Disappearing Act Read online

  "Just check," he challenged Lunthanadi. "You can do it. Minister Odaniya can request the statistics on saltpeter supplies and uses from the Minister for Defense. We all spend two-thirds of our time answering questionnaires and compiling statistics on this and that anyway; nobody will notice one more."

  "Hmph! You worry too much about things that are none of your business, Chulayen. Remember, 'The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher.' " Lunthanadi turned away and waddled toward a junior clerk who had stopped his copying work to enjoy the argument. "Here now, young Bhiranu, d'you think the Bashir pays you to sit with your mouth open and see how many flies'll fall in? Your mother may have . . ."

  With the ease of long habit, Chulayen tuned out the tirade and returned to his own desk, thinking so hard that he almost didn't notice Sudhan's winks. "Told you," Sudhan whispered, but then Lunthanadi whipped around and he became very virtuously busy reading and scribbling comments on his own paperwork.

  As well to keep busy, Chulayen supposed. He reached for the next paper on the stack. But the court pronouncement that had worried him did not get routed to a clerk for filing; instead it found its way into the inner folds of the sash that held up his light, loose trousers. While he went through memos and letters mechanically, stamping each one with the appropriate phrase, scribbling his initials somewhere on the margin and consigning the paper to the appropriate box for the clerk-trainee to carry off for filing, the original memorandum seemed to grow and stiffen until it was all sharp edges and corners, poking him with every deep breath he took, refusing to be forgotten and filed away properly.

  Lunthanadi had as good as accused him of being a—a pacifist. Chulayen's lip curled in an involuntary sneer. It was an ugly word, and one he had in no way earned. He was as loyal a servant of the Bashir as anyone in Udara, and of good Rudhrani stock on both sides of his family tree. He had never questioned and did not now question Udara's need for a strong army to defend its ever-increasing borders. His parents, already elderly when he was born, had well remembered the times of chaos in Udara when brother fought brother for the right to the throne, when venal councillors debased the coinage until you needed a barrow full of tulai to buy a turnip—and then likely couldn't get the turnip, because the farms had been despoiled by fighting among the war lords. They'd told him enough tales of those days to make him understand, perhaps better than most young men of his generation, just how fortunate Udara was to have a strong Bashir who maintained peace and good order in the community. Why, they could scarcely be better off had they lived in the legendary times of the Emperor! And now that he had a family of his own to care for, he was thankful every day that they were growing up in a strong, safe state. Neena and Neeta would never know the fear his mother had recounted at seeing blood running in the streets; little Vashi would never cry with an empty belly.

  That was why he wanted somebody to understand the mistake in this judicial pronouncement, couldn't Lunthanadi see that? Not out of disloyalty to the regime, but out of the highest kind of loyalty, the kind that didn't want to see the Bashir's Council tainted by the record of a single unjust or unwise decision.

  Also, it would be a great pity if the Jurgan Caves' wonderland of crystal chambers were destroyed by saltpeter miners before anybody figured out that it was virtually impossible to transport the product from Thamboon's mountains to the gunshops of Udara.

  At the midday break Sudhan asked Chulayen if he was feeling ill.

  "You've hardly moved a paper since that quarrel with Lunthanadi, you keep staring at the walls, and your lamp needs trimming." Sudhan nipped off the charred end of the wick deftly and looked again at Chulayen in the flare of improved light. "You're a funny color, too."

  "Hardly moved—oh!" Chulayen really looked at his cluttered desk for the first time in some hours. Sudhan was right. That first burst of mechanical activity had ended as he sank deeper in thought; this afternoon he'd have to work double-fast to catch up with the new papers that had been deposited on his desk while he stared into space and thought.

  Except that he wouldn't be here this afternoon, because out of all that blank nonthought had come an idea. He knew now what he had to do to protect the honor of the Bashir's court. "You're right. I don't feel so good. Tell Lunthanadi I went home sick, will you?"

  "You're forgetting your dinner!" Sudhan pointed at the package of cold dhanadi balls, each wrapped around some tasty filling and the whole thing wrapped up in layers of green leaves that kept the food cool and fresh.

  "You have it. I'm not hungry."

  Sudhan shook his head at Chulayen's departing back. Pass up Anusha's cooking? The man was definitely sick.

  * * *

  In the hours that followed, most of them spent on the benches outside some office or other, Chulayen occasionally thought with regret of the packed dinner he had abandoned. Anusha might have her little faults, but even apart from the loyalty he owed to the good high-class Rudhrani girl his parents had chosen for him, she really was an excellent cook. Always in the kitchen, scolding their Rohini servant girl and getting her fingers burned and her hair smoky by insisting on preparing the meals herself so that they met her exacting standards. But he couldn't very well eat his dinner and then claim to be going home sick; he couldn't take the package home with him, or Anusha would want to know why he wasn't at work and where he thought he was going; and a High Rudhrani gentleman didn't eat in the street or sitting in the hall outside an office, like some Rohini day laborer. It simply wasn't done.

  He couldn't go to the most logical person, either, the Minister for Land and Property; old Odaniya was a stickler for procedure and protocol and would likely refuse to talk to Chulayen altogether once he found out that Lunthanadi knew nothing of the visit. And the Minister for Defense wasn't likely to see a midlevel bureaucrat from another office, without an appointment and without recommendation.

  But Chulayen's parents had boasted a wide circle of friends among the Bashir's most trusted ministers and councillors, men and women who would welcome Chulayen for the memory of his parents and would—he hoped—hear him out once he explained what was troubling him.

  The welcome he received unreservedly; the understanding turned out to be a little harder to come by.

  * * *

  "Certainly, certainly, dear boy," his father's old friend Viripraj said. "Very—ah—conscientious—of you to concern yourself with these matters. But hardly my department, is it? Yours either, for that matter. You just route that on to the proper authorities, and I'm sure they'll see it's all taken care of."

  "But who are the proper authorities?" Chulayen asked. "And if the Bashir's Council didn't know how inaccessible the Jurgan Caves are, how can I be sure that these authorities will understand?"

  Viripraj's chuckle was rich as a well-aged red wine. Perhaps a wine a little past its prime . . . "Now, now, young Chulayen. You mustn't go setting yourself up as the only living expert on the world and how it should be run, not when you're talking to me. Not with somebody who saw you crawling around the floor in nothing but a cut-off shirt! Just give me the memorandum, and I'll see it reaches the proper person, and you can get back to work. Mustn't neglect your work, now, not with those pretty little girls of yours wanting marriage portions in a few years. What were their names again? Nila and Nela?" He reached out one hand, expectant.

  "Neenalaladhi and Neetavaruna." The twins' lively brown faces and sparkling black eyes smiled in Chulayen's mind. Anusha often talked of taking the children back to see the Jurgan Caves and give thanks to the Earth for their fine healthy family—not now, of course, but in a few years, when baby Vashi was old enough to travel and when the situation in the former state of Thamboon had become somewhat more settled.

  Perhaps, when they went, he could tell the girls how their father had preserved the Jurgan Caves so that they too could see the crystal chambers.

  "Thank you," Chulayen said, standing, "but I mustn't impose on you to that extent. It was a great kindness
in you to see me at all."

  * * *

  After Chulayen left, Councillor-Emeritus Viripraj sat thinking for a moment, then shook his head sadly. These young people, how rash they were, how incapable of seeing the whole picture! It was a harsh duty, but didn't he owe it to the memory of his old friend, Chulayen's father, to see the boy was brought to his senses? He rang a bronze bell and one of his confidential clerks came in.

  "Follow that young man who just left," Viripraj instructed him. "If he returns to the Office of Land and Property Contracts, come back here and report to me. If he goes anywhere else . . . well . . . I suppose you'd better come back and report in any case." It wasn't time, yet, to send a note to the Minister for Loyalty. That could wait. The boy might show the good sense to take himself back to his own department and work through the proper channels.

  * * *

  "You do not seem to understand the unique position of the Ministry for Defense," Lal Neena Somiti said coldly. "It is my privilege, indeed it is every Udaran subject's privilege to defer to the Defense Ministry's requirements above all else—saving, of course, the Ministry for Loyalty." Her right hand moved in a barely visible avert-the-evil sign, hardly more than a reflexive twitch.

  "When the requirements make sense," Chulayen said, "but this is a stupid pronouncement."

  "It is not for such as you to call the Bashir's Council stupid. 'When they come to shoe the turagai of the Bashir—' "

  " '—does the dung beetle stick out her foot?' " Chulayen finished for her. Lal Neena was as fond of old aphorisms as his boss Lunthanadi. "Lal Neena Somiti, if the turagai of the Bashir are already shod, might not even the dung beetle warn the Bashir that he is wasting money on a farrier? If they understood the position—"

  "I am sure they consulted the requisite experts before making their decision."

  "And had the 'requisite experts' ever been within half a kilo-lath of the Thamboon border?"

  "There is no Thamboon border," Lal Neena pointed out. "The former aggressive state of Thamboon has now been peacefully absorbed into Greater Udara, by the mercy of the Bashir, may his name be remembered forever. Your talk comes perilously close to disloyalty."

  "I only want to make sure this pronouncement isn't overruled on appeal!"

  "It won't be," said Lal Neena. "You'd do well to think more of your own life and career, Chulayen, and less of meddling in affairs that are beyond your province." Her tone softened. "I'm only telling you what your own mother would, if she were alive to see what you're getting up to. Adapt yourself to circumstances, Chulayen, as—"

  "As the water does to the pitcher," Chulayen finished tiredly. "And if the pitcher is broken, what becomes of the water?"

  Lal Neena shook her head. "Go home, Chulayen. Go home now, and return to your office tomorrow. It may not be too late."

  * * *

  "First Somiti in the Ministry for Trade, and now you think he's going up the mountain to the north quarter?" Viripraj sighed. The boy was working his way through his parents' influential friends like a madman with a lighted torch in the dry brush. Pundarik Zahin lived in one of the mansions on the north quarter of the mountain, and he was always to be found there since the paralysis of his legs had forced him to retire from the Ministry for Defense. Doubtless that would be Chulayen's next stop. The best thing Viripraj could do for him now would be to see that he was brought to his senses as soon as possible. Harsh but necessary. "Very well. Send this note to Zahin—and see that you get there before young Chulayen does!"

  * * *

  "Sir, you could verify that the Ministry has more than adequate stocks of saltpeter!" Chulayen begged.

  Pundarik Zahin stroked his long grey moustaches thoughtfully. "Adequate? Tricky word, that, boy. Adequate for what? Never know when we may need to repel aggression on our borders. Or put down uprisings within them."

  Chulayen looked blank. "There's never been any unrest against the Bashir." The Ministry for Loyalty was well known for stopping troublemakers before they could get fairly started, and Chulayen had always felt they did an excellent job. He liked living in a peaceful and prosperous state; what idiot wouldn't?

  "That's not to say there never will be any," Zahin pointed out. "Ministry for Loyalty can't be everywhere. And you know, those Thamboons, they're a wild lot, most of them are ethnic Rohini—naturally they're going to take a subordinate place to us Rudhrani, now that the countries are merged."

  Chulayen nodded. That was the logical outcome, of course. Everybody knew that Rudhrani were smarter, faster, more logical, generally better fitted for management and government. Since most of the Thamboon people were Rohini, their country must have been struggling along with people unfitted by nature for the positions of leadership they were forced to assume. Of course Udaran-educated Rudhrani would be filling those positions now, and possibly some of the Thamboons were too short-sighted to see that the changeover was for their own good. Still—

  "It's not going to make us any more popular in the former State of Thamboon," he said, "if we start by destroying a natural beauty spot which many Rohini consider also as a sacred place."

  Zahin's bushy grey eyebrows shot up. "Sacred place? Perhaps that's why the Bashir's Council condemned the caves, my boy, ever think of that? Gathering spot for disaffected Rohini, these wild-eyed cultists. Better all round to set them to peacefully mining saltpeter—that's the kind of menial job Rohini are good at, after all—then they won't have time for all this Inner Light Way nonsense."

  "But there's no way to transport the saltpeter, even if we did need it! It's just not profitable to bring anything big and heavy down out of those mountains. It would only be worth industrializing the caves if the product were something very small and valuable—" Chulayen stopped in midsentence. He had never seen Zahin like that, as if his face were carved from something harder than stone. This wasn't dear old "Uncle" Pundarik with the bad legs that he was arguing with; it was General Pundarik Zahin, conqueror of the half dozen states that had been combined to create Udara before Chulayen's birth. It was Defense Minister Emeritus Pundarik Zahin, still very much an active voice with the ruler whom he had brought to power and kept there through ten years of civil war.

  "I really think, Chulayen," said this stranger, in a voice so carefully level that it was worse than the wildest tongue-lashing, "that you should go home now."

  "Not back to work?" It was only midafternoon.

  Zahin shook his head. If his face hadn't been so still, so carefully expressionless, Chulayen would have thought he looked sad. It must be a trick of the light. "No. Not today. It's too late."

  "You mean—they've already started mining the caves?"

  Zahin looked startled for a moment. "Well—that too."

  * * *

  As he made his way down the mountain, Chulayen pondered those last words of Zahin's. They were a strange echo of Lal Neena Somiti's. She had said It may not be too late; Zahin, It's too late. Too late for what?

  The top of the mountain, the fine tall whitewashed houses surrounding the Bashir's palace, the peacock gardens and the fountains that cascaded down steep flights of terraced basins, were still bathed in golden afternoon sun. But as Chulayen reached the lower levels, where Puvaathi village had originally been built and where it had exploded into a disorganized nest of office buildings, converted houses, street markets and kava houses, the slope of the mountain behind him caught and held the sun and turned afternoon into blue dusk. He walked from sunlight into shadow and felt the cool air of early of autumn on his face. Here the shadows turned muddy brown and dirty whitewashed buildings into blue palaces, made a veiled princess of a Rohini street vendor and a hidden treasure of a market stall's sacks of open spices. Chulayen took a deep breath of the clear mountain air with its underlying flavors of wood smoke, roasting meat, spices, and ghaya hair. Well, okay, not so clear maybe as it was up on the clean, cool, sunwashed mountaintop. But the mingled smells were comforting, were familiar, were home. His steps quickened as he turned away from
the central crossings where shops and vendors clustered, toward a tangle of wood-and-mud houses that teetered precariously down the lower slopes of the mountain, one story tall on the west side and three on the east side. Behind a latticed window, someone sang mournfully from the song of Rusala.

  * * *

  Sada na rajian hakimi; sada rajian des:

  Sada na nove ghar apna, nafra, bhath pia pardes.

  * * *

  "Kings are not always rulers;

  kings have not always lands:

  They have not always homes;

  they fall into great troubles in strange lands."

  * * *

  "Buy a yai pao, honored sir?" whined the stooped old Rohini pancake vendor who usually worked just a few hundred steps from Chulayen's house, in the angle where three sets of buildings met and scattered down the slope in different directions. "My last one, honored sir, and with it for a free sauce, all the news of the day."

  "Thank you, but the woman of my house would be annoyed were I to enter the house munching on dir—on fare not cooked by her own hands," Chulayen stopped himself from saying dirty street food just in time. It was right for a High Rudhrani gentleman to be courteous to all, even the lowest beggar; and at least this old woman was not begging, but trying to earn an honest living by selling the greasy pancakes sprinkled with slices of sharp fresh onion. The things did smell good, setting his stomach rumbling and reminding him that he had forgotten to eat earlier.

  "So stand here and eat it while I tell you the news, grandson! You should not go home hungry and unprepared." Chulayen felt he really ought not to allow such familiarity, but such kindly concern emanated from her wrinkled face that he couldn't bring himself to snub her.