Nothing Sacred

NOTHING SACRED.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough.

FOR JANNA SILVERSTEIN FOR FIRST LISTENING TO THE DREAM.

FOR THE BESIEGED PEOPLE OF TIBET, AT HOME AND ABROAD.

AND FOR MY BROTHER MONTE, WITHOUT WHOSE INVALUABLE TECHNICAL a.s.sISTANCE THIS BOOK WOULD HAVE BEEN EATEN.

PART ONE.

KALAPA COMPOUND, TIBET.

Late September, 2069. DAY 11?

The guards gave me this paper with instructions to write about my career as a war criminal, starting with my life at age eight. This is fairly standard practice in these places, according to what I"ve read, and to what the Colonel told me when I first got here. He also said they "haf vays off" not only making you talk but making you believe it after a while. So before my brain gets too well washed, I am saving out some of this paper to keep a true record of what happened, just to keep it straight in my own mind and give me something to fill up the time. The Colonel and the others told me some of the jargon the interrogators like to have included in a confession and I think I get the drift. It behooves the smart prisoner to indulge in a lot of verbal self-flagellation before the authorities decide to flagellate said prisoner in a more literal sense. There"s a very strict prose style involved. No problem, though. I"m a good mimic and can write the most incredible bulls.h.i.t as long as I don"t have to keep a straight face.

My name is Viveka Jeng Vanachek. I am currently, albeit reluctantly, a warrant officer in the North American Continental Allied Forces, 5th Cobras, attached to the 9th New Ghurkas at Katmandu. I was captured September 15, 2069, following a plane crash near the Kun Lun Mountains while on a mapping mission. Not that I am this great cartographer, but I do know the section of the file in the program that allows the computer to reconfigure existing maps while scanning the countryside from an eye in the bottom of an XLT-3000 high-alt.i.tude reconnaissance aircraft. Anyway, I"m trained to use thatknowledge, although that flight was the first actual mission I"ve been on. Right up until the crash, I"d been having the best day since I sold out and joined the military.

Major Tom Siddons was a very nice guy, and I think he must have enjoyed working with me as much as I did with him. I suppose he got as far as he did in the military just by being relatively good-natured and an exceptionally good pilot. Unlike the other pilots, he could express himself not only in words rather than in long strings of symbols and numbers, he could even express himself in words of more than one syllable. He also liked poetry, and I think he liked me chiefly because he was impressed with my ability to recite dirty limericks in Middle English and translate Chinese verses.

I hadn"t been in Katmandu very long, but I had already told him over a beer how much I hated the monotony of knowing one section of one file of one program. Each of the other warrant officers in Katmandu with the same rating knew another section of the same file of the same program. If anyone was transferred, died or committed suicide, he or she was replaced by a brand-new specialist in the same section-specialists were never cross-trained, so the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing. It made me feel like a not-very-expensive microchip. Here I had spent almost twenty years, off and on, studying the humanities and what do they do with me? Stick me in computers, because I"d once taken a cla.s.s to fulfill a math requirement. My art history background and the one drafting cla.s.s I"d gotten a C in qualified me for the mapping section. I told Siddons all of this and he sipped his beer slowly and nodded in most of the right places.

I forgot all about griping to him until one morning when he strode into the hangar office, decked out in a silver suit with so many pockets he looked like a walking shoe bag.

"Grab a flight suit and your kit, Ms. Vanachek," he told me. "We have us a mission."

It didn"t occur to me to bring a weapon. I"d been in what was technically considered a combat zone for the best part of six months and had yet to see more than a fleeting glimpse of an indigenous civilian, much less an enemy.

I gawked through the canopy as we climbed to 19,000 feet, then settled down to the keyboard and punched up my section. Siddons had explained that the plane"s computer would do just as mine did back at the hangar, except that while the computer in the hangar usually had to make do with adjusting data, inputting new topographical information from a graphic mock-up to existing map data, this one had a special adapter that translated the terrain pa.s.sing through an eye in the bottom of the plane into a graphic image and instantly altered the corresponding map data accordingly.

We need map updates frequently because the terrain constantly changes so that it no longer conforms to earlier maps. And while our hangar-bound graphics adjustments are fine for recording the changes our own side wreaks on the local scenery, our allies and our enemies are not so conscientious about informing us of all of their destructive activities. Furthermore, the war precipitates natural disasters-earthquakes, avalanches and floods-that also make unauthorized and, worse, undoc.u.mented alterations.

We overflew the pa.s.s, into the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The more heavily populated areas had been kept up to date, but the whole central plateau was still a battleground. New valleys are dug daily and mountains of rubble make strategic barriers that need recording.

The problem with fast travel through or over any country, of course, is that it so thoroughly objectifies what you"re seeing that you might as well be looking at a holovid screen. The landscape of Tibet, vast plains with mountains pinched up all around the edges like a fancy piecrust, seemed highlyimprobable to me and I returned to my screen after about fifteen minutes of admiring the view. Siddons wasn"t about to let me ignore it, however. His voice crackled into my headphones saying, "Nah, don"t bury your nose in your G.o.dd.a.m.n graphics yet. Take a gander out there at the real world."

I stared down over and through a swath of cloud. The tail end of the cloud snagged on the ragged snow-splattered tops of raw-rock mountains, but beneath it spread a lake covering-I checked my screen-twenty square miles. It cupped the plane"s shadow in waters that looked like a huge opal, milky with shots of blue and red fire reflecting off the surface. "Gorgeous," I said "What makes it look like that?"

"Poison," he said. "Check your coordinates. This is where the PRC dumped its toxic wastes before some of our forces helped India shoo the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds back behind the border again. The lake"s Tibetan name is Lhamo Lhatso. It was sacred. The holy men saw the birthplace of their last spiritual leader in it."

With an innocent-looking twinkle, the lake pa.s.sed under our starboard wing and away.

"We"re going to veer over India way now, toward Karakoram Pa.s.s. Between the avalanches the saturation bombing triggered and the floods this spring, the area is useless to ground troops."

"Not to mention a little tricky for the local inhabitants," I said.

"There aren"t a h.e.l.l of a lot of those left, except guerrillas," Siddons said. "And they"re tough bozos who play their own game and don"t kiss anybody"s a.s.s."

"Sounds like you admire them."

"Well, hey, when you have been in the service of our beloved organization as long as I have, little lady, you too may come to admire anybody who doesn"t basically sit back and leave all the fighting to our troops wearing their patches. The Tibetan guerrillas have to be about the only people on the face of the planet fighting anything worse than a hot game of Parcheesi who don"t have NACAF allies specifically a.s.signed to them, evening up the odds manpower- and firepower-wise."

"Major, I had no idea you were such an idealist."

"Doesn"t mean I won"t blow the little b.u.g.g.e.rs off the face of the earth if I get a chance, you understand. There"s no need to get sentimental about it. If we blow up our fellow AmCans who are working for the PRC or the Soviets, I see no particular reason to extend professional courtesy to anyone else."

I watched the high wild mountains sweep past our belly and noticed how often the bomb pocks and avalanches showed up on the screen as a major change in the landscape. I remembered that before NACAF entered the three-sided conflict among China, India and the USSR, with all the territory in the middle, including Tibet and the Himalayas, as the battleground, Mount Everest had been the highest mountain in the world, instead of the fourth highest. I told the major, "I once took a course in myth and folklore. Did you know that in the old days, Tibetans never climbed their mountains much? They were afraid of disturbing the demons of the upper air."

"Well, we got those demons good and stirred up now," he said.

Soon we were past one range and once more flying over a vast flattened plain, flyspecked with the ruins of villages and monasteries, the jagged hills bursting from the plains at times like the work of some giant gopher. The flatlands were as pocked as the mountains, the earth blasted and sickly tan, the wholething treeless. NACAF-made planes, NACAF pilots or pilot trainers, NACAF defoliants and NACAF bombs made it all possible.

"Hey, maybe they meant us," I said to Siddons. "Maybe they foresaw us."

"Who?"

"The old-time Tibetans with those myths. Maybe we"re the upper-air demons."

"Don"t let the scenery give you an att.i.tude now, Warrant Officer. We didn"t do all of that by our lonesome, you know. This little old country"s been a stompin" ground for a good hundred years now for all kinds of people who didn"t like the way the local pope ran things-"

"Dalai Lama," I corrected, remembering Comparative Religion and Central Asian Soc.

"Yeah, I knew that," he said, grinning back at me. His grin was as jerky as a stop-motion film clip as the aircraft hopped from air pocket to air pocket in a series of stomach-churning dips and b.u.mps. I took a deep breath. My digestive tract preferred ground travel.

"Anyhow," he continued," one thing good ol" NACAF does do is keep it all a clean fight. You got any idea what we need all these updated maps for?"

"Making sure whichever rock the enemy hides behind doesn"t move before our side finds it?" I asked.

He ignored that. I think he began to feel at that point he was setting a bad example for a junior officer. So he said, "Nope, so we can still locate any possible covert nuclear devices, no matter when or where they were hidden, and send crews to disarm them. Fighting for Peace, just like the recruitment ad says."

I would like those words to be remembered as the major"s last.

The XLT-300 model aircraft we were in flew very far, very fast and changed alt.i.tudes with very little difficulty. Ask a pilot why and how, or an engineer. All they paid me to know was that my Ground-Air-Geocartography program, or GAG as it was affectionately called, was specifically designed to keep up with the plane. We covered the plateau within about an hour and when we took the hit, were on the far side of the Karakoram Pa.s.s, headed east for the Kun Lun Mountains. Radio transmission this far from base was d.a.m.n near impossible, satellites or no satellites. The mountains didn"t get in the plane"s way, and they didn"t get in the satellite"s way, but they sure got in Ground Control"s way.

The wind was fierce that day, and blew the little jet around as if it was a paper airplane instead of a real one. So when we took the hit, I thought for a moment it was just another gust of wind. Siddons caught on quicker, and I saw his hands fly across the switches and b.u.t.tons on the control panel.

Suddenly the canopy popped and all those upper-air demons I"d been thinking about roared in and s.n.a.t.c.hed us from the plane. Something kicked me in the rear. My seat bucked like the barroom bull-riding machine they keep in the Cowboy Museum my grandparents once took me to in Tacoma.

Except that this bronco didn"t come down again but blasted me through the shrieking wind, up and over the body of the jet. I screamed, not of my own accord but as if the scream was ripped from my vocal cords by the velocity of my plunge to earth.

When I haven"t had worse things to dream about, I still see the bolus of flame spewing from theunderside of the geometrically precise angle of the starboard wing, and I spin to face a maw of rock and snow yawning like a fast forward of some boa"s jaws as it swallows prey. I bolt awake as once more the feeling of the automatic chute opening reminds me of being plucked from midair by a giant bird and I try to come fully awake before Siddons"s body, twisting beneath a burning chute, plummets past me.

But my actual landing must have been a testimony to the parachute maker"s technology. For though I had a bad case of vertical jet lag, my mind skipping a few beats between ejecting and landing, when I came to myself enough to take inventory, everything was intact-no broken bones or missing teeth.

Encouraged, I attempted to stand, but the force of the wind complicated matters, billowing my chute against me so it molded to my face, blinding and smothering me within a wave of blue, red and white silon. I yanked the suffocating fabric from my head. The stench of burning metal, wiring and flesh p.r.i.c.ked my nostrils before I focused sufficiently to visually locate the smoke.

Pulling off my helmet, I divested myself of the yard or so of chute attached to it and scanned the horizon for a telltale plume, but it was as if I was still swathed in some larger, grayer fabric, a bolt of wildly swirling gauze which obscured everything.

The ground on which I stood was indistinguishable from the air in front of me. I was standing on some mountain plateau then, shrouded with cloud. Vaguely, near the toes of my boots, ghostly tufts of gra.s.s emerged and vanished as the wind whipped the ground cover. But I saw no sign of Siddons.

I"ve dreamed of his death since then, so I must have seen it, but I honestly don"t remember seeing him die other than in the dreams. Shock probably. I tried calling to Siddons, but my words vanished in the cloud before they were out of my mouth.

As I gathered up the chute and uncoiled it from my legs, the wind whipped away a corner of the mist and I saw four people jogging down a mountain path toward me, carrying rifles. They all appeared to be Asian but I wasn"t alarmed by that, since many of our NACAF troops are American or Canadian of Asian origin, or Asian allies. I even felt a small surge of relief, thinking perhaps we were being rescued.

The rifles didn"t alarm me either. There"s a war on. Of course they carried weapons.

I waved a cautious greeting and would have shouted at them but they didn"t return my wave. That was when I began to realize that the crash might be more than a temporary setback. Even if these were our people, I didn"t know any pa.s.swords. They pointed their guns at me and one barked an order. He must have been used to talking over the wind or else the wind had died down because I heard him very well. He was speaking in Han Chinese, of which I had learned a smattering in Intro to Chinese Dialects 101. Before I could try to puzzle out exactly what it was that he"d said, the man who"d spoken pushed me down while a woman rapidly scooped up my helmet, then gathered the rest of my parachute. When she finished, the first man prodded my ribs with his rifle, forcing me to stand again, while a third covered me with another rifle, presumably to make sure I didn"t overpower the guy with the gun in my ribs. A fourth man trotted through the mist toward us carrying two winter kits, slightly charred and smoky around the edges. A pair of jump boots dangled from his shoulder by their laces and bounced in rhythm with his gait. Siddons"s helmet-I could read his name in black block letters across the front-dangled from one hand.

The woman tied my wrists together. I stared at them stupidly. Right then the tangible evidence that I was a prisoner cut through the shock of the crash. We had had a frightening little lecture about enemy torture in basic training, but the only advice about getting captured I was able to recall was "Don"t." Each of us knew so little about each piece of equipment that almost everyone was expendable. People in my grade who got captured fell into the category of "acceptable losses."We started walking, the wind driving against us. Even the tough silon fibers of my flight suit didn"t entirely block the cold. The others were dressed in a motley a.s.sortment of winter garb, leather jackets, woolen sweaters and down vests, and wore sheepskin leggings over heavy trousers-the woman"s trousers were an incongruously cheerful turquoise and I thought they must have come long ago from a ski apparel shop.

As we descended the first ridge, and out of the fog, the wind subsided to fits of gusting and between gusts I caught a few fragments of the conversation between the guards. Too bad I never got beyond Intro. My knowledge of the Han dialect was limited to numbers, the alphabet, and "Have you seen my luggage?" and "Please tell me where I will find a toilet." None of this erudition was applicable. I regretted the deficiencies in my education more bitterly at that moment than I have on the other recent occasions when I found it did not prepare me for life outside the university. After all, we of the NAC have been at war, or involved in several capacities in a series of wars, with the PRC, among others, for a little over a century now. Why in the h.e.l.l couldn"t my courses have taught me to ask, "When may I see the North American consul?" or to understand when someone said, "We will take this prisoner to Beijing by transport truck, but we must be careful because along the way we will pa.s.s her countrymen who could aid her in escaping if they know that she is with us. "Something useful. Why couldn"t I have learned something useful? Even their names would have been helpful. I hate groups, especially ones in which I don"t know anyone.

My affiliation was announced to my captors by the patch on my flight suit. The New Ghurkas are, of course, allied with the Indians. We are not currently allied with the PRC. The PRC is not currently allied with the USSR. I now understand the black market trade in patches among NACAF troops. A Chinese dragon patch would have been a big help just then, instead of my cobra insignia.

These people wore no patches, which was, as Grandpa Ananda might say, good news and bad news. The good news was that they were probably irregular foot soldiers for the PRC rather than freelance body-looters looking for equipment to sell on the black market. The distinction was slight, true, but the guerrillas did have some sort of military structure and purpose, whereas the body-looters were the entrepreneurs of the war. The bad news was, these people did not wear a cobra and had guns pointed at me so they weren"t on my side and since they had military objectives, I could expect to be interrogated (read "tortured") instead of killed outright. Maybe, I thought optimistically, they were body-looters but for the time being preferred my equipment on the hoof, allowing me to save them the trouble of carrying my gear.

Which was hardly rea.s.suring because I was still bruised and stiff and shocky and slowed the party down. Every so often the guard in back of me would give me a jab in the spine with the rifle or a little kick of encouragement, but such incentives did not improve my speed since I usually fell down and had to be hauled back onto my feet again. The air was thin and cold, needling my hands and face even when the wind wasn"t flogging me, and each fresh gust ripped the fragile veil of oxygen away from my nose and lips before I could draw a breath.

By the time we stopped I was half crawling, my lungs about to burst. My feet and legs hurt clear up to my armpits and my throat ached from screaming against the wind and the effort of breathing.

I sank onto the rocky path we"d been climbing and went blind for a few moments while I tried to catch my breath. My ears roared constantly and when my eyes refocused, I saw my captors" mouths moving but I couldn"t hear the words. The woman in the loud ski pants pointed down over the edge of the cliff the path skirted. A couple of hundred yards below lay the smoldering wreckage of the plane.

Farther down, hidden by the haze and by a tumble of boulders, a bubble of parachute swelled and collapsed, swelled and collapsed, one blackened edge fluttering in the wind.I said a mental prayer for Siddons, including in my entreaties all regional and international deities, from Jehovah, Jesus, and the Hindu bunch to the Collective Unconscious and the upper-air demons, and finally the soldier"s G.o.d, who could not have been the same one who lived in clean white churches and fancy cathedrals and synagogues back in the NAC unless He was schizophrenic. The G.o.d out here presided over battlefields and bombers and His name was apparently d.a.m.n.

The woman gave me another shove and I lumbered to my feet, no easy task with bound hands on a steep incline.

When we finally stopped climbing I hoped the worst was over, but the descent was no better.

Though the mountains shielded us from the wind on the downhill side, the trail was slippery and small rock slides hailed upon our heads and b.o.o.by-trapped the footing. My legs and toes cramped constantly and I was so exhausted that when we reached the ruined village at dusk I was more hopeful that we would finally rest than I was fearful that the rest, for me, might be a permanent one.

From a distance the roofless stone walls of the bombed-out huts looked odd, deep and hollow, but as we drew nearer I saw that black tents were pitched inside the sh.e.l.ls of the houses, the walls offering a form of camouflage as well as extra protection from the wind.

Two people tended half an oil drum set over an open fire. Steam rose cozily from the oil drum. Soon one of the people ducked into the doorway of the nearest ruin, then reemerged to signal us toward it.

My guards, not superhuman after all, had for the last leg of the trip left me alone so that they too could concentrate on walking without falling, but now they rallied enough to manhandle me through the doorway of the ruined house and into the tent.

A man who looked to be about fifty, his arm tightly bandaged to his side with a strip of parachute silon, sat on the floor in the midst of a clutch of snotty-nosed children. A Coleman lantern hanging from the central mast of the tent provided a circle of urine-colored light in the middle of the gloom, but in the deep shadows around the edges, something moved and I caught the glitter of a dark eye in a half-glimpsed web of dusky wrinkles and a wisp of white hair.

The man spoke a sharp word and the children retreated to one side of the tent and stared solemnly at me.

Cute. The smallest one wrung the sides of her long coat in her little fists so it showed she wore not even a diaper underneath. Very cute, but standing back in the shadows like that, dutifully solemn and quiet but with their eyes shining with the excitement of having a strange creature like me among them, the children reminded me less of cherubs and more of wolf cubs waiting for dinner.

Remembering manners from my social anthropology texts and numerous old films of Pearl Buck books, I bowed and mumbled the Han greeting that meant something like "How kind of you to let me come."

The man flicked his eyes toward my guards, who pushed me to my knees and plopped crosslegged down beside me, rifles in my ribs. I wondered if they were going to execute me inside, in front of the children.

Nothing more ominous than supper occurred, however, and a rather good supper at that. Unless I"m mistaken, it was rice made into a stew with various packages of freeze-dried trail food.

When we finished the man amazingly offered me a cigarette. I was puzzled for a moment, thinkingthat they surely intended to finish me off in some quicker fashion than that, and then recalled that in some parts of the world, smoking was still considered a relaxing amenity. I refused with another very weary bow. For someone so imperiled I was having a h.e.l.l of a time staying awake.

The man asked me a question in Han, but it was too rapid for me. In Mandarin, of which I knew a great deal more since there were more language programs available in that dialect, I carefully replied that I did not understand, please go slower, I spoke only a little Han.

The man glowered and the ancient in the corner grumbled a word to him, at which he flipped his hand at the guards who dragged me to my feet again and out to one of the few intact houses-or maybe it was an animal shed. There they deposited me. A tent would have made a more luxurious accommodation, for my little prison was riddled with c.h.i.n.ks and drafts and stank faintly of manure.

Someone threw in a blanket and I lay down.

For about five seconds I worried about all those stories of desirable AmCan women being raped by h.o.r.n.y Asian men, but then the wind whistled through the nearest crack in the wall and I wrapped the blanket around me and decided that if someone did attack me I"d try to get him to stay the night just for the sake of warmth.

Each time exhaustion carried me over the precipice of fear into sleep, the wind sliced up my spine.

Groggily, I"d pull the blanket tighter, try to squirm the cramps out of wherever they were gripping me and clutch my shivering body back into a tight fetal fist.

I was dreaming I was late for cla.s.s and had to parachute down to Kane Hall to avoid flunking out when I looked up and saw my parachute was on fire. I sat up and opened my eyes to the glare of a flashlight.

"Well, I"ll be d.a.m.ned," a deep male voice with a rea.s.suring redneck drawl said. Abruptly, somebody plopped down hard next to me, almost on top of me, and the light withdrew. "Sorry about that, sweetheart. Guess you probably weren"t expectin" company."

"No, but I"m glad to see you," I said. "In a manner of speaking, that is, because I can"t see you and of course I"m sorry they caught you but it"s good to hear another American voice."

"What outfit you with, sugar? What"s your name?" he asked, his drawl dripping mola.s.ses in my ear as he pulled my shoulders, blanket and all, against his chest, so, as I thought, he could speak without being overheard by the guard.

"Viv Vanachek-Viveka actually, family name-from Bellingham, Washington. I"m a computer specialist in geocartography. We were just flying around updating our topodata when we were hit.

What"s your name? How did you get captured?"

"Call me Buzz, Viv. I"m with recon and intelligence, which is how I got here. Golly d.a.m.n, baby, I"m sorry to see you in this kind of fix." He petted my hair with his hand. He smelled like a goat, or anyhow, as sour and strong as goats are reported to smell (I"ve never met one of the beasts myself) but he felt great. His hands were strong and a little rough and surprisingly not too, cold, his breath stirring my hair and warming my cheek.

I offered him some blanket since it didn"t look like they were going to throw him one of his own. He remarked then that I seemed to be the prize catch of the day and snuggled beneath the blanket, thought my hands were too cold and tucked them into his shirt. One thing led to another. It"s a scientific fact that danger raises hormone levels and increases erotic responsiveness. It"s also my personal scientific theorythat a woman who expects to be shot at any moment is somewhat less worried than usual about little things like disease and pregnancy and is inclined to gather her rosebuds (or whatever) while she may. I developed the theory on the spot, thinking we were in the same situation and that sharing warmth and comfort on what might be our last night on earth seemed the only sane alternative. When we were finally both comfortable and nicely warmed up, he asked, joking (I thought he had to be joking),"How did a nice girl like you end up in a place like this?"

"The usual way, I guess," I said, and turned the question back on him, but he wasn"t having any. He was the first guy I"d ever been around who, given the opportunity to talk about himself, preferred to hear about me. So I told him.

I explained how since my mother died and my grandparents" timber farm had been sold to a lumber company, I had been working on my undergraduate degree off and on for fifteen years, living on what small income was left from the sale of the farm after our debts and taxes were paid, until finally that too was taxed away, then doing little odd jobs for crummy money to stay alive and get tuition.

"Why didn"t you just bite the bullet and finish up, get your degree and get a job instead of coming into the army?" he asked I asked him how long since he"d been in the academic system NAC-side and he allowed that it had been at least fifteen years and even then, he wasn"t much of a college man.

"Things have changed some," I said. "It used to be that a graduate degree was a pretty reasonable goal if you made the grades, kept at it, and were able to spend enough money on books and tuition to house an average family. There used to be scholarships and grants and my mother said once there were even government loans. But-well, why did you join the army? Let me guess. You couldn"t find a job, right? Well, neither can anybody else with what used to be an okay education. My poly-sci prof said NACAF was formed partly to overcome that problem. The military is absorbing the excess population."

"I"ve been over here a long time," he said. "I"d like to know how your professor has that figured."