The Cult of Loving Kindness (34 page)

To Nanda Dev, it represented everything he hated. It seemed to squat above the town like a huge insect on the rock, a delicate yet evil presence. Standing on the balcony, he felt unclean, contaminated, sad.

To his right and to his left, the crests of the mountains were lit with winking beacons. They described the arc of a circle high around the mine—red and green, red and green, diminishing and finally vanishing. Through the thick air he could not see the beacons on the opposite peaks, five miles away. But below him the town was glowing red, and the wind seemed to rise out of the pit, carrying fumes, which disturbed his eyes. He turned away and trudged on down the steps; as the stair turned he looked westward down the dark side of the ridge, the wooded slope that fell toward the perimeter. He could see the lights from the gate. They were shining through the trees.

The road which rose up toward him was dark now. There were no trucks on it. The mine was still producing, but in the emergency only two furnaces were lit. Since Thursday, all shifts, all wages, had been cut in half. People wandered aimlessly on the maidan.

The stair came down onto the rock. Nanda Dev left the building and walked down along the ridge. He had no wish to see anyone, no wish to talk. Instead of heading toward the terminus, where the big cars rose and sank diagonally along the greased rail to Crystal Lip, he took another way. Someone waved to him; without responding, he hurried down a concrete embankment on the ridge’s outer lip, until he was out of sight.

There were some storage sheds upon the outer slope, a few boys working. He didn’t stop. He crossed the road behind the empty loading dock, and skirted around the far side of the furnace compound. He climbed down through the rocks and thornbushes, until he reached another service stair.

Here the ridge was narrow. The stair, which antedated the construction of the road, fell away below him, a series of concrete bastions. He stood for a moment looking down toward the gate and toward the razorwire fence, trying to find the small path that led off through the trees. There were no lights to mark it, no lights to mark the camp among the fig trees seven miles out, and he wondered if perhaps the woodman might get lost.

Then he turned around and climbed instead up to the summit of the ridge, which he reached in a few minutes. As he crossed over he could see the lights of Carbontown again. Or rather, he could see the glow, for the slope below him now was gentle, and the town itself would be out of sight for most of the hour’s descent.

Again the stair was broken and cracked and clogged with refuse. He kicked down through the beer cans and plastic containers. The stair was scarcely used; it ran down parallel to the car, and occasionally Nanda Dev could hear a smooth metallic hiss over to his left behind the rocks. It was getting dark. The wind was hot and strong, stirring the refuse around him.

On the upper slope the stair ran straight. But as the angle of descent increased, it wound back and forth, searching for the gentle way.

There was a place above the town that he knew well. When he had first been shipped out from his neighborhood in Charn, often after school he had climbed up with a few friends to smoke cigarettes and drink. It was a simple turning of the concrete stair, yet almost it was the only place in the gigantic complex where it was quiet enough to talk. Out of earshot from the processing plant upon the ridge, out of earshot from the pit, the stair seemed to hang suspended between two worlds. Later, when he knew his wife, they had often met there at the three-quarter mark after his shift was over, before her shift began. In the evenings, Carbontown was spread out like a grid of fire. There was some shelter, and the wind was less.

She was waiting for him. She was waiting in the bastion. The boy was perched on the concrete parapet, kicking his bare heels. She stood with her arms around the child, staring down over the lights, her pregnant belly pressed into the wall. She was wearing her black flowered dress, and her grey hair was braided down her back.

The boy saw him first. Like so many of the children at Carbontown he was backward, not speaking yet, though he was past the age. Still he recognized his father; he clapped his little hands, and Kate turned round.

“I knew you’d come,” she said. She smiled as he came down and put his arms around her. He hugged her, but there was a tension, a shyness in her body. She wanted to touch him, but there was something she wanted to say, also. She twisted away from him but kept hold of his hand. She held on to his hand and squeezed his fingers as he pushed the hair away from his son’s forehead. Then she cleared her throat, showing partly a symptom of a new medical condition—a new outbreak of silicon saliva in the town—and partly something true to her own shyness. When they had first known each other, even in bed she could not meet his eyes, and often she would be clearing her throat and making small, soft, tentative noises. Now she spread his hand out on the parapet. She spread his fingers apart one at a time, not looking up except for quick glances at the boy. “I knew you’d come,” she said. “Where were you?”

“Talking to the new director.”

“Rasmus saw you at the offices.” She glanced up at his face and turned away, squeezing his wrist hard. “Did you see the bishop?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, what’s she like? I got your note but I was worried. Maia stayed the night.” She was running her thumbnail back and forth along his wrist. “Did she … say anything?”

He looked out over the grid, the red streets north and south, the blue streets east and west. Beyond, the pit gaped like a fiery jaw. Let it come down, thought Nanda Dev. Just let it come down. He pushed his hand back through his son’s hair.

“I took some pictures,” he said. “They’re being developed.”

“Did she … give you anything? What was she like?”

“She touched me. I was as close as I am to you. She told me everything would be all right.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” said Kate. She rubbed her forehead on his shirt. “Rasmus said he saw you at the offices. I waited at the car, so then I knew you’d come this way.”

Again there was something important that she wanted to tell him. She cleared her throat. “The union met last night. They’re meeting now. As I came up I heard the loudspeaker.”

“Tell me.”

She shrugged. “Maia’s husband’s cousin. You know him—Enver Shaw. He’s the one they said attacked Professor Marchpane. He’s to be whipped. The message just came down.”

Nanda Dev said nothing. He had one hand on his son’s fragile head, and the boy was staring at him out of black-rimmed eyes.

“Tonight,” said Kate. “His wife is with the union now. Two hundred cuts—it will kill him.”

When Nanda Dev spoke, he seemed to hear two voices, and one was coming from someplace outside himself. “Marchpane banned that punishment three months ago. Now we’ll have a lot to say.”

As he was talking, he listened to the second voice—its tone, its inflection, its accent, and it seemed absurd to him, a cruel piece of mimicry. “Marchpane was all right,” he said. “But this new man is very hard.”

The wind was coming up out of the mine. Kate was rubbing her forehead against his chest. And now his son was smiling for some stupid reason, smiling and clucking.

 

Part 13:
The Gathering Man
D
eccan Blendish stood next to the desk in Cathartes’s office. From time to time his wrists would twitch, both together.

 

Cathartes was looking past his shoulder. “You have an academic training,” he said. “You understand the importance of these things. Not just in terms of your own interest, or because I tell you.”

He was encased by his distinctive odor—sweet, oppressive, male. Deccan Blendish knew that to approach closer was to risk distress; from three feet away, the smell of the professor’s breath was diffuse enough for him to tolerate. But even a few inches closer, and he could feel it in his nostrils—it was a temptation, always a temptation. He closed his eyes. Yet still he could picture the professor’s red lips tensing and relaxing, puckering minutely around each word: “I trust you. These others, they have no education. They follow orders and that’s all. I’m not comfortable with them. They have no loyalty to me, and I don’t trust them.”

“But I am sick,” whispered Deccan Blendish.

“Don’t you feel better?”

He felt better. For the past few days, a nurse had given him a shot of morphine every four hours. Now his joints were greasy in their sockets.

“You’re getting better. Already you are stronger. Modern antibiotics—but you know that woman was the cause of this. When she’s gone, you will feel better still.”

Blendish had begun to sway off-balance just a little bit. Nauseated, he opened his eyes. The red lips were very close to him.

They were telling him the weakest of the three arguments. Yet the conviction never varied, the sure tone. What did this mean?

In fact all the arguments were weak, in various degrees. Over the past few days he had heard them many times in many different permutations, when Cathartes had visited him and stood beside his bed. The words never repeated and they never seemed to stop. Even alone, after his shot of morphine, sometimes he would still see the thin chain of words, glistening with saliva, drawn out link by link from that wet mouth, the red lips puckering around each link.

“I don’t trust them,” said Cathartes. “You, I trust. I respect your dedication as a scholar. That work you did with the Treganu, that was fine work. I was angry, perhaps slightly jealous. I know scholarship when I see it. I think this work could form the basis of a publishable dissertation.”

“Under your direction,” whispered Deccan Blendish.

“Partly under my direction. But I was thinking of Professors X and Y.” Here he named two famous primatologists from the University Extension; in every cycle of the argument, the names were different.

“I think I could arrange a fellowship,” the red lips said. “And of course if you agree to help me now, the company will sponsor you.” Link by link, the chain slipped through. Yet it was a weak chain, and the flaw was that Blendish was a dead man. He could feel it in his body. Every morning, his feces in the toilet were full of wriggling shapes. Every evening when he threw up after supper, even the lightest broth had wriggling shapes in it.

“It would mean you’d have to teach a couple of undergraduate sections. You could be my TA next semester, when my leave runs out. I’d like that.”

Blendish nodded. “So would I,” he whispered.

He was dying. He could feel it in the dissolution of the world. It was contracting. It was coming apart. Already his vision had contracted. Though Cathartes’s lips were preternaturally distinct, the rest of his face receded into wriggling shadow. That morning, staring at his wasted and unrecognizable face in the mirror of his hospital room, Blendish had noticed the parasites moving in a ring around the outside of his cornea. He had taken off his spectacles and held his face just inches from the glass. He had seen the small shapes struggling, poking through the pale membranes of his eyes.

“It is because I trust you that I offer you these things. Because you understand the importance of what we are trying to accomplish. And you understand the risk. I must tell you—the possibility of a strike in Carbontown is real. Perhaps a violent confrontation. I am expecting the return of company management anytime now, of course. A response to my appeal. But until then the security of the mine is in plain jeopardy, and it is my responsibility to defend it. Yours and mine. During Professor Marchpane’s illness, I have taken over his duties, but these men are not my men. I don’t trust them as I trust you.”

“Thank you,” whispered Deccan Blendish.

“And this woman must be stopped. You saw what she did at the plantation. What she did to you. Now she has spread her poison through the mine.”

The question was: Why him? Even if Cathartes believed what he was saying, did he think Blendish was capable of doing what he asked? There was another reason.

“If you do this in the way that I’ve described, dressed in these clothes, no one will stop you. Her guards are on our side.”

Maybe. Whatever else it was, this journey was not safe. Maybe Cathartes wanted him dead, not knowing he was dead already.

Blendish dropped his eyes down the front of the professor’s uniform, over the bulge in his pants, over to the desk. The black shirt was there, the hood, the map. The axe was there. Also the skull was there, taken from its box. The circle of parasites around his eye kept all things indistinct, save for that grinning face.

“I’m asking you to do something illegal,” said Cathartes. “Under ideal circumstances she would be arrested and returned to Charn for trial. There’s no doubt of the outcome—for witchcraft and sedition, your testimony alone would be enough. That’s what you have to remember. You and I are men of ideas, and we can make this leap of judgment. For other men it would be murder. It would be an unwise precedent.”

As he spoke, he moved away from Deccan Blendish toward the window. The young man didn’t see him move. He was staring at the skull. He was no judge of the passage of time. Only he was aware that the professor’s smell was less intense. And he was aware of an orange glow outside the window; it threw a muted, diffuse light. Cathartes stood looking into it, looking through it, looking down through it to the world. There on the maidan, Blendish knew, a middle-aged miner was being whipped to death. No more than a hundred yards away, and yet there was no sound. No sound from the whip, and no sound from the man. Nothing from his shattered back and buttocks. The rhythmic spray of blood upon the concrete made no noise. Nothing from the crowd, which was packed all over the ridge, over the gallery roofs and everywhere that might afford a view—a thousand or five thousand children, women, men, drinking company beer from company cups.

 

In their tent beyond the fig grove Rael and Cassia were making love. That morning they had woken up still joined, and all day they had been making love with an urgency that had replaced words, replaced tenderness, replaced comfort. Rael wondered whether it was possible to live inside her, his sex losing and regaining stiffness in a rhythmic cycle that would become their only means to measure time.