Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “Yes.” She let the answer stand.

  The bank fell away sharply, and below Mingolla’s feet the surface of the water was figured with eddies forming around the slick brown tips of a submerged branch; black flies hovered above them, and shadowy fingerlings darted in the green murk of the shallows. Farther along the bank a row of tree ferns leaned out over the river, their stalks ten or twelve feet long, their plumy fronds nodding: the nodding gave them the semblance of an animal vitality, and they seemed to be signaling their approval of all that passed before their strange eyeless heads, measuring the peace of Fire Zone Emerald.

  “All right,” said Mingolla finally. “I’ll start. You told me you learned stuff that made what you were doing meaningless. What was it?”

  She drew a line in the clay with her forefinger. “There’s another war being fought. A war within a war.”

  His impulse was to ridicule her, but her glumness was convincing. “What sorta war?”

  “Not really a war,” she said. “A power struggle. Between two groups of psychics, I think.”

  Maybe she was crazy after all. “How’d you find out ’bout it?”

  “My superiors told me. That’s how they work. They build you up, give you power, watch how you handle it. And when they think you’re so involved with the power that all you want is more, they admit you to their”—her voice quavered—“their goddamn fraternity! They tell you a little at a time, they give you clues to see how you’ll react. Well, they told me too damn much!” She looked at Mingolla, anguish in her face. “I believed in the revolution. I gave it everything…everything! And there isn’t any revolution! There isn’t even a counterrevolution! It’s all camouflage.”

  Mingolla remembered Tully’s outburst about the war not making sense, remembered de Zedeguí’s cryptic statements. He told Debora about Tully, and she said, “That’s it! That’s how they begin, by seeding doubt. And next they tell you about special operations, drop hints about underlying purposes. Then they present the whole picture…nothing specific, because they still don’t trust you. Nobody trusts anybody. That’s the one verity. Everything is suspect, everyone’s after power. And no one gives a damn about anything else. The cause is a joke!” She looked at him again, calmer now. “Do you know why I deserted, the final straw? It was because of what they told me about you.”

  He waited for her to go on.

  “They said you were going to be assigned to kill me. I know how the training goes, how isolated you are. Never more than a couple of other people around. If you’d been given an assignment, only your trainer and the person in charge of the therapy would know about it, and that meant that one of them had to be in league with one of my superiors. With all the other information I had, I realized that what was really going on must be so elitist, so complicated and filled with intrigues, I’d never figure it out…not while I was still involved in it.”

  Mingolla kept his eye on the eddying water, watching strands of dark scum being spun loose from a clot of mud caught on the tip of the submerged branch. “It’s hard to swallow,” he said. “But I’ve heard some things, too.”

  “There’s more,” she said. “Amalia knows it.”

  “Amalia?”

  “She’s another clue. A little girl. She’s in my hut. Sleeping. That’s all she does now.” Debora rubbed the back of her neck as if the subject were making her weary. “That’s why I rescued you. I’m not strong enough to wake her anymore. I need your help.”

  “That’s all…that’s the only reason?”

  “Why else would I? You were hunting me.” She said this with defiance, but he could hear the lie.

  “Not now…I’m not hunting you now.”

  “No, but that isn’t by choice.”

  “Debora,” he said. “I was just…”

  She jumped up, walked a couple of paces off.

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly,” he said.

  The wind veiled her mouth with a sweep of dark hair; behind her, three old shirtless Indian men were sitting beside one of the huts, staring at them with fascination. “Do you want to help or not?” she asked harshly.

  “Sure,” said Mingolla. “That’s what I want.”

  Amalia was a chubby Indian girl of twelve or thirteen, with a psychic’s heat and a melanin deficiency that had dappled her reddish brown skin with pink splotches; in the candlelit gloom of Debora’s hut the splotches looked raw and vivid, like scars made by poisoned flowers pressed to her face. She lay with one arm hanging over the side of a hammock and wore a dirty white dress imprinted with a design of blue kittens. Her breathing was deep and regular, her eyelids twitched, and according to Debora she had been asleep for almost a week.

  “She just ran down,” Debora said. “Like a windup toy moving slower and slower. Then she stopped. But even before that she wasn’t right. I thought she was retarded. She’d lie there and stare at the walls and make noises. Then she’d have violent spells…break things and scream. Once in a while she’d be lucid, and I could get her to talk. She talked about Panama, about a place she called Sector Jade…she said everything was being decided there. A lot of what she said sounded rote, like pieces of poems and stories she’d memorized.”

  The last of Mingolla’s doubts vanished. “I’ve heard stuff about Sector Jade.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Just the name, and that it was important.”

  A starved-looking cow stopped by the door and looked inside the hut, its ripe smell filtering in. Its mottled red-and-white skin was sucked in over its cheekbones like a caved-in map, and its unpruned horns had grown into circles that almost met its eyes. It snorted, then moseyed off.

  “What else did she say?” Mingolla asked.

  “She’d talk about where she used to live. With one of ‘the others,’ she’d say. She said she was one of his ‘broken toys.’ I asked what she meant by ‘the others,’ and she said they were like us, but not as strong…though they were stronger in some ways. Because they were hidden, because they couldn’t be detected.”

  Flies droned in the thatch, a chicken clucked. It was hot, and sweat burned in the creases of Mingolla’s neck. He breathed through his mouth. “It’s weird,” he said. “When I was in therapy, I never worried about failures or fuck-ups with the drugs…even though they gave me an overdose once. I just assumed everything was fine. Beats me why I leapt to that assumption, but I did.”

  “You think that’s what happened to Amalia…a failure with the drugs?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Maybe. But she might not have been sound before they gave them to her.”

  “Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.”

  “I should warn you,” Debora said. “She’s strong…very strong. And her thoughts are chaotic.”

  He glanced at her, held her eyes. Her skin was almost the same shade of ashen brown as the air, and for an instant the eyes appeared to be disembodied, floating toward him. She moved back, nervous, and put a hand on the hammock ropes.

  “I’ll give it a shot,” he said.

  Chaotic was too mild a term to describe the process of Amalia’s thoughts; they seemed a fiery shrapnel spraying around inside her skull. The electric sensation was overwhelming, and the subsequent arousal shocking in its suddenness. “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  “Can’t you do it?” Anxiety in Debora’s voice.

  “I’m not sure.” He rubbed his temples; the pain there was more an inflammation than an ache.

  After several tries he became acclimated and began to project alertness and well-being. Though painful and dizzying, his contact with Amalia’s mind proved instructive. He was beginning to understand that what he had perceived as random flux was in fact an infinity of patterns, most of them so minimal that they tended to obscure one another; and he found that what he was doing intuitively was reinforcing certain of them, channeling his energy and strength along their course. Some of Amalia’s patterns were—like that one of Nate’s—powerful, easily perceived, and
the longer he worked on her, the more dominant these grew. However, half an hour went past, and he still had not been able to wake her.

  “I could be here all day,” he said to Debora. “Why don’t we work on her together?”

  Debora frowned, plucked at the hammock ropes. “I guess it’s worth a try,” she said. She ducked under the ropes and stationed herself on the opposite side of the hammock. “All right.”

  Mingolla’s attention was focused on Amalia, on the boil of her thought, and at first he failed to notice the presence of a new and more controlled electrical flow, one whose borders kept withdrawing from his own. When he did notice it, he mistook it for one of Amalia’s patterns and pushed toward it with all his strength. At the moment of contact he had an impression of two streams of crackling energy knitting together, entwining, tightening, forming a kind of liquid knot that grew more and more complex, twisting in and out of itself, and his focus became limited to completing that knot, to contriving its ultimate expression, until even that intent was absorbed into a blaze of sexuality: like a man clutching a live wire, his thoughts sparking, conscious only of the voltage pouring through him. And then he found himself staring at Debora, unsure of who had broken the circuit and of how it had been accomplished. She looked terrified, her mouth open, breathing labored, and appeared on the verge of bolting from the hut. He wanted to say something to calm her, to stop her, because he saw that a barrier between them had been eliminated. He saw this very clearly, and he believed he had also seen down to the core of their mutuality; he didn’t understand what he had seen—its shape was as complicated as the knot they had created—but the fact that he could see it at all debunked the notion that his feelings for her had been manufactured. Enhanced, maybe. Their progress sped up, hurried along. But not manufactured. He believed she saw this, too.

  “Debora?” Amalia’s voice, weak and whispery.

  Her eyes were open, and she thrashed about as if being swallowed by the hammock.

  “How do you feel?” Debora leaned down to her, stroked her hair.

  Amalia stared at Mingolla. Though not in the least pretty, asleep she had embodied a youthful healthiness; now a sullen energy had gained control of her features, and she looked to be a fat little prig of a girl, the one with whom nobody wants to play.

  “Why do you love him?” she asked Debora. “He does evil things to people.”

  “He’s a soldier, he has to do bad things sometimes. And I don’t love him.”

  “You can’t fool me,” Amalia said. “I know!”

  “Think what you like,” said Debora patiently. “Right now we want you to tell us more about Panama.”

  “No!” Amalia twisted onto her side, facing toward Mingolla, her dumpling belly netted by the hammock mesh. “I want to play with you.”

  “Please, Amalia. We’ll play later.”

  Mingolla started to exert his influence on her, but the instant he touched Amalia’s mind, a pattern he hadn’t noticed, one that must have been buried beneath the surface, began flowing back and forth, creating an endless loop that seemed to be threading through his thoughts, fastening itself to them with stitches of bright force. A point of heat bloomed in the center of his forehead, grew into a white-hot sun of pain filling his skull. He felt the jolt of a fall, heard Debora crying out. The pain dwindled, and he saw Amalia sitting up, skewering him with a look of piggy triumph.

  “I want him to play, too,” she said.

  “We’ll both play with you afterward,” said Debora. “After you tell us about Panama.”

  “You play with her.” Mingolla pushed himself up. He gingerly touched the back of his head, found a lump. Then, alarmed by Amalia’s scowl, he backed toward the door.

  “Don’t hurt him,” said Debora.

  A sly smile spread across Amalia’s face. “Say you love him, and I won’t.”

  Debora cast a grim look toward Mingolla.

  “Say it!” Amalia insisted.

  “I love him.”

  “And you’ll keep loving him forever and ever, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have something to eat afterward?”

  Mingolla almost laughed at the greediness that came across Amalia’s face, it was so comically extreme an expression.

  “I’ll cook you chicken and rice,” Debora said. “I promise.”

  “All right!” Amalia lay back in the hammock, arms folded across her immature breasts. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell us ’bout Sector Jade,” said Mingolla.

  She glared at him, then turned her eyes to the ceiling. The innocence of sleep seemed to possess her once again. She remained silent for a long moment, and Mingolla said, “Is she…”

  “Shh!” Debora waved to him to quiet. “She’ll tell us.”

  “Into…” Amalia wetted her lips. “…Vanished…all vanished beneath…as smooth as stone, like a sector of jade amid the bright tiles, and he imagined that they would never reappear, that they were traveling an unguessable distance to a country beneath the shell of the world to which Panama was affixed like a curious pin on a swath of blue silk, and there, in that faraway country, the blood knot would be unraveled and the peace would be forged.” Her intonation grew firmer. “Not the peace that passeth understanding, no, this would be a most comprehensible peace, one purchased with banknotes of blood and shame, with the coinage issued by those who at last have realized that what is fair in war must be incorporated into the tactics of peace, and from this issue would be established an unnatural yet stable order, a counterfeit of salvation, which is in itself a counterfeit of hope, and once…and once…” She sighed, lapsed again into silence.

  “I’ve heard that before…those words.” Mingolla couldn’t jog his memory.

  “Where?”

  “It’ll come to me. Ask her about ‘the others.’”

  This time there was a longer pause after Debora had put the question, but when Amalia began to speak it was with more certainty.

  “…Only the latest incidence in the centuries-long feud, which was called by the Madradonas the War of the Flower, this euphemistic characterization exemplary of their tendency to embroider reality. Now Diego Sotomayor de Cabrillo, whose niece had been violated, was not slow to take his vengeance, yet went about it in typical Sotomayor fashion, preferring to concoct an ornate and subtle reprisal rather than initiating an immediate strike. He was at the time a man of great influence in the government of Panama, and using his high office, he sent against the Madradonas an army of tax assessors and other civil servants, by this harassment seeking to occupy their attention while he prepared his plot. From the populace of Barrio Clarín he selected a witling tool, a handsome young boy with a shred of the natural ability, whose brain had been damaged by a fall in his infancy, and from this stone of a child he constructed over the years a weapon of sublime elegance, supplying him with the gifts of poetry and song, making of him a pretty toy that would be sure to delight Serafina, the youngest daughter of his nemesis, and burying in the deepest labyrinth of the boy’s thought a violent potential to be triggered by the sight of her naked body…”

  “Son of a bitch!” Mingolla pounded a fist into his palm.

  “Don’t!” Debora bent over Amalia, who appeared to have dropped off into a deep sleep. “You can’t interrupt her. She just stops if you do. Damn! Now we’ll have to wake her again.”

  “It’s okay. She said enough.” Mingolla went to the door, stood looking out at the lethargic activity of the village. Women rolling cornmeal on wooden flats, sleepy children lolling in hammocks, pigs waddling and snooting. “It’s like you were telling me. Clues. Izaguirre was giving me clues.”

  Debora joined him in the doorway. “I don’t understand.”

  “What she calls ‘the others,’ they’re characters in a story about two families who’re addicted to this plant that gives them mental powers. They can influence people like we do, but it takes them a long time to get the job done. They’re weak.” He gave a ru
eful laugh. “But they’re hidden. Their power isn’t detectable.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Wake her ass up again, milk her dry, and head the fuck away from Panama.”

  “That wouldn’t do any good. She always uses the same quotes. It’s probably all she’s been programmed to say. I just never understood the part about the families.” She looked up at Mingolla, seemed startled by his proximity, and walked off toward the river.

  “Where you going?” he called.

  She didn’t break stride. “For a walk…to think.”

  He caught up to her, fell into step. “I’ll go with you.”

  “No.” She paused beside a hut in whose doorway two naked little girls were playing, flattening cakes of mud between their hands. “I’d rather be by myself.”

  “We’ve got more to talk about.”

  “I think we’ve covered everything.”

  “We haven’t covered you and me.”

  “That’s a dead issue.”

  “Bullshit! I know damn well what you feel.”

  She took a step back, not in fear, but as if she needed distance in order to see the whole picture. “I’m sorry,” she said coolly. “I may have misled you. There’s…”

  “Uh-uh. You…”

  “…absolutely no chance of a deeper relationship between you and me.”

  “You can’t deny what you feel.”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  Her voice had risen in volume, and the two little girls were gazing at them in awe.

  “Sure, you save my life and tell me it’s ’cause I can help you with Amalia. Then we wake her and you say she’s already told you everything she knows. You didn’t need my help. So why’d you save me?”

  “I felt responsible,” she said. “I got you into this.”

  “Be real. It didn’t take Amalia saying you loved me to make it true.”

  Anger notched her brow. “If you think I’m going to let emotion control me, then you don’t know me. The revolution, that’s…”

  “There isn’t any revolution,” he reminded her.