Nothing Sacred Part 17

DAY 14.

At last I have time to write at length again. For the past two weeks it has been far too busy to do anything more than make a note of the date. I don't want to lose track of time again, advisable though the doctor seems to think it would be to do so. I am only forty-three. If the atmosphere cleans up in time, some day I may be able to go outside again. Not that I can tell you why I'd want to. But maybe some day at least some of these children would want to. At least one has already expressed his opinion that Shangri-La, (or Shambala-when in Tibet, etc.) is not all it has been cracked up to be.

"I thought there would be golden paG.o.das, like in the stories," the boy complained as he helped me hang the chimes from the outer edge of the command bunker. Laundry flapped from the poles and protrusions like the prayer flags at Danielson's grave. People are still camped so thickly under the canopy that it's hard to walk from one end of the compound to another, but stone lean-tos have blossomedamong the flowering jungle covering the valley floor and if there are more mouths to feed, there are also more hands to work on the garden. And of course, there is all the new livestock the refugees brought with them, and some very welcome small farming implements.

It took us three days of tending to the immediate survival needs of the new people before we got around to burying Danielson. The delay was partly because there was some question as to how the funeral should be handled. The wood supply was insufficient for a cremation, especially now that we were using so many campfires at night for warmth. We have continued to sleep aboveground since there are not enough cells excavated yet for everyone and we're still concerned about aftershocks, which may be able to reach us even if direct contamination, according to Terton, cannot. So when there was time, Marsh and Thibideaux helped Samdup dig a grave at the foot of the pa.s.s at the far end of the mountain.

I helped Merridew, who still limps from his cat wounds, down the mountain, where he planned to say a few words over the grave. On the way down, we pa.s.sed Tea and Dolma, who each carried armloads of mani stones, smooth, with rivulets of rain dripping from the carved prayers. I have hauled so many of those stones from the garden, some whole, some broken. The ones Tea and Dolma held were whole.

"Something will be needed to keep the snow lion from taking your friend," Tea said." In the old way, we would have let the animals have the body, but there are few animals here now and giving the only wild one the taste of human flesh doesn't seem a good idea. These seem-appropriate."

Using one hand to steady the Colonel, I could only carry one stone myself-the small ones weighed at least five pounds or so apiece-and I thought it would be a long day, carrying enough stones to form a cairn over Danielson.

But then Wu and Dr. Terton threaded their way toward us through refugees and the radish patch.

On the way, Dr. Terton squatted down and lifted a stone. With a put-upon sigh, Wu did likewise and Tsering, who walked behind them, picked up three more. Meanwhile, one of the refugees who had helped Dolma carry Danielson's litter spoke a word to her, pried a stone from the dirt and brushed it off and handed it to a child of about nine, who handed it to his sister. In a hushed babble, people told each other what the stones were for, and soon there was a straggling procession to the grave. Thibideaux and Marsh were just about to lay Danielson in it when Dolma stopped them, set down her stones, and began gathering blossoms. Soon others were gathering them too, until the area was denuded of wildflowers for half an acre around, and Danielson's grave was half filled with them. Then he was lowered down and Merridew mumbled a prayer that sounded to me like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," but he stopped when he got to the part about "loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword." He got as far as "lightning." Then Marsh cleared his throat awkwardly and said, "Walk in beauty, Du."

Thibideaux tossed in a shovelful of dirt and handed the shovel to me. I would never again need to fear Danielson looming over me at night, or have to explain myself to him. But he had died trying to escape, which was the right thing according to what he had been taught to believe, and while trying to redeem himself to his family. I'm sorry he never got the chance to be the man he might have been, given the sort of home he wished he could provide for his children and a more peaceful world.

As I tossed in my shovelful, a child in the crowd wailed and buried its face in its mother's skirt.

Another child screamed a word I recognized as meaning "father" and I wondered if that child belonged to one of the people lost on the trail. But the kids weren't the only ones crying. The adults keened and clung to each other, mourning loudly. It seemed funny for a moment, since Danielson, far from crying over their graves, would have killed any one of them with his bare hands and whistled while he worked.

But I guess they have a lot to cry about and maybe Danielson's funeral is the first chance they've had todo it without worrying about falling into a bottomless ravine or being shot at or having to outrun radiation.

But it seems okay that Danielson, who was not born to a family and who couldn't keep the family he tried, should become the ultimate stand-in for the families of all of these people he'd have considered enemies.

When the grave was filled with earth and flowers, mani stones clinked one atop another until they produced a pile tall enough and broad enough to shade five people.

Thibideaux walked the Colonel back up the hill, leaving me to walk alone. I felt oddly empty inside, and so incapable of crying myself, for Danielson or the world or anything else, that my eyes felt as dry as the lake once was.

I guess I have a hard time accepting that life outside does not go on as I remember it, since life here in Kalapa does continue, although it has changed since I was first brought here. If Dr. Terton is to be believed, and when I remember the strange manner of Danielson's dying and the chanting of the monks, I can't disbelieve her; extraordinary things have happened here in the past and extraordinary things are still possible. I reluctantly admit that despite the grief around me, the possibilities this place presents fascinate me.

Marsh worked with Tea on the plumbing, devising a plan to provide an energy source for the valley from the gas produced by the unending abundance of night soil. Thibideaux and Terton worked to cure physical ailments, and the excavation crews, led by Dolma, continued to unearth new caches of objects that would be useful in supporting the community. So if the ancient kingdom of Shambala is no longer an earthly paradise, it is at least no longer a prison camp.

"The golden paG.o.das are in the past," I told the boy, who still didn't think that the chimes Thibideaux had found in the garden and restrung sounded just right and who was staring up at me critically. "Since the avalanche, Shambala has come down in the world." It wasn't a very good joke and I'm not even sure I said it correctly, since idiomatic expressions often don't translate very well. At any rate, the boy did not give me the smile I was trying to coax, but then I remembered that the child, like the rest of us, had seen enough to knock the levity out of anybody, and I tried a serious question instead.

"Why would you want them to be gold?"

A cranky-looking woman, who is probably younger than she appears, hissed to him in Chinese, "Watch what you say or these people will think you haven't got the right karma after all to come here and they will throw you out."

"I have so got the right karma," the boy said. "I just thought it would be like the stories said."

The woman looked to me as if she was arguing with him because she too was disappointed. But that may be the result of trying so hard and being very tired and having lost a great deal.

Dr. Terton emerged from the door beneath the chimes, almost knocking me off the rock on which I was standing as I tried to hang them. "Everyone's karma is fine, I'm sure," Terton said to the woman and boy, and to me she said, "If you use a longer nail, Viveka, the chimes will ring more freely."

I hopped down from my stone. "This was the longest one I could find."

"I will ask the guardians for another nail for you," the cranky woman said. Our former guards are referred to as guardians, short for the Guardians of the Gate of Shambala, by the newcomers, not as soldiers. These people have no love of soldiers or uniforms, though many of them were guerrillasthemselves. The woman's spurt of cooperativeness was a form of apology, as if she was a little afraid that her harshness had cast a dark shadow on her own karma.

"If you wish to see our golden paG.o.das," Dr. Terton told the boy, "wait for sunset, when the last rays kiss the bowl of Karakal."

"Sunsets are very common," the boy said.

"Not anymore," I said. "Not if the rest of the world is having nuclear winter." I felt a pit yawning inside me and the wind howl through my heart as soon as I spoke and regretted that I had reminded myself, as well as everybody else. Sometimes moments pa.s.sed when I forget to try to imagine what it must be like out there now. What's gone? What remains?

"None of that will touch us," the doctor said.

"Excuse me, but with all due respect you can't know that, ma'am," Thibideaux said, voicing my own feeling. He and Merridew had been in the dispensary. The Colonel's hair is growing back and his scars are barely noticeable, though he still limps a little.

"Ah, but I can," Terton told Thibideaux, smiling. "I've lived more lives than the fabled cat to take the precautions that ensure the security of this place. You see, it really is a top-security area, even if I meant something a bit different by the phrase from the way it was interpreted by others."

"I'm glad you get such a kick out of being mysterious," the Colonel told her, "but what we need right now is a little less hocus-pocus and a little more hard data. I have a man dead of old age who was certainly no more than thirty-five when he left here, we have a compound full of homeless people who claim they had a bomb dropped on them, in which case according to all scientific calculations, it is only a matter of time before the aftereffects descend on us, before the food we are growing and the water we are drinking are deadly and we will be just as dead as if we'd been sitting on ground zero."

"That is of course unless you're a top expert from the Pentagon's ultimate survivalist school,"

Thibideaux added. "In that case, you probably brought us here as a food source for yourself." He was teasing the doctor and the Colonel at the same time.

Terton acknowledged the attempt at lessening the tension with a warm flicker in her eyes but said, "There is much you don't understand, I know. We have had so much to do and so many to care for there has been no time for explanations. Besides, what I could tell you is not the kind of thing one can explain to mult.i.tudes over a portable loudspeaker. The Tibetan people, the Indians, even the Chinese are not so impatient as you Westerners. They don't know the details, of course, but for hundreds and hundreds of years they have known that something of this sort would happen. And, of course, one always believes in one's own survival, no matter who else is to die. Your culture actually has had stories of this time also, including the one about this place pa.s.sed off by Mr. Hilton as popular fiction. But your people ceased to believe in such stories years ago, and so took no pains to prepare a haven or avoid the consequences of the collective karma of the world. That is, of course, an oversimplified and in some respects misleading statement, but nonetheless I believe I am correct in saying so."

"That would be just fine, ma'am, if we knew what the devil you're talking about," Merridew said.

"It would help if we could just hear," I said. The chimes, agitated by the wind, were clanging in one of my ears while the babble of voices and the clamor of cooking pots, the banging of hammers, the chopping of knives, the slapping of clay, the hiss of fire and water and the distraction of a half-naked brat bowling me over as it ran around trying to work off energy it should have expended many times over onthe hike to Kalapa, made the doctor's soft voice difficult to hear.

The sky above the canopy was still blue, the snow still bannered from the mountaintops, and somewhere out of sight rumblings and mutterings still issued from the range, but the natural sounds were all but lost in the human cacophony.

Also, it seems to me that the doctor's voice has grown fainter and more quavery than when I first met her. Her movements are also somewhat less sure, though they have a surprising grace I failed to notice before. Her skin is less like leather now than onion skin. Of course, she is an old woman, and has not lived her whole life within these boundaries, and if anything could knock the stuffing out of anyone, I suppose the end of the world ought to be it.

"Come with me to the lake," she said. "It is good to see it between its sh.o.r.es again."

"There's a lot of work to be done, ma'am," Thibideaux said. "Lots of these folks are still in pretty poor shape."

"Their faith in Shambala will do more for them at the moment than your ministrations, young man,"

she said. "Come along."

The lake glittered beckoningly, children of the refugees splashing naked in its waters, whose colors mingled pale silver to cool aquamarine, rippling into clear turquoise, teal, and to a deep navy in the center. The lake is so broad and long that its entirety is visible only from the very crest of Kalapa, which is both the name of the city that once stood on this lesser mountain and the name of the mountain itself.

Already the scrubby rhododendron bushes suck up the lake's moisture and have grown to four times their former height since the lake appeared. Though the lake filled the valley such a short time ago, it is as if the valley exists only as a vessel for its waters. The lake reminds me of an Arabic saying quoted often in A Thousand and One Nights, the Sir Richard Francis Burton version Grandma Viveka had kept from college. When something was very beautiful, the desert dwellers said, "It is cool to my eyes." The lake was like that in that figurative sense, as well as literally. It changed the entire character not only of the valley but the compound, and I understand now a little of Wu's bitterness toward us as the people she blamed for its loss. Well, now a bigger bomb has brought the lake back to her. It is a glory to behold.

Dr. Terton sat on a stone and motioned us to be seated around her, her gestures displaying a dancer's suppleness of wrist, palm and fingers. I sat between her and the lake, the breeze fluffing the hair off my face, tickling my neck with the tendrils that escaped from my braid.

The breeze smelled like flowers and fresh water. As the doctor talked, I fingered smooth pebbles, jade, amber and agate brown. I wondered if the stones had been there before the lake emerged or if they had gurgled up from below, riding the crown of the spring.

Soon the doctor was circled by Thibideaux, Marsh, Merridew and me and by some of the children, who stopped splashing and squealing, sensing a story. Tsering's daughter, Pema, was among these, and she sat as close to Merridew as she dared. She remembers who saved her from the lion.

Terton took a deep breath and began. "What has befallen the world must have come as a great shock to all of you. I know there is much you would like to ask and much you would like explained.

Have you any particular questions?"

"Yes, ma'am," Thibideaux said. "Do you mean to tell us that what happened to the world did not come as a big shock to you too?""Not in the same way as it came to you. There were warnings. Humanity has been preparing itself for this fate for quite some time, as you cannot be unaware. Also, according to our histories, all of this has been foretold. The only question for many years has been "When?" For us it is much as if a beloved but troubled friend has succ.u.mbed to a long illness. You know death is inevitable, and yet when the end comes, you are not really prepared for it. You never realize how much you will miss your friend, or what exactly he has meant to you until afterward. That sounds a bit like a poorly written popular love song, does it not? But without your friend's troubles to distract and instruct you, without his symptoms to contemplate, you are once more compelled to look at your own life, to dwell only on your own growth, without the mirror your friend provided or the insight you gained by seeing his progress on the paths he chose when you selected others."

"Yes, ma'am, that's just fine," the Colonel said. "Real poetic and all that, I'm sure. But we're talking about the whole world here."

She nodded. "Unfortunately, yes. More than one friend, then. Many. All of us here have had great losses, many losses. And you in particular have had so little preparation or teaching. There was no time, you see. I had to locate you and have you brought here, almost one by one. There were so many who might have come but they were not within my grasp. The most immediate necessity was to relocate you and to prepare this place once more as the haven it was intended to be. But there was no time for more than the most profound tests of your ability to bear this task, no time for instruction and training which you, Colonel, would no doubt have interpreted as 'brainwashing.' I had to arrange supplies and protection for us all. Just as I thought I could return and begin your instruction, when I at last had thought of a way to help you understand-" She shrugged. "The end came. I who have prepared for it through many lifetimes and who expected it generations ago was taken by surprise at how swiftly it fell upon us."

Merridew said, "This is a lot of c.r.a.p. For all we know you could have set off fireworks back in the hills. We don't know who you are really or who these people are. We've seen no signs of devastation, nothing to support your claims."

"Unless you count Danielson, sir," Thibideaux reminded him.

Marsh cleared his throat. "I can a.s.sure you, Colonel. What we saw wasn't fireworks." To Terton he said, "But what I'd like to know, ma'am, is just who in the h.e.l.l are you really? What kind of damfool Chinese officer behaves the way you have?"

"Damfool Chinese officer is cover story of Ama Terton. She also has cover story that she is Mongolian Soviet officer and Indian army officer," Tea said, crawling out of a piece of yard-wide ceramic pipe that opened into the lake. He sat down between Terton and me, wiping his face, which needed it, with the tail of his shirt. "Ama Terton is the Terton-she is the finder, the gatekeeper. She is Bodhisattva-compa.s.sionate saint who stays in this world through many incarnations to help others."

"I've heard of them," Marsh said, looking bemused. "But I thought all of them got rich selling wisdom during the 1980s New Age craze and moved to big estates near Banff."

"If they got that rich, then they really must have been wise," I said. n.o.body laughed. I knew all about bodhisattvas though- Grandma had always claimed she must be one to put up with Granddad.

"Anyway, why don't you guys just shut up and let the woman talk? I for one would like to hear what she has to say, how and why she did this, why she brought us here, and just what this place is."

"Vanachek," the Colonel said wearily, "why don't you shut up? You've been compromised already.

I know you don't understand; you're just out of your depth. You're a nice enough lady and all that butyou're no trooper, you're a f.u.c.king civilian somebody had the stupidity to stick into a uniform. You can't tell the difference between infiltrating these people to get information and falling for the line of bull they put out. You are, excuse me, just too d.a.m.ned female to bear in mind who's your enemy."

Dr. Terton beamed at me. "Yes. It's one of her better qualities." But when her smile fell on him again, it changed and she looked from one of us to the other, anxiously for someone who is supposed to be serene (although, really, how easy would it be to be serene if you were supposed to be compa.s.sionately helping everyone to enlightenment? If your heart was really in it, it seems to me like a good way to be a nervous wreck). "Oh, dear," Terton said, "I can see this will be difficult to explain. I'm sure that although most Western theology doesn't include reincarnation, you are all familiar with the concept?"

Three curt, impatient nods.

"Good. You're probably also aware that many times a person is not reincarnated as a human being, but as some lower form. Or sometimes, if the person has worked through many lifetimes to a sufficiently enlightened state, they may achieve nirvana. There are other options as well-if you are a rather sociable person, as I have usually been throughout my lives, you may wish to have lots of company in enlightenment. I've always felt it would be so much pleasanter that way. And so some of us choose to keep returning in human form even though we have nothing to gain in a personally spiritual sense. The highest leaders and lamas of Tibet have always been bodhisattvas themselves, who as they die reveal clues as to their next incarnation. In the next body, they recognize aspects of their former lives that enable those who need them to identify them. Probably the best-known case, of course, was that of the Dalai Lama.

"There is also the matter of tulkus-or a partial transference, as you would say- "possessing"

another body, or even a manifestation created from no material substance, but that is not what is happening here. No, since I gained enlightenment, I have been charged with a single duty throughout my lives and that is to prepare this place, once the Kingdom of Shambala, currently reduced to the city and valley of Kalapa, for this time of crisis.

"In order to accomplish this task, to empower, preserve, people, and rebuild this place as necessary, I have had to use many methods you might think unbecoming to an enlightened being. All I can say to that is, twaddle. When you have lived as many lives as I have you'll think nothing of it.

"The most unusual aspect of my mission has been that although I am always born in this place, most of my lives have necessarily been lived outside of it, where I age as any person ages. I wish I could say, as did the priest in Mr. Hilton's book, that I am hundreds of years old, but as a matter of fact I'm barely seventy, and I've had a rather stimulating rough life and show it, as do many of my countrywomen in comparable circ.u.mstances. In previous lives I have sometimes been able to return here and live for many years until duty drove me forth again, but often I've died young, having gathered at great peril certain persons and objects in need of preservation or needed by this place for its own preservation."

"How did you do that?" Marsh asked. "Why are we supposed to be 'preserved' here? Do you have one of those shields like the s.p.a.ceships use in the science fiction vids?"

She blinked apologetically. "Nothing so easy for you to understand, I fear, Mr. Marsh. It would help so much if at least one of you was a more religious person. Then you might be more inclined to believe me when I tell you it has something to do with what you would call the 'power of prayer.' "

"You must remember that this place is very ancient. What we have uncovered since the avalanche isthe merest crust of what it once was. Even in my first life, growing up here, I had no idea how deep the catacombs went or what was in the outermost rooms. But for hundreds of thousands of generations the holiest and best of my people have been chanting and praying for the preservation of this sanctuary.

Which is fair, since the people who were here were all that time chanting and praying for the preservation of the human race, and most especially for the human spirit.

"Certain people, and you among them, have been led to me and to this place by their particular path.

That they, and you, have come here has been as much your own doing as mine. You three gentlemen, in placing the need to care for the souls and bodies of others above the need to preserve your own life, showed a certain apt.i.tude for this sort of thing."

"But I'm no hero," I said.

"No, Viveka, but you are possessed of both a trusting and a giving nature, although your society rewards neither of those traits, and you have an inquiring mind which seeks to know things that many have forgotten. You were an unusual case. You did not first go to some dreadful torture camp like the others, but your dharma clearly led you straight to me and to this place."

I was glad it was clear to her. Here all this time I'd thought it was the plane crash that had brought me to Kalapa Compound.

"Can you not see, Mr. Merridew, that your suffering and isolation, once vital to your survival, now stand between you and the peace for which you have fought at such great cost to yourself? For a time it was necessary to your psyche that you regarded us as enemies, perhaps, but that time is now past.

Perhaps you might consider that you are no longer acting from your own observations of us and your own best judgment so much as you are acting from the military tradition of your family. You are the latest, but I hope not the last, of a long line of honorable, selfless men who have given much to benefit others. In the past, the dharma of your ancestors and yourself has made your family valiant warriors, but the principles you uphold are equally valuable in our situation. Do you not find it foolish to continue to regard us as enemies when there is no longer a war?"

"My country right or wrong," Merridew muttered. In another minute he would have given her his name, rank and serial number.

"Your country right and wrong, I'm very much afraid, though the whole question has become rhetorical. But tell me, Mr. Merridew, you were a pilot. When you flew from one country to another on your airlift missions, did you notice as you flew over the land that it had great lines where boundaries were, or that the color changed, as on a map, as you flew across borders?"

"You said you would tell us what you were up to here, not ask a lot of d.a.m.ned nonsense ..."

Like Marsh, the Colonel seemed to be reacting badly to our emanc.i.p.ated status.

"Colonel, if you'd just let her talk," I said.

"Vanachek, put a lid on it. You've been subverted."

"Come off it, sir. Don't you get it? There aren't any sides anymore. We're it. When I was hurting, you guys helped me. When you were hurting, we helped you. What did politics have to do with any of that?"

Marsh's voice was all the more bitter for its soft reasonableness, "There is the old trick of putting awoman in as a mole, getting everybody to talk. You've been pretty inquisitive, Viv."

"You don't think they could have come up with somebody a little more like Marlene Dietrich for the job?" I asked.

His mouth twisted into what was almost a smile. "Maybe there was no Marlene Dietrich with the right karma. Besides, anyone would look good after a while."

"That's why the men had strict orders not to touch you," the Colonel informed me.

"Is that it?" So I was an outcast by command, was I? And he was always making noises about me being friendly with the enemy. What did he expect if n.o.body else was supposed to have anything to do with me? So I responded in the way that kept me out of corporate boardrooms back on the NAC.

"Gee, sir, and here I thought it was my deodorant. Or saltpeter in the momos. Just joking. I actually thought it was all of our scruples. If we find out they're telling the truth and the world has ended and we're pretty much immortal, can I at least have a hug? Two or three hundred years is a long time to live without being touched."

"Yeah. If you accept that this is Shangri-f.u.c.king-La," Marsh said with a cynical grin, "it sure is."

"Well, there's Danielson," Thibideaux said. "We need to bear in mind what happened to him. No gettin' 'round it, fellas, somethin' definitely irregular, unauthorized and plain f.u.c.kin' weird happened to Danielson and that it happened because this is Shangri-La makes about as much sense as anything. I think we may just be having ourselves a little credibility gap here, if you don't mind my saying so, because we thought when it ended it would be with a big bang and not, as whoever the famous sonofab.i.t.c.h was that said it said, with a whimper."

The Colonel glared at him, stood, and marched back up the hill, his chest stuck so far out his shoulder blades were in danger of meeting at his spine.

"He's not always like this," I apologized to the doctor, as an upper-cla.s.s wife might explain to her hostess that her husband generally held his substances better. "I can't think what's eating him. I mean, all this time we've been prisoners and now all of a sudden we're free-relatively speaking."

"I suppose it was too much to hope he'd be pleased," Terton said.