The Cult of Loving Kindness (29 page)

Outside the tent a torch was stuck into the sand: burlap soaked in oil and set alight at the top of a long pole. The fog clung to it, blurred it, spread the weak flame into a weaker glow, an imperfection in the dark day. “No,” murmured Cassia. “They won’t let me.”

“Secret. Dark in dark. Soft in soft.”

“No,” repeated Cassia. “They won’t let me go.”

Rael nodded. “Let,” he said. “Let—not let.” He raised his fist up to the doorway. Then he spread open his fingers, quickly, suddenly, so that they made a little noise.

Cassia shook her head. “They have guns,” she said. “They will hunt for me.”

Rael nodded. “Hunt. Then fast.”

Outside, the fog was thicker, condensing on the flap. Cassia shivered, and Rael picked up a blanket which had lain at the bottom of the bed frame. He wrapped it around her shoulders. Again the frame made a small music.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Maybe I have a mission to the truth. Sarnath would say … I don’t know. He wasn’t afraid to die. These people need me—they will not abandon me.”

She brought her hand up to her face, to look at the tattoo upon her palm. “And even if they did, what difference would it make? I have no place, except for here.”

She put her hand out to touch him on the forehead. “What are you thinking?” she asked. “I’ve known you all my life and you’re a stranger.”

Rael frowned. “You know what they told me?” she went on. “They said your mind was empty. They said you had no word for love. They said you climbed up to my tower window to kill me. That much I remember too.”

Rael turned his face away. “Not no,” he said.

Again Cassia reached out to touch his forehead. “Or part of you,” she said. “Part of you and part of me, when we were together on the night before they burned us.”

Rael felt an anger in him that was building, building. With his clenched fist he touched her on the lips. “Burned,” he said, “not burned. Is a bitter, is a black soft hard, is a sad. Is a dead thing dying now and counting—one, two, and nothing gone. Now far away I know now is a something. Somewhere is a something. Now your heart is some, your heart, and this will die. Me, and killing you.”

Cassia shivered, and pulled herself against him. “Yes,” she said. “Eight days. That’s all. But what else is there?”

Rael stared out through the open doorway. “Don’t you understand?” she said. “There’s nothing there. Here at least there’s something.” She looked around the tent, empty except for the old woman snoring in the corner. “These people listen to me. I can teach them something. They have a ritual—that’s all. This dog’s head that they worship, what does it say to them? Does it teach them how to live? Does it teach them how to free themselves and live in peace, according to the thirteen honorable precepts of the master? No, the body is in place, but it can’t move. It lacks the power of truth.”

 

Reverend Porphyry was reading from his paper. “ ‘ “It is less solid, and less dense. The ratio of animal to mineral material has been reversed. In its makeup, almost it is like a child’s skull—plastic and cartilaginous, even after so many full years. Yet you can see how large it is… .” ’ ”

 

The priest raised his eyes. “That’s a quote from the graduate student. There’s a sketch.”

Longo Starbridge had squatted down behind him, to read over his shoulder. “What a prize,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“At Carbontown. Dr. Cathartes has removed it to the aerodrome, to wait for transport. Both these stories come from there.”

Longo Starbridge said nothing. He was staring at the diagram of the skull, his eyes narrowed down to slits.

 

Part 11:
Carbontown
I
n those late summer days, the mines at Carbontown were just beginning to approach their peak efficiency. They were located in mountainous country about sixty miles southwest of Nyangongo, which formed part of the same massif. At Carbontown the mountains were arranged in a close circle around the pit—an enormous open quarry whose lease had been renegotiated in summertime of each of the past six years. The miners lived perched above it on a ledge of rock in forty-six loose rows of barracks. This was the town of Crystal Lip, with a population in that season of almost seven thousand men and women.

 

The blast furnaces at Carbontown, the company offices, and the processing plant were all located on the low point of the ridge above the town, near the terminus of the new road. There the ingots of polished glass were loaded onto trucks to begin the first stage of their journey all over the district and abroad. The road descended sharply from the plant, down through the gate, out into the forest.

On the inside of the circle, away from the forest and the road, the ridge was piled thick with the accumulated slag. A mountain of garbage, refuse, loose rock, and smashed glass loomed above the town, always in danger of collapsing. Occasionally a flow of slag would rumble down into the streets; it was a source of friction between the miners and the company. Earlier in the summer, the miners had initiated a series of slowdowns and strikes, and had even succeeded in extorting some promises from the university provost. That had changed by the sixteenth phase of summer, when the pressures of production had required a new kind of management. Charn and the new quality-of-life laws were far away. The mine was more than half owned by a foreign holding company.

By the last months of the sixteenth phase of summer, 00016, the mine was functioning around the clock. By night the miners’ headlamps made moving skeins of light over the glass faces of the pit as lines of men trudged upward, trudged downward, carrying baskets of raw shards.

By night the pit was illuminated by torches, and dozens of small fires. By day a cloud of smoke hung low over the town, and everything down there was covered with a film of soot. The tarmac streets were slippery with soot.

Tuesday was the obligatory washing day. On Tuesday afternoon, the sixty-seventh of September, Dr. Benjamin Cathartes stood at the window of the company weight room, looking down on the maidan. Some of the miners’ wives were boiling their grey laundry in communal outdoor vats, poking at it with long sticks.

He found it a dispiriting sight. Also dispiriting was the constant roar from the blast furnaces behind them, the pounding and clanking from the cog railway. Every effort had been made to keep the company offices pleasant. They were situated on a crag of rock next to the heliport, and were surrounded on three sides by gardens. Yet because they were high up, they commanded a more complete view. That was enough, Cathartes thought, to make them the most depressing section of the whole.

The athletic facility was well appointed, though, with thick carpets and new equipment. Since his arrival at the mine five days before, Cathartes had spent much of his time here. Hot mineral water was pumped up by some mechanism into a whirlpool bath, which occupied a cabinet in one corner of the room. Cathartes had just come from there; he stood by the window in his spandex exercise shorts, a towel around his neck. His arms and chest were naked. He rubbed them with the towel, liberating the smell of the mineral water—a byproduct of an industrial process, he knew, yet pleasant nevertheless. It gave his skin a chalky feel.

He examined his body in a row of wood-framed mirrors along the far wall. Each one presented a different view. He frowned, and rubbed some water from his neck. Then he walked over to the side wall and put both hands upon the vinyl seatcover of the new universal exerciser—a complicated pile of brass wheels and weights and pulleys, set in a wooden frame.

For several minutes he stood chafing the seat between his palms, frowning at his reflection, feeling a new and uncustomary inertia. The sight of his own body, normally so satisfying, touched him not at all.

Behind him came a knock at the door. “Enter,” he said without turning round.

Still looking in the mirror, he watched them march the fellow in until he stood next to the trainer’s desk, a guard on either side of him. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips dry. His face was slack and vacant, mere flesh over the bone, and his student’s uniform hung off of him, as if it had been made for a much larger man. To Cathartes there was something contemptible about how close he was to dissolution. How long had it been since he had first stumbled into the Treganu site, sick then already, but still plump? Not forty days. Since then three weeks of dysentery, one week of confinement, and the poison that had crept into his blood from his infected leg had stripped him down to almost nothing. Had affected his brain also, or else they would not be in this predicament.

“Give him his spectacles,” Cathartes said. One of the company guards pulled them from the pocket of his shirt. They at least were still unchanged—the bows repaired with tape, the lenses still as fat as ever. The guard thrust them at Blendish and he took them, and balanced them upon his pockmarked nose.

The spectacles were the key to his face, which opened up his thoughts and his expressions. They were the detail that gave sense to the rest of him. Turning to look, Cathartes now conceded that the amiable but foolish student, whom he had taken in that first night in the village and nursed until his fever broke, was not completely gone. At least his eyes were there; his eyes remained, stubborn and futile in his new thin face.

“Leave us,” he said. The company guards, stolid men in brown uniforms with truncheons on their belts, saluted smartly, turned crisply, and marched out. It was a display of efficiency diluted only by the bovine boredom on their faces. As he watched them go, Cathartes found himself wondering whether in the coming crisis they could be depended on, whether they were capable of more than the routine punishment of strikers and trade unionists.

Again he wandered over to the bank of windows. Below and to the left, the helicopter stood on a circle of grey concrete, a lone mechanic working on its tail section. If it had been functional, if it had been capable of the long flight, he would have commandeered it to return to Charn. Already he would have returned in triumph to the university, the skull of Angkhdt locked in his pouch. But in this wilderness of zealots and fanatics even his safety was in jeopardy, since the damned student had made his idiotic claim in print.

The effect of his bath was dissipating, and the sweat felt cool upon his chest. Cathartes flicked the towel from around his neck and dropped it into the laundry can. An attendant had laid his bathrobe over the trainer’s chair; he strode over to the desk and slipped it on. As he did so, his eyes fell once more upon the issue of the Carbontown Gazette, now almost a week old. He picked it up from the linoleum surface, scanning the headline for the hundredth time, feeling once again a rush of heat suffuse his face—it was unbelievable. “Idiot,” he said. “You idiot.”

Blendish flinched. A shudder passed over his face. But then he seemed to relax somewhat, to pull himself together. His voice, when it came, managed to achieve some sickly dignity.

“Sir,” he said. “I want to know why you are treating me like this. You have taken me from my researches and locked me up as if I were a criminal. I have not been allowed access to a lawyer, nor have I yet been told what I’m accused of.”

This was a speech that he’d rehearsed. As he completed it, his relaxation left him, and when Cathartes struck the side of the desk with the folded newspaper, he flinched again.

“Lawyer—are you crazy? I am an associate professor of theology.” Cathartes wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and when he spoke again his voice was lower and more soothing: “It is for your own protection. I have felt myself responsible for you and for your welfare. Where you were, you could not be given the correct medical supervision. You’re sick—you understand that.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you? I’m glad. Because your sickness seems to have infected your mind. It’s true—I had to bring you here. I meant to bring you back to Charn with me. I think you should be grateful for my abuse of university funds, instead of trying to destroy my work.”

“It was my work,” said Deccan Blendish. He squinted and then looked down at his feet. “I found it,” he said. “It was part of my research.”

“Your research! You lunatic!” Again Cathartes let his anger rise, and the student took one step backward away from him.

Cathartes threw the newspaper back down upon the desk. “I was responsible for the project. Naturally I claimed responsibility. Besides, I knew immediately what it was, and you had no idea. You thought it was some ape. Some ape from outer space.”

“I stick to my conclusions,” muttered Deccan Blendish. He gave his head a sudden shake, as if an insect were caught inside his ear.

“Your conclusions have destroyed my reputation. Your conclusions have robbed me of my greatest triumph. What were you thinking of, to say such things to a reporter?”

“You could issue a retraction.”

“Thank you. Thank you for your advice.” Cathartes moved a little way into the center of the room and then turned round again. He crossed his arms upon his chest and stood with his legs spread wide, his pelvis straining forward. “Success in academia,” he said, “is a long, slow, humble process. For every step you climb, a dozen people are trying to pull you back down. So you have to be careful. Now, I made a claim—a modest claim in some ways, but it would have been enough. Because I had the facts behind it—I had documents, I had photographs, I had witnesses’ reports. A valuable artifact disappeared from the Temple of Kindness and Repair during the revolution. I have found it—it’s as simple as that. I make no claims about what it is. I make no claims about how it got to where I found it, except to say what everyone already knows—that there was more to the Treganu cult than just asceticism and nonviolence.”

“But you didn’t find it,” said Deccan Blendish. “I found it. I found it in a bag with those old manuscripts—you still don’t know. It was my discovery, and I don’t understand why you stole it. You didn’t need it. But they might have given me some funding, some grant money, I’m sure. Perhaps even a lectureship.”

His voice sank to a murmur, and he was staring at his feet, staring at a pattern in the heavy carpet that might have been a water stain. As always he was confused by the professor’s presence, his red lips. His white terry-cloth bathrobe was open down the front, and Blendish could see the fur on his muscular chest, his hard, flat stomach. Lower down, the outline of his sex was visible against the sheer blue spandex.