Nothing Sacred Part 20

away like that besides killin' that little old lady, your own self, and a whole bunch of us?"

"So it's 'us' now is it, Doc? You have turned against me too."

"Excuse me, please," Dr. Terton said, "This divisiveness is not good. There are no longer any sides.

If Mr. Merridew so fervently desires to reach the border, then he shall. I will be happy to take him there and perhaps it would be a good thing if some of you came as well, as you have come so far already. In this way we can all travel at a more leisurely pace and be a.s.sured of arriving and returning safely."

Merridew clearly thought that was a trick too, but there was nothing he could do but go along with it, and since we were headed where he wanted to go, he steeled his jaw, set his eyes flintily on the path ahead, and persevered, as did the rest of us in a somewhat less determined fashion.Now we could have a fire and rest for longer than a few hours at night. Three of our party had given their food to someone else to pack and had themselves hauled bags of synthetic charcoal, since there is no other fuel available in the high mountains in the winter. Even had there been enough animals around to leave burnable droppings, we'd never have found droppings beneath the snow.

In another few days, after several more narrow escapes, we crossed over another precarious path and descended into a basin that didn't look the least bit familiar to me until Terton led us into the mountain face, which contained the cave I remembered.

The cave offered shelter and nothing more, as the refugees had stripped it of supplies on their way to Kalapa.

"Why have we stopped already?" the Colonel wanted to know. "We need to find civilization. Don't try to fool me, Doctor, with this pretense that you're cooperating. You have committed crimes against the people of the United States of America and I intend to see that you pay for them. Her too," he added, nodding in Wu's direction.

Wu glanced at Lobsang and I saw him shake his head. Wu had been subdued during the trip, particularly after our near catastrophe. She bit a piece of her cracked lower lip and watched the Colonel warily.

"The boundaries of Shambala extend until the next pa.s.s and no farther," Dr. Terton said." Beyond that no one can travel without returning to his natural age. You, Mr. Merridew, are very much my senior, I'm afraid. You may recall that when we met I was scarcely older than Nyima appears now."

The Colonel shrugged. "It's not my lookout if you should have used a better grade of skin cream, lady. I need to get me and my people back to our lines without interference and you will help me do it."

"The other danger, of course, is radiation. Beyond our borders we will be as susceptible as those who have already perished. Our new residents fled before the effects of the bombs, but those conditions, the fire storms, the radiation, will be surrounding Shambala on all sides now. Many years must pa.s.s yet before those effects dissipate sufficiently to allow us to venture beyond the pa.s.s."

"That's your story," he said. "I just don't buy all of this. If you people were so benign and interested in our own good, why did you have a prison camp with the Dragon Lady here in charge? Why not just tell us where we were and let us have the freedom to decide whether to stay or not?"

But Dr. Terton's age had caught up with her and her stamina was not up to more arguing. So she didn't answer except to yawn at him, give him a sleepy smile, and curl up against the wall of the cave for a nap. Wu took up the argument instead. "But if you had decided to go, you might have told your people, who would return and destroy us."

"If you had behaved like a friendly nation they would have had no reason to destroy you," he replied.

"They didn't need a reason to destroy us," Wu said bitterly. "And need not have done so on their own behalf. Since the beginning of Tibet's troubles your country's position has been that all of Tibet is part of China. Shambala is technically within the borders of Tibet, although actually it transcends them.

Your pilot needed no particular reason to bomb our mountain-"

"This is all in the past," Tea said sharply. "The real issue, Colonel, is that whatever has happened to you has happened so that you may fulfill your destiny with us. You were one of the Terton's earliestchoices. There was a good reason for you to be among us."

"Not good enough for me," he said. "I think it's about time we got going again, unless you're going to try to force me to stay."

"No, no," Lobsang said. "It would be a great waste of energy to have to chase you clear across the mountains again. The Terton has said we will go to the boundary, as you desire ..."

The Colonel grunted, but otherwise said nothing, and rolled onto his side to sleep.

People were already up and out of the cave when I rose but since all I had to do was stand up and grab a handful of dried vegetables from my belt pouch, I lost no time joining the others. The sun rises late so deep in the mountains and the fading light that seeped between peaks threw the whole valley into an eerie moonscape of shadows, glowing brightness and deeper, blacker shadows. We trudged toward the pa.s.s, half awake.

Once from the corner of my eye I thought I saw something pale and s.h.a.ggy flitting past us on one side, but if it did indeed flit it flitted away so quickly that by the time I turned my head no sight of it remained.

Dr. Terton led the procession, followed closely by the Colonel, Wu and Lobsang. Pema tried to keep up with the Colonel, but he would have nothing to do with her and she quickly fell behind, to be hefted this time onto her father's back. From that vantage point she watched Merridew as if he was her pet cat or dog who had contracted rabies and become vicious but who, because she loved him, she hoped might still remember her and be saved.

Watching her, I stumbled and fell flat on my face, and floundered for several minutes in the deep snow, sinking first one foot and then the other in to the hip as I tried to gain leverage to rise again. Finally, Dolma pulled me out and after that I watched where I was going instead of watching the other climbers.

We climbed the pa.s.s single file, paying strict attention to our relative positions and I did notice then, looking up to see how far we had yet to climb, that the mountain before us was glowing with pale lime phosph.o.r.escence, dulling to mustard gold where it touched the sky. The higher we climbed, and the more of the pa.s.s that was revealed, the brighter this light became, until the valley below us was lit with it.

At the crest of the pa.s.s Dr. Terton stopped. "Look," she said unnecessarily to the Colonel, who had stopped dead a few feet behind her, staring past her in stricken silence. She pointed outward, toward a smooth bit of trail that connected the pa.s.s to a nearby peak. The peak was suffused with the greenish glow and as I crowded closer to her, I saw that beneath the trail was a great deal of thin air, what looked like a desert made of snow, and a vast lake or river of incredibly deep blue, tinted slightly turquoise by the greenish glow, with oily-looking rainbows dancing across its surface. A snowfall that more resembled the snow of static interference on a video device than real snow blurred the whole scene, and a piercing wind shrieked up from the water. The odd thing was that nothing moved except for the pulse of the glow and the crackle of the snow. "This is the southern boundary of Shambala."

"Surely even you can see that it is dangerous out there," Wu said, her voice breaking between an argumentative declaration and an awed whisper.

The Colonel squared his shoulders, glared at her, and declared, "It's dangerous here too." He limped forward to close the gap between him, Ama-La, and the bridge.

"Very well, then, if you are determined," Ama-La said and stepped out onto the bridge.The Colonel started after her but before anyone else realized what was happening, Wu let out an anguished "No!" and pushed past him.

Ama-La continued to walk calmly across the bridge, but looked back once when Wu shouted and I saw that where the snow touched the doctor's face great sores erupted and froze. She stopped walking just before she reached the other side of the bridge and sank down, the hood of her coat covering her face so that we could not see.

Tea grabbed for Wu as she plunged past him. "You can't help her," he screamed, but Wu broke loose from him and ran onto the bridge herself.

Marsh and Thibideaux meanwhile held tightly on to the Colonel. Wu rose as far as her knees and crawled toward Terton. I heard something snap and one leg collapsed under her, and she dragged it, her sobbing broken up by the snow and the glow. Her face and hands were shielded by clothing, as was the rest of her body, but her movements were pained and slow for all of her urgency. When at last she reached the Terton, she removed a mitten and stretched out her hand. Before the sores covered it I saw that it was clawed and knotted. She touched Ama-La's face and screamed, cradled her in her arms, still screaming, as the wind caught her hood and ripped it back exposing the seams of age and the spreading lesions ravaging her doll-like face. Her thin white hair tore from her skull in patches as the sores spread so quickly I almost could not be sure of what I saw before she died.

The Colonel was sure, however. "I see," he said. On the far side of the green-lit path, Wu's skull crumbled and the bodies of the women visibly shrank inside their clothing, until the next blast of wind carried away first a coat, then a boot, then the rest, so much used clothing blowing down toward the electric blue lake.

Pema escaped her mother and slipped between the adults to take Merridew's hand. He glanced down at her, unseeing, for a moment, then followed the tug on his hand and allowed her to lead him back down the mountain.

PART TEN.

EPILOGUE: PBB, TENTH YEAR-JUNE 15, OLD TIME 2080.

Today, while methodically building shelves in yet another of the old cells to hold our preserves and dried produce, I found myself suddenly panicky and fearful, and realized that the dark stains on the floor of the cell in which I was standing were probably my own blood. I had miscarried and almost died in that cell. That part of this life happened so long ago-no, to be honest, I have made, as we have all made, a conscious effort to forget about it. We have all become different people. I thought I had no interest in theold, sad past except for the stories we tell the children about the Terton.

So I surprised myself by standing in that claustrophobic little room and bawling my eyes out, sobbing and gulping and sobbing again, sinking to the floor, leaning against the old cot for support as I grew exhausted with crying. I heard the "clink" as my head lolled against the stones and that was when I remembered the loose stone and found the first section of my old prison diary.

I finished the section about the journey the day we arrived back at Kalapa, in the library. Tea came in while I was writing and sat quietly, watching, until I laid down my pen. Then he came over to the table, gathered my pages together in a neat pile, sandwiched them between two empty wooden covers from one of the ruined Tibetan books, and tucked my diary in among the other books on the shelf. "Now you must write new things," he told me. And I have. Mostly I have written descriptions, catalogs of all of the sights and sounds, objects and animals, inst.i.tutions and inventions I remember from my past. I also write down the stories the others tell me of their lives until they came here. But, like everyone else, I have other duties as well, including many of the same tasks I have been performing since I was first a.s.signed to a.s.sist Tea.

Others chose new paths. Shortly after we returned, Thibideaux closeted himself in the library for several days and when he emerged, he began work on his first chorten. Dolma, who had been closeted with him and who helped him find the books he needed, told me he had decided to model the structure on the one that once formed the main gate of Lhasa. The structure would be stepped below four smooth, rectangular walls, then steps would lead to a dome topped by a ringed spire. The superstructure would be of stone for all but the dome and for that he would use the clay from which Lobsang and Marsh had fashioned the water pipes.

Dolma and Lobsang remembered details from other chortens they had seen and offered help and advice. By the time the chorten was done, Dolma decided that there was more to a pairing than producing children, and she and Thibideaux are designing several more buildings. He wants the camp to look as much as possible like the ancient Kalapa about which people used to dream and tell stories to their children. "I don't want to be livin' in no prison camp the rest of my life, but we are stuck here in this valley. Make the best of it, cher, my mama always used to say and that's what I mean to be doin'."

That first chorten stands now atop the old command bunker, and though it has no relics, it evokes our varied memories of Ama-La and Wu. Marsh and his wives and children and the other husbands of his wives and their children bring flowers every day.

I think Marsh has missed Wu in a way that none of the rest of us, including Tea, have missed her.

For a man who dedicated his life to peace, he needs a sparring partner more than most, but he has to settle for playing chess or wrestling with his children, because n.o.body else is fond of conflict.

Ama-La chose well. We have potters and weavers and farmers and breeders of animals who have increased the stock from the wild things that wandered into the valley. We have carpenters and electricians and makers of candles and carvers of stone and wood. We all have to be farmers if we want to eat, although some of us are better than others. Dolma and I are the archivists and Tea has prevailed on Dolma to help him write a little book of Ama-La's aphorisms in her most recent lifetime, while Tea has added a few more sayings from previous lifetimes.

But although everyone has a contribution and we were presumably chosen for this community so that none of us are deadweights on its resources, physical or spiritual, the one position no one has yet seemed overly eager to a.s.sume is that of leader. Maybe it's because we have all been in the center of so much strife for so long. Maybe it's because we have each seen how the most fail-safe plans by the wisestpeople with the purest possible motives can be misconstrued or misrepresented by one flaw in the character of one person. So by and large we each tend to our own business, and larger projects which involve all of us are put to a vote. If there's less than unanimous agreement, we wait. Time is something we either have a great deal of, or none of at all, depending on how correct the Terton was about the magical shield of Shambala and how well all those prayers and psychic vibrations will hold up to the onslaught of the disaster raging around us. We will either outlast the disaster or it will outlast us, but meanwhile, we continue as if we will continue. We have no leaders, for we are all leaders of ourselves, the people that the Terton led to Kalapa to live in the ruins of the last sacred place on earth while the rest of humankind destroyed every other thing natural and human-made that it should have held inviolable.

I have made one other contribution to our society besides my histories, my work in the archives and on the farm, and now, this written record of our beginnings which lies before me. My other, very important contributions are my children.

Forty-three is not so very old in Kalapa, and as Marsh says, if the human race is to survive, there is a need to repopulate. Tea is enjoying fatherhood, and actually spends more time and attention than I do on our daughter, Nyima (no, I didn't like Wu, even after I knew about her, but Nyima means Sunshine and our daughter lives up to it to an almost irritating degree at times) and our son, Mike. (Growing up in a family of odd names has made me appreciate what sounds to me like a nice, solid, ordinary boy's name, although the other children tend to call him Meekay, which just demonstrates what I was saying about good intentions.) Tsering and Samdup have four more children, Tsering has two others by one of the Indian prisoners, Pandit Singh, and Tania is expecting her first child by Samdup and hopes it will be a sister to the son she bore with Marsh.

Pema is a good young mother to her own daughter. Colonel Merridew insisted that Tea, who is as close to a clergyman as we have here, marry them in a proper ceremony. It took Pema until she was eighteen to convince the Colonel that a man who had never enjoyed a childhood needed a young wife to show him how to play with his children. The Colonel and Pema, like Tea and I, are so far monogamous.

Dolma is the natural person to keep the census, since she goes with Thibideaux to help deliver babies and everyone confides in her. Even Shambala could not heal her enough that she has been able to have her own babies, but she is what amounts to a youthful grandmother to every child born in Kalapa. Though she and Tea set up the cla.s.ses, we all take turns teaching the children our special skills, and if one child or another shows a particular apt.i.tude for what we do rather than for what its own parents have become, then the parents will allow the child to be trained by the person who can teach them the best. It's a good theory. I hope it works. As the kids grow up, I'm afraid they'll become bored and restless. I'm afraid that a lot of the peace we have now is only because so many of us adults have known so much war. The kids didn't grow up with it.

They only know a few of the stories and stories always sound glamorous whether you mean them to or not. The valley will be too small for them in time, and too familiar, despite the wealth of treasures yet to be uncovered and the amount of work to be done. Even Tea admits that the stories and myths surrounding Shambala predict that it will decline from being a haven to once more being in the midst of the world and conflict. Well, it makes sense that if the world doesn't revive and intrude on us, at some point, when it's safer to do so, at least some of our people will want to go out into the world. Like the past residents of Shambala, once our children reach maturity they will age slowly, as we age slowly. I see no reason why, if our natural death rate continues to be so low (the chorten and Danielson's mound mark the only new graves since shortly after the avalanche), we will not become overpopulated in a few generations. Also, if we are truly re-populating the world, then some of us, at some time, will have to go out into the world. Our children will not be like us, peaceful because they are tired, lacking a broaderinquisitiveness out of fear.

Just the other day Pema brought her eighteen-month-old, Chime Cincinnati (the middle name is for the Colonel's birthplace-it was Pema's idea, not his, that the name reflect something of his past) to the library. She and Tea and I were talking about the dance cla.s.ses Tania is organizing, which will help condition us all better for mountain travel. Mike was riding herd on Chime, when suddenly she let out a howl that none of us could ignore and scuttled after him while he tried to keep a book out of her reach.

"She's very good with books," Pema said, half apologetic and distressed and half defensive on her child's behalf. "She sits quietly for many hours with them."

"But, Mama, it's the book of the Terton," Mike said. "Father won't even let me touch it without him there, much less a baby." He held it up and I saw that he was right. It was one of Ama-La's medical books, an indecipherable one in ancient Tibetan we hoped someday to decode and so kept in the library instead of redistributing it with the rest of her belongings to the newcomers. Chime waited for a moment, her eyes lingering tearfully on the book, then wiped her eyes and fixed first her mother and then me with a bright, beseeching stare. When we did not immediately chastise or support her, she calmly stretched out her chubby little cocoa-colored hand for the book and said sweetly but firmly to Mike, "Mine."