Shadow Puppets (28 page)

Not a good list of precedents, that.

But they had their glory, didn’t they, before they fell.

Virlomi never went into town herself. Those days were over. When she had been free to wander, a pilgrim in a land where people either lived their whole lives in one village or cut themselves loose and spent their whole lives on the road, she had loved coming to villages, each one an adventure, filled with its own tapestry of gossip, tragedy, humor, romance, and irony.

In the college she had briefly attended, between coming home from space and being brought into Indian military headquarters in Hyderabad, she had quickly realized that intellectuals seemed to think that their life—the life of the mind, the endless self-examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers—was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people.

Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdrew from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage.

In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and
display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasingly about them. Everywhere she went in India, she constantly heard herself thinking, I could live here. I could stay among these people and marry one of these gentle peasant men and work beside him all my life.

And then another part of her answered, No you couldn’t. Because like it or not, you are one of those university people after all. You can visit in the real world, but you don’t belong there. You need to live in Plato’s foolish dream, where ideas are real and reality is shadow. That is the place you were born for, and as you move from village to village, it is only to learn from them, to teach them, to manipulate them, to use them to achieve your own ends.

But my own ends, she thought, are to give them gifts they need: wise government, or at least self-government.

And then she laughed at herself, because the two were usually opposites. Even if an Indian ruled over Indians, it was not self-government, for the ruler governed the people, and the people governed the ruler. It was mutual government. That’s the best that could be aspired to.

Now, though, her pilgrim days were over. She had returned to the bridge where the soldiers stationed to protect it and the nearby villagers had made a kind of god of her.

She came back without fanfare, walking into the village that had taken her most to heart and falling into conversation with women at the well and in the market. She went to the washing stream and lent a hand with the washing of clothes; someone offered to share clothing with her so she could wash her dirty traveling rags, but she laughed and said that one more washing would rub them into dust, but she would like to earn some new clothing by helping a family that had a bit they could spare for her.

“Mistress,” said one shy woman, “did we not feed you at the bridge, for nothing?”

So she
was
recognized.

“But I wish to earn the kindness you showed me there.”

“You have blessed us many times, lady,” said another.

“And now you bless us by coming among us.”

“And washing clothes.”

So she was still a god.

“I’m not what you think I am,” she said. “I am more terrible than your worst fear.”

“To our enemies, we pray, lady,” said a woman.

“Terrible to them, indeed,” said Virlomi. “But I will use your sons and husbands to fight them, and some of them will die.”

“Half our sons and husbands were already taken in the war against the Chinese.”

“Killed in battle.”

“Lost and could not find their way home.”

“Carried off into captivity by the Chinese devils.”

Virlomi raised a hand to still them. “I will not waste their lives, if they obey me.”

“You shouldn’t go to war, lady,” said one old crone. “There’s no good in it. Look at you, young, beautiful. Lie down with one of our young men, or one of our old ones if you want, and make babies.”

“Someday,” said Virlomi, “I’ll choose a husband and make babies with him. But today my husband is India, and he has been swallowed by a tiger. I must make the tiger sick, so he will throw my husband up.”

They giggled, some of them, at this image. But others were very grave.

“How will you do this?”

“I will prepare the men so they don’t die because of mistakes. I will assemble all the weapons we need, so no man is wasted because he is unarmed. I will bide my time, so we don’t bring down the wrath of the tiger upon us, until we’re ready to hurt them so badly that they never recover from the blow.”

“You didn’t happen to bring a nuclear weapon with you, lady?” asked the crone. Clearly something of an unbeliever.

“It’s an offense against God to use such things,” said Virlomi. “The Muslim God was burned out of his house and turned his face against them because they used such weapons against each other.”

“I was joking,” said the crone, ashamed.

“I am not,” said Virlomi. “If you don’t want me to use your men in the way I have described, tell me, and I’ll go away and find another place that wants me. Perhaps your hatred of the Chinese is not so fierce as mine. Perhaps you are content with the way things are in this land.”

But they were not content, and their hatred was hot enough, it seemed.

There wasn’t much time for training, despite her promise, but then, she wasn’t going to use these men for firefights. They were to be saboteurs, thieves, demolition experts. They conspired with construction workers to steal explosives; they learned how to use them; they built dry storage pits in the jungles that clung to the steep hills.

And they went to nearby towns and recruited more men, and then went farther and farther afield, building a network of saboteurs near every key bridge that could be blown up to block the Chinese from the use of the roads they would need to bring troops and supplies back and forth, in and out of India.

There could be no rehearsals. No dry runs. Nothing was done to arouse suspicion of any kind. She forbade her men to make any gestures of defiance, or do anything to interfere with the smooth running of the Chinese transportation network through their hills and mountains.

Some of them chafed at this, but Virlomi said, “I gave my word to your wives and mothers that I would not waste your lives. There will be plenty of dying ahead, but only when your deaths will accomplish something, so that those who live can bear witness: We did this thing, it was not done for us.”

Now she never went to town, but lived where she had lived before, in a cave near the bridge that she would blow up herself, when the time came.

But she could not afford to be cut off from the outside world. So three times a day, one of her people would sign on to the nets and check her dead drop sites, print out the messages there, and bring them to her. She made sure they knew how to wipe the information out of the computer’s memory, so no one else could see what the computer had shown, and after she read the messages they brought, she burned them.

She got Peter Wiggin’s message in good time. So she was ready when her people started coming to her, running, out of breath, excited. “The war with the Turks is going badly for the Chinese,” they said. “We have it on the nets, the Turks have taken so many airfields that they can put more planes in the sky in Xinjiang than the Chinese can. They have dropped bombs on Beijing itself, lady!”

“Then you should weep for the children who are dying there,” said Virlomi. “But the time for us to fight is not yet.”

And the next day, when the trucks began to rumble across the bridges, and line up bumper to bumper along the narrow mountain roads, they begged her, “Let us blow up just one bridge, to show them that India is not sleeping while the Turks fight our enemy for us!”

She only answered them, “Why should we blow up bridges that our enemy is using to leave our land?”

“But we could kill many if we timed the explosion just right!”

“Even if we could kill five thousand by blowing up all the bridges at exactly the right moment, they have five million. We will wait. Not one of you will do anything to warn them that they have enemies in these mountains. The time is soon, but you must wait for my word.”

Again and again she said it, all day long, to everyone who came, and they obeyed. She sent them to telephone their comrades in faraway towns near other bridges, and they also obeyed.

For three days. The Chinese-controlled news talked about how devastating armies were about to be brought to bear against the Turkic hordes, ready to punish them for their treachery. The traffic across the
bridges and along the mountain roads was unrelenting.

Then came the message she was waiting for.

No signature, but it was in a dead drop that she had given to Peter Wiggin. She knew that it meant that the main offensive had been launched in the west, and the Chinese would soon begin sending troops and equipment back from China into India.

She did not burn the message. She handed it to the child who had brought it to her and said, “Keep this forever. It is the beginning of our war.”

“Is it from a god?” asked the child.

“Perhaps the shadow of the nephew of a god,” she answered with a smile. “Perhaps only a man in a dream of a sleeping god.”

Taking the child by the hand, she walked down into the village. The people swarmed around her. She smiled at them, patted the children’s heads, hugged the women and kissed them.

Then she led this parade of citizens to the office of the local Chinese administrator and walked inside the building. Only a few of the women came with her. She walked right past the desk of the protesting officer on duty and into the office of the Chinese official, who was on the telephone.