Against the Day (153 page)

“Still
broodin about that time back in the woods there, I knew it—but I wasn’t
really aiming at you, Dwight.”

“Not
that. I believe
. . .
all the signs
are here, you must have seen them
. . .
these
high peaks surrounding us, the Tuvan script that resembles Tibetan
characters—and these are the only known Buddhists in the world who speak
Old Uyghur or any sort of Turkic language, for that matter. Everywhere one

sees images of the Wheel of Life
. . . .
A Tibetan Buddhist enclave in the
middle of a prevailing Islamism. What does that suggest to you?”

Kit
nodded. “Ordinarily it would have been the reason for our trip out here, and
somebody would write it up and report it back to LieutenantColonel Halfcourt.
But the problem for me these days is—”

“I
know. There may not be a ‘mission’ anymore. What happened up on the Stony
Tunguska—we don’t know how they reacted back in Kashgar, Shambhala may
have vanished in that instant from their list of priorities. We don’t even know
what it’s done to us out here. Far too soon to say. As to our purpose
now—no one has the wisdom or the authority to tell us anything.”

   
“We’re
on our own,” Kit said.

   
“And
separately, too, I fear.”

   
“Nothing
personal.”

   
“Not
anymore, is it?”

As
Kit rode away over a patch of open steppe, the wind came up, and presently he
heard the peculiar, bass throatsinging again. A sheepherder was standing
angled, Kit could tell, precisely to the wind, and the wind was blowing across
his moving lips, and after a while it would have been impossible to say which,
the man or the wind, was doing the singing.

After a bit
,
Lieutenant Prance thought he’d begun to detect a presence overhead, which was
neither eagle nor cloud, and which slowly drew closer until he could make out a
vast airship, from which a crew of animated youngsters were regarding him with
great curiosity. Lieutenant Prance greeted them in a high voice with a sort of
tremolo to it. “Are you kind deities? or wrathful deities?”

   
“We
endeavor to be kind,” supposed Randolph St. Cosmo.

   
“Me,
I’m wrathful,” snarled Darby Suckling, “what’s it to you, Bo Peep?”

“I
only meant that whenever they appear,” said Prance, “these guardian deities,
one must show them compassion, regardless of their level of threat to one
personally.”

“Never
work,” muttered Darby. “They’ll squash you like bugs. But thanks anyway. For
nothing.”

“According
to the classical Tibetan sources, the relevant parts of the Tengyur, to begin
with—”

   
“Kid
. . .” Darby looking around in some distraction, as if for a firearm.

   
“Perhaps
we could discuss this over a ’99 Château Lafite,” suggested Randolph.

   
So
was Dwight Prance taken aloft and on to an uncertain fate.

·
    
·
    
·

Kit meantime had
fallen in with a band of
brodyagi,
former hardlabor convicts who had
been sentenced years before to internal exile in Siberia, and settled in
Siberian villages. Unable to live with the misery and poverty of the life, they
chose mobility, each for his own reason but all for the same reason. Around
1900 the practice of internal exile was officially abandoned, but by then they
were long gone, wanting only to get back to Russia. Easiest way would have been
to pick up the dilapidated, brushcovered road known as the Trakt that ran clear
across Eurasia, and head west. “But things interrupt, detours happen,”
explained their leader, a Siberian shortax genius known only as “Topor,” who
with a single ax could do every job from treefelling to the most finely
detailed bone scrimshaw, including milling lumber of any size and crosssection,
trimming taiga deadfall for the fire, dressing out game, mincing herbs,
chopping vegetables, threatening government officials, and so forth—“some
of us have been out here for years, found local girls, got married, had
children, abandoned them again, allegiances to the past and the former Russian
life fading, like reincarnation, only different, and still some inertia of
escape bears us on, west
. . . .
”

Once Kit would have said, “A vector.”
But the word now did not occur to him. At first he thought of the holy
wanderers that Yashmeen had told him about. But these
brodyagi
tended to
be not so much Godpossessed as violently insane. They drank incessantly,
whatever they could get their hands on, some of it pretty horrible. They had
devised a steamdistillery with which they could turn everything they found with
any discernible sugar content into a species of vodka. Fusel oils made up one
of the major nutritional groups in their diet. They came back to camp with
sacks full of strange mottled red mushrooms that sent them off on internal
journeys out to Siberias of the soul. There was apparently a twopart structure
to the narrative, part one being pleasant, visually entertaining, spiritually
enlightening, and part two filled with unspeakable horror. The fungomaniacs did
not seem put out at any of this, regarding one as the price of the other. To
enhance the effect, they drank one another’s urine, in which alchemized forms
of the original hallucinatory agent were present.

One day Kit heard shouting in the
taiga. Following the sound, he came upon cleared rightofway and no track, and
later in the day track running between the trees, with clearances of only
inches. At night he heard steam whistles, mysterious passages, invisible weight
hurtling through the forest, and next day somewhere among the trees the voices
of section hands, surveyors, work crews, not always calling in local languages,
in fact sometimes Kit

swore he was hearing phrases in
English, and from putting them together he understood that this railway line
was supposed to provide a link between the TransSiberian and the Taklamakan.

Kit proceeded through
the dark forests as if there were no doubt as to his way. At first light
he found himself in a clearing above a meandering river, where, far below
through the humid breathing of the taiga, a plume of steam from a riverboat was
just visible
. . . .

He
had left the
brodyagi
miles back among the trees. Finally, just at
nightfall, he came upon the camp of a small exploring party—highpitched
tents, pack horses, a fire. Unaware of how he looked, Kit strolled into the
firelight and was surprised when everybody grabbed for a weapon.

“Wait.
I know him.” It turned out to be Fleetwood Vibe, in a broadbrim hat with a
hatband of Siberian tiger skin.

Kit
declined food but did chisel a few smokes. Unable to help asking, “How about
your father, what do you hear from him?”

Fleetwood
fed pieces of deadfall to the fire. “He is no longer of sound mind. Apparently
something happened in Italy while he was there. He is beginning to see things.
The directors are muttering about a coup d’état. The trust funds are still in
effect, but none of us will ever see a penny of his fortune. It’s all going to
some Christian propaganda mill down south. He’s disowned all of us.”

   
“And
’Fax, how’s he handling that?”

“It
set him free. He’s pitching professionally, under another name, out in the
Pacific Coast League. Pretty good career so far, earnedrun average just under
two, a nohitter last season
. . . .
He’s
married to a barmaid from Oakland.”

   
“Houseful
of kids, another on the way, never been happier.”

Fleetwood
shrugged. “Some are meant for that. Others can only keep moving.” This time he
was seeking not a waterfall or the source of a river, not to map in a stubborn
gap in the known terrain but a railroad—a hidden railroad existing so far
only as shadowy rumor, the legendary and famous “TuvatoTaklamakan.”

   
“That
must have been the one I’ve been hearing.”

“Show
me.” He brought out a map, of sorts, mostly in pencil, smudged and beginning to
be split at the creases, decorated with cooking grease and cigaretteburns.

“Unless
you’re bound for the Stony Tunguska,” Kit said. He angled his head up at the
pale sky. “As close as possible to where
that
happened.”

Fleetwood
looked stricken, as if someone had seen into his history and detected at the
heart of it the impossibility of any redemption. “It’s only the first step,” he
said, “only what brought me out here. Do you remember once, years ago, we
talked of cities, unmapped, sacramental places . . .”

“Shambhala,”
Kit nodded. “I may have just been there. If you’re still ~interrested, it’s
Tannu Tuva. Or I left somebody there at the edge of madness who was making a
good argument that’s where it is.”

“I
wish . . .” Through the fear and guilt, a kind of perverse shyness. “I wish it
could be Shambhala that I seek. But I no longer have the right. I have since
learned of other cities, out here, secret cities, secular counterparts to the
Buddhist hidden lands, more indelibly contaminated by Time, deep in the taiga,
only guessed at from indirect evidence—unmanifested cargoes, power
consumption—ancient before the Cossacks settled, before the Kirghiz or
the Tatars. I almost sense these places, Traverse, so close now, as if at any
moment, just behind my shoulder, beneath the next unconsidered footfall, their
gates could open
. . .
dense with
industry, unsleeping, dedicated to designs no one speaks of aloud, as one
hesitates to speak the name of the wilderness Creature that feeds on all other
creatures
. . . .

“As
nearly as I’ve been able to triangulate, they lie in a cluster, located quite
close to the event of 30 June
. . .
for
practical purposes their rail depot is Krasnoyarsk. Though there’s no official
acknowledgement of that, no records kept, anyone booking passage there on the
TransSib is automatically a subject of interest to the Okhrana.” He had tried
the previous winter to approach the secret cities. In the unhopeful light of
evening ~arival, from the bruisecolored shadows of Krasnoyarsk, invisible
functionaries in fur hats and heavy greatcoats had watched the platforms,
escorting those with approved business to unmarked icevessels moored by the
frozen Yenisei, turning back the others like Fleetwood whose motives seemed
little more than idle tourism. “But now, given the Event, it may be possible to
enter
. . .
perhaps somehow terms
have been renegotiated.

“Whatever
goes on in there, whatever unspeakable compact with sin and death, it is what I
am destined for—the goal of this long pilgrimage, whose penance is my
life.”

Kit
looked around. The dark miles were empty of witnesses. He could kill this
selfpitying loudmouth so easily. He said, “You know, you’re like every other
socalled explorer out here, a remittance man with too much sense of privilege,
no idea of what to do with it. “

There
was just enough light from the fire to see the despair in Fleetwood’s face,
despair like a corrupt form of hope, that here at last might be his great
crisis—the unappeasable tribesmen, the unforeseen tempest, the solid

terrain gone to quicksand, the beast
stalking him for miles and years. Otherwise what life could he expect as one
more murderer with his money in Rand shares, destined for golf courses,
restaurants with horrible food and worse music, the aging faces of his kind?

The
two of them might have been sitting right at the heart of the Pure Land, with
neither able to see it, sentenced to blind passage, Kit for too little desire,
Fleetwood for too much, and of the opposite sign.

Neither
got much sleep that night. Both were troubled by unpleasant dreams in which
one, not always literally, was murdering the other. They woke into a midnight
storm that had already taken one or two tents. The bearers were running in all
directions, screaming in one or more dialects. Prevented by the inertia of
dream from entering the present tense, Fleetwood’s first thoughts were of his
duty to the past. In the light from the fallen star of 30 June, in its pallid
nightlessness, he had dreamed insomniac the possibility of another fallen thing
like the one he had once helped the Vormance people so terribly bring to its
victims. Would young Traverse, would someone, for God’s sake, bring this to an
end? He looked over, through the windbeaten confusion, at where Kit’s bedroll
should have been. But Kit had left sometime in the night, as if taken by the
wind.