or Indians. Tea was there, of course, and Dolma, looking very martial except when she pushed her gla.s.ses up on her nose with the tip of her rifle barrel. A prison with a better than one-on-one guard-to-prisoner ratio. We must all be very desperate characters indeed to warrant such precautions. I really must have another look at that three-sectioned computer file.

Wu paced back and forth, as if she was about to deliver a long-winded speech and then said, first in Chinese, then in Tibetan, Hindi, English and finally Russian (I had no idea that she, as well as Dr. Terton and I, knew so many languages),"The supply helicopter did not come at the arranged time. The pack train waited an extra week and still it did not come with fresh provisions. Consequently, rations will be cut to half portions until the next appointed time. Do not feel that I am being unnecessarily harsh. The staff and administrators will also be on half rations. That is all. Back to work."

Today I've been working with Tea deep in the tunnel, the work lights s.h.i.+ning through the silt and dust sifting down onto our faces, hands and clothing as we slowly dug and sorted our way through a new barrier to rooms beyond.

I would have preferred less confining work, boxed in with Tea as I was with onion still on my breath from breakfast. He noticed and said all too aptly, "You are being very closemouthed today, Viv. What is eating you?"

"Other than being a prisoner of war with rations running low, you mean?" I said, not exactly snapping, but trying to keep him from delving any further. I had distributed only about twenty-five packets of seeds, not enough to make a difference in the level in the room, not enough to make a bulge in my pockets, and not enough, I feared, to keep even us prisoners fed, let alone the guards, during the month or so until the helicopter was scheduled to return.

Tea laughed. "You are thinking you will be hungry because the pack train returned empty? Instead think how the other ladies back in North America will be envying you, who are already so much more slender than you were on arrival, and now have the chance to be going on a new enforced diet that they would be paying thousands of dollars to be nibbling on."

"I was just wondering if Wu is going to cut back to eating half of the fresh fruit I saw at her table once when she questioned me instead of wolfing down the whole bowl." He frowned. He doesn't like it when I criticize Wu but he never threatens or corrects me. I get the oddest feeling that it isn't so much that he doesn't agree with me as that he objects to my unkindness in pointing out her shortcomings.

I wish he had checked the seed room himself, so I wouldn't be in such a quandary about other, more urgent shortcomings of a nutritional nature. We have gentle rains cooperatively falling mainly at night lately, and the vegetables grow so fast I'm pretty sure we could get in another crop before the growing season ends. But if I let him know about the seed room, surely Wu will take the matter out of his hands and work us all to death planting food for her to hog for herself and the staff, leaving the rest of us still on short rations, without our hard-won new secret supplement.

Of course, before long probably one of the guards will spot our crops among the rocks for what they are.

At least some of the guards must come from farming families, although I wonder how many generations back has it been since Tibetans have been allowed enough peace to grow food. The countryhas been in the middle of a war all of my life. According to my geography texts, the Central Plateau used to be rich farming land but you'd never know it by looking at it now. Still, you'd think somebody would have recognized cauliflower when they saw it. Or was cauliflower indigenous to this area? Never mind, they haven't noticed yet, the cauliflower grows up between the rocks as fast as the weeds it replaced, and the problem remains. We've been very lucky thus far with having our haphazard plantings take root, but some things really flourish best if planted a certain depth down. It's a shame they have to go to waste because I'm afraid to share them.

TWO DAYS LATER.

I've been going to laughable lengths to avoid having to make a decision. I accidentally left the door to the seed room open when we were in the lower corridors yesterday. Tea was still explaining to me how he intended to sh.o.r.e up a side pa.s.sage as he crossed to the door and shut it behind him without looking inside the room. Today I went so far as to ask him to hold the flashlight while I looked for "something" in the room, but he's so preoccupied with his work that he continued telling me about how rich in various minerals this area once was without even glancing at the riches around him. He is a dear fellow in all other ways and not a bit stupid but is, as I first noticed, a little goofy, though now that I'm learning Tibetan I realize he speaks perfectly well not only in Tibetan, but in Chinese and Indian, and the funny-sounding tense mistakes he makes are only because he loves Western slang and insists on speaking English to me so that he can use it. None of the other English-speaking Tibetans make that sort of mistake-it's more the kind you hear from Indians occasionally. I don't have enough linguistics background to quite understand why.

Anyway, he can be remarkably obtuse. I find it hard to believe the seeds have been here undetected for so long. I guess it's just that Tea is so into minerals, he is oblivious to vegetables and animals. I wonder if that Earl Grey program labeled rooms as to contents? You'd think if it did, he would have remembered this one. But then, it was a big place.

THREE DAYS AFTER LAST ENTRY.

d.a.m.n, I wish I was able to keep better track of the dates. I gained access to the computer again, and I'm even more confused than ever. I have had a roaring headache most of the day- probably from staring at the screen.

Tea borrowed Dolma back this morning and left me alone with the computer in the library, supposedly cataloging books. He doesn't realize, of course, that I've memorized his access codes.

The Earl Grey files, now that I see them again, bother me, especially in light of the other little goodies I've uncovered under the code name of CONSTANT COMMENT (a favorite tea brand at my grandmother's house when I was a little girl). On the one hand, it's hard for me to believe that Tea is making it so easy for me to get this information, which seems to be important, at least to us prisoners. On the other hand, maybe he is as oblivious to its importance as he is to that of the seeds. Or maybe, as the Colonel says, it's disinformation. But the Earl Grey files, which bother me most deeply, have empirical data to support them. The Constant Comment files could possibly be disinformation planted for me to find just so I can make everybody else miserable when I divulge the contents. But why doesn't Wu tell my cellmates this stuff herself if she wants them to know? Part of it is just case history. It's the hero business that would boggle their minds.

It certainly boggles mine. I seem to have been keeping excellent company, here in the prison camp. Iam surrounded by heroes immortalized in the history of NAC. Not major history, perhaps, since if it was mentioned in my military history cla.s.ses at all, it wasn't presented as material required for testing, as I don't recall learning any of it. But it's history nevertheless-always presuming it's true, of course, and actually, I hardly see how this particular kind of information could be used to break down prisoners. On the contrary, the fact that it hasn't been mentioned indicates to me that perhaps Wu felt it would be too good for morale.

I found it by accident. Before I accessed the Earl Grey program I tried the Darjeeling one again, and it was exactly as I remembered it, with the three columns in Chinese, Hindi and Russian and our names among those of the other prisoners and guards listed below. This time I noticed that a cursor was flas.h.i.+ng at the head of the Chinese column. I tapped the DOWN arrow until the key reached the first name I recognized, which was Danielson's. I pressed the RETURN key. For a moment, I thought I'd blown it.

The screen flashed, went blank, and flashed again. What would happen if I'd erased something important? It would be discovered I'd been messing with unauthorized programs and then-what?

Before I had a chance to work up full-fledged m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic fantasies about it, the screen filled with a file neatly headed "Danielson, Du Poindexter." Poindexter? Any guy born in a lab should have been spared having what sounded like ugly family names. A nice clean code number would have been more the thing. But there in Danielson's file was all of the history he had already related to me, followed by the cursor prompt "Access Constant Comment?" So I pressed RETURN again.

A portion at the beginning, where the date would have been, was deleted by a heavy black bar. I wished I knew how to get inside the thing and get rid of that bar. It seemed to be a press release.

Today-years after he was reported missing in action by the platoon he singlehandedly saved from destruction, Master Sergeant Major Du P. Danielson was formally honored at the dedication of the crematory mound where the ashes of NACAF troops and their allies are blended in a last testament to the brotherhood of humanity and the worldwide fight for peace. The a.s.sault led by Danielson not only saved the lives of all other personnel involved, but prevented the destruction of a nearby medical mission and village of civilians and led to the discovery and disarmament of a concealed nuclear device. Secretary of Defense Robert E. Grant, in a moving dedication speech, regretted that Danielson's remains had never been recovered so that his ashes could be among the first to blend upon Danielson Mound with those of his fallen comrades in this profound tribute to the bravery of one NACAF fighting man in particular, and to all NACAF fighting forces all over the world.

Much as Danielson disliked being a prisoner, I somehow doubted he would share General Grant's regret that the Danielson ashes were not handy for scattering.

I pressed ESCAPE and was back in the three-column file. Alphabetically, the next one of us to access was Marsh. I pressed RETURN and waited to see what the Constant Comment about him was.

The date once more was blacked out but the news release said:

The North American continent was spanned today from the Gulf of Mexico to the sh.o.r.es of the Arctic Ocean, as well-wishers formed a human chain to express solidarity with captured WorldPeace Organization activist Keith Irwin Marsh. The government of the People's Republic of China has denied knowledge of Marsh's whereabouts. The Free Marsh Fund has acc.u.mulated billions of dollars over the years, and WPO spokesmen say that if Marsh is not located within another year, the money will be used to help free other hostages and prisoners, and to train other individuals to continue Marsh's work. Marsh was known not only for his willingness to negotiate under extremely perilous circ.u.mstances, but also for his skill in deactivating nuclear and other explosive devices. It is feared he may have met his death performing such a service for his captors after he and a military corpsman disappeared after crossing into China, where Marsh had been dispatched to a.s.sist the locals devastated by northern China's worst flood in recent years.

I switched back to Earl Grey to see what they said about the Colonel and Thibideaux. I was also curious to see if, unbeknownst to me, I hadn't somehow or other been immortalized too, but I hadn't gotten that far and was interrupted before I could investigate further. Dolma stood in the door. I tapped the key and accessed Darjeeling again as she walked across the library to the table where I worked.

"Viva," she said, as it seemed easier for her to say than Viv with a short i, "Viva, I am a.s.signed to the pack train that leaves early in the morning. I will not see you again for a while."

"I don't envy you the trip. How will you manage out there in the snow without your gla.s.ses fogging up?" I asked, smiling. I was touched she had come to say goodbye. We were less like guard and prisoner now than like co-workers and I felt like a rat for deceiving Dolma, though I realistically figured what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. Still, I would have hated for her to be blamed for any of my transgressions.

She pulled off her gla.s.ses and began wiping them. "I have good far vision," she said. "I say to you, 'Don't get sick again, my friend.' "

"I'm not the one going out there in the snow and wind," I said.