400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  Elliou was the first to drop out, and since she and I were lovers then, after I broke up with Shendy, naturally I went with her. We started the first Garten on Banks Island, in that balmy interim when the Arctic Circle had just begun to steam up from polar evaporation, before the real cooling set in.

  It was really beautiful at first, this natural migration of kids from everywhere, coming together, all of us with this instantaneous understanding of who we were, what we needed. We had always been these small stunted things growing in the shadows of enormous hulks, structures we didn’t understand, complex systems we played no part in – while all we really wanted to do, you see, was play.

  That was how most of the destruction came about – as play. "Riot" is really the wrong word to describe what we were doing – at least in our best moments. The Gartens were just places where we could feel safe and be ourselves.

  It didn’t last, though. Shendy, always the doomsayer, had warned us – but she was such a pessimist it was easy to ignore her.

  The Six had been the original impetus – the best expression of our desires and dreams. Now the Six were only Five. We found ourselves listening to the old recordings, losing interest in the live Five shows.

  Then Five turned to Four, and that broke up soon after. They went their own ways.

  Then Elliou and I had a huge fight, and I never saw her again.

  The Gartens disintegrated almost before they’d planted roots. Hard to say what the long-range effects were, if any. I’m still too much a product of my childhood to be objective.

  But forget the received dult wisdom that puberty was our downfall. That’s ridiculous.

  It was a good two years after I left the Garten before my voice began to change.

  A Quote For Your Consideration

  Intense adolescent exploration, as far as we know, is common to all animals. Science’s speculation is that such exploring ensures the survival of a group of animals by familiarizing them with alternatives to their home ranges, which they can turn to in an emergency.

  - Barry Lopez

  Where Are They Now?

  Elliou Cambira: Wife, mother, author of Who Did I Think I Was? Makes occasional lecture tours.

  Dabney Tuakutza: Owner of "Big Baby Bistro" snack bar chain. Left Earth’s gravity at age thirteen and has resided at zero gee ever since, growing enormously fat.

  Nexter Crowtch: Financier, erotic film producer, one-time owner of the Sincinnati Sex-Change Warriors. Recently convicted of real estate and credit fraud, bribery of public officials. Awaiting sentencing.

  Corinne Braub: Whereabouts unknown.

  Likki Velex: Conceptual dance programmer and recluse.

  Shendy Anickson: Took her own life.

  Shendy’s Last Words (First Draft)

  I’m sick – sick to death. There’s nothing to say but I still have the vomitous urge to say anything, just to spew. My brain feels burned, curdled, denatured. Scorching Summer came too early for us orphans. Straight on into Winter. I don’t remember Spring and know I’ll never see another. Too much Twelving, none of it right – it wasn’t my fault, they started it, I ran with what I was given/what they gave me till I ran out of things to say, new things, meaningful things. Nothing to push against. My mind was full of big ugly shapes, as bad as anything they’d ever injected, but these I had built myself. I’d knock them down but the ruins covered everything, there was nowhere to build anything new. I knew who I was for the first time, and I hated it. Straight from infancy to adulthood. Adolescence still lies ahead of me, but that’s only physical, it can’t take me anywhere I haven’t been already. Everything’s spoiled – me most of all. I wanted to start again. I wanted to go back to what I was before. I got this kid, this little girl, much younger than me, she reminded me of myself when I was just starting out. I Twelved her. Took a big dose of baby. It was too soft; the shoggoths came and almost melted me. The brain slag turned all bubbly and hardened like molten glass plunged in icewater; cracks shot all through me. Thought to recapture something but I nearly exploded from the softness. All I could do to drag myself out here to R’lyeh Shores. Got a condo – bought the whole complex and had it all to myself. Corinne came out to visit on her way to disappearing. She brought a vial of brainsap, unlabelled, said this was what I was looking for, when I shot it I’d see. Then she went away. I waited a long time. I didn’t want another personality at this late stage. Twelve. Killed me to think that I was – finally – twelve myself. And that’s what I did. I Twelved Myself. I took the dose Corinne had brought – just this morning – and first I got the old urge to write as it came on, but then the shock was too great and I could only sit there hang-jawed. It was Me. A younger me. They must have drawn and stored the stuff before the first experiment – a control/led/ling substance, innocent unpolluted Me. The rush made me sick so sick. Like going back in time, seeing exactly what would become of me. Like being three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve all at once. Like being a baby and having some decrepit old hag come up to me and say, this is what you’re going to do to yourself, what do you have to live for anyway? see how awful it’s going to be? you think you’re cute but everyone will know how ugly you really are, here, why don’t you just come understand everything? And baby just drools and starts to cry because she knows the truth is exactly what she’s being told by the stinky old hag who is herself. Is Me. All at once and forever. This is final. What I was looking for – and I’ve ruined it. Nowhere newer; no escape hatch; no greener garden. Only one way to fix what they broke so long ago. I loved to hate; I built to wreck; I lived to die. All the injections they doped and roped me into, not a single one of them convinced me I should cry.

  * * *

  “Wunderkindergarten” copyright 1992 Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in In Dreams (1992), edited by Kim Newman and Paul McAuley.

  THE VULTURE MAIDEN

  With the development of our socialist system, the social system for the natural extinction of religion was established.

  — Ganze Prefecture Policy on Religious Freedom Chapter 5, Section 1: “Freedom of Religious Beliefs is a Long-Term Policy That Will Prevail Until the Natural Extinction of Religion.”

  I.

  The Spring Festival began at sunrise with the roar of a giant kangling carried by two monks and blown by a barrel-chested third who stood on the highest wall of the Shining Hill monastery’s central temple. Golden light, like the voice of the horn made visible, lanced into the gray shadows that covered the broad valley as the sun peered through a notch between distant peaks capped with violet snow. Frost evaporated from the tufted brownish grasses, mingling with low, icy vapors that made the sky appear to shimmer like a silken tapestry. In the hall below, the crashing of cymbals rose to overpower the kangling’s dying wail, and then came the low, deep-throated chanting of the monks. The rocky hill behind the monastery began to glow with a warm, honeyed light.

  As the monks turned away from the sun and toward Shining Hill, carrying their immense horn back into the building, the sunlight touched a plume of dust rising from the road to the monastery. Along that road, from the direction of the nearby village, a convoy of six trucks drummed and rattled. Ahead of them walked a long procession of villagers bearing scarves and wildflowers, sacks of nuts and grain and other offerings. The trucks sounded their horns, scarcely slowing as they approached the crowd; villagers scattered quickly, pulling each other out of the way, shouting warnings to those ahead. They moved to the roadside and glowered at the passing vehicles, saying nothing, not daring to curse the drivers because they knew that such words hung in the air and joined with other unwise things they might have uttered in a moment of despair, and eventually ended up in an official’s file so that one day the speaker might be summoned to a brief “interview” and never be seen again in the village. This was even more likely now that the ledhon rukhag, the work gang whose trucks these were, had been dispatched to the village.

  The trucks reached the Shining Hill monastery just as the hil
l began to lose some of its legendary luster. They parked on the rutted earth before the main building. When the engines died, the sound of chanting filled the silence. High-pitched bells were ringing and pure songbowls singing, their weird wavering notes as piercing as the thin air that scoured Zhogmi Chhodak’s nostrils, threatening him with yet another nosebleed, when he opened his door and stepped down from the first truck. This was spring? His feet were numb despite the heavy boots and thick woolen socks he had brought from Beijing; a shock of cold passed through his soles and up his legs, as if the very earth were trying to stab him, as if the elements of the Tibetan Autonomous Region harbored an irrational enmity and would strike him down if they could.

  Full of regret at leaving the warmth of the heated cab, he surveyed the grounds of Shining Hill. The local Democratic Management Committee had promised to meet his work gang on the steps of the main building, but there was no sign of them. The compound was sorry-looking, half-finished, no better than some prisons he had toured, despite all the money the monks had requested for restoration so that Shining Hill might attract a tourist trade. That was no longer a priority, however. Tourists had brought welcome money into the TAR, but too many other contaminants traveled with them, diseases for which no inoculant existed other than total isolation. Capitalism was a greater scourge than the bitter winds that swept the high Tibetan plateau. Under the current protection of martial law, Zhogmi could act without caring how the propagandists of the Dalai clique would interpret his actions. He had a sort of freedom here.

  Zhogmi Chhodak could not imagine a more isolated place. He longed for the busy streets of Beijing, the cultural center of the world. He shared a common ancestry with the villagers, but nothing else. The Party offered incentives to mainland Chinese who moved to Tibet, but so far there had been few migrants to this region. In Lhasa and some other parts of the TAR, the indigenous population was outnumbered more than ten to one by immigrants; would that it were so here. The villagers were a primitive, superstitious people. The shame they caused Zhogmi sharpened his determination to bring them forward, though still he cursed his Tibetan blood, which had landed him in this remote outpost. One could almost imagine that the Revolution had never reached this spot—except that the rubble of the monastery still showed the marks of mortar shelling, and the hill was in places torn by craters made when he was a boy.

  The chanting in the temple continued unabated, and the villagers on the road were nearer. Zhogmi’s men stood shivering in their coats, stamping on the hard dirt, blowing on their hands. His driver had gone around a corner of the temple to urinate, so Zhogmi opened the driver’s door and bleated the horn. It sounded feeble after the kangling’s roar, and had no apparent effect on the ritual. Nonetheless, within seconds there was a stir inside the temple entrance, and four men hurried down the steps to greet the trucks.

  “Zhogmi! Welcome!” said a broadly smiling man, speaking in a hushed voice, as if not wishing to impinge on the sounds coming from the hall. Jowo Tenzin was Tibetan, paunchy and balding, and dressed very inappropriately in a native chuba that did little to disguise his bulk. As leader of the Democratic Management Committee, that agency which oversaw the functioning of the monastery, Tenzin was responsible for enforcing the policies of the Nationalities and Religious Affairs Bureau Commission. He seized Zhogmi’s hand and shoulder, bringing him up the steps toward the entrance. The other three DMC members, dressed more suitably in the khaki or dark-blue uniforms of the Republic, greeted Zhogmi more cautiously.

  “The seasonal ceremonies are just beginning,” Tenzin said breathlessly. “If you wish to see—”

  “I have no desire to see misguided displays of superstition.” Zhogmi pulled from Tenzin’s grasp and took a stand on the topmost step, just outside the temple entrance. He could smell a rancid burning odor and a perfume of incense. “Nor should you indulge in such behavior.”

  “Indulge? I don’t encourage a thing—I merely permit what the law allows.”

  The youngest DMC member, a Chinese man named Jing Meng-Chen, moved closer. “We monitor the ceremonies only to ensure their legitimacy. It is all too easy to subvert the rites with irrelevant commentary disguising a political purpose.”

  Zhogmi nodded his approval, and waited to see if Tenzin agreed. Jing Meng-Chen clearly would have been a sensible choice to head the DMC, but it was not uncommon to secure the sympathy of locals by entrusting some authority to a malleable Tibetan. Such flexibility, inevitably, also played a part in counterrevolutionary conduct. Since Jing Meng-Chen did not seem the sort to compromise principles for the sake of personal gain, Zhogmi decided that he was the man to carry out his bidding.

  “I appreciate your devotion,” he told Jing Meng-Chen. “However, further observation will not be necessary this morning.

  “That’s fine,” Jowo Tenzin said happily. “They are a trustworthy lot.”

  “On the contrary,” Zhogmi said, and watched sharp creases suddenly divide Tenzin’s broad brow. “The ritual will be stopped immediately.”

  “But . . . but really!” Tenzin protested. “That’s quite illegal.”

  “Not under the circumstances,” Zhogmi said.

  He saw that Jing Meng-Chen did not question his command, and in fact seemed ready to carry it out. “Put an end to that racket,” Zhogmi told him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And take some of my men along if you think you’ll need help.”

  Jing Meng-Chen glanced at the machine guns in the hands of the work team.

  “That won’t be necessary, sir.”

  “Nonetheless—it’s best for efficiency.” He signaled several men toward the temple.

  “Appreciated, sir,” said Jing Meng-Chen. He turned back into the temple, followed by several soldiers of the work team. The other two DMC men also went inside, though Jowo Tenzin remained on the steps exhorting Zhogmi for an explanation.

  “Last night I reviewed the monastery’s accounts, Jowo Tenzin, and I found much to trouble me. Government grants have apparently vanished; huge amounts were withdrawn to make purchases for which no invoices appear; and there are numerous unauthorized expenditures. Unless and until you can explain each of these discrepancies, I am seizing the monastery’s assets. No money shall be withdrawn from the monastic account either by monks or the DMC.”

  “But—but there are day-to-day requirements. The monks must eat.”

  “They shall earn a useful living doing necessary public works, as they should have been all along, instead of wasting resources on this ruin. What tourist would visit Shining Hill? It has no historic significance.”

  “To the villagers—”

  “Would you encourage nostalgia for the old days of feudal oppression? Buddhism itself teaches the danger of attachment to illusion and material things.”

  Jowo Tenzin’s stricken look told Zhogmi that he had made the right first move in stanching further waste and uncovering deceit.

  “What do you know of Buddhism?” Tenzin whispered.

  “I have served in the Tibetan Buddhist Guidance Committee and the Tibetan Buddhist Association.”

  Zhogmi had been aware for some time of the approach of the villagers. They stopped at the yard before the temple and anxiously looked toward the entrance. The presence of the work gang discouraged them. Zhogmi’s men faced the growing crowd, guns at the ready. They had seen such crowds before, and the villagers had seen such men. No one wished to move. But the day was warming, the hampering ice in Zhogmi’s joints beginning to thaw. The sky shimmered like silk, like a thangka painted in unreal colors.

  In the temple the monks fell silent.

  Jowo Tenzin said quietly, “Perhaps if . . . if you waited until later, after the ceremony, it would benefit your plans. Many of them have brought offerings that might make up for the debts—”

  “This monastery is not permitted to tax or take donations from the people,” Zhogmi said sharply. “They already struggle to live with what they have. You dare not encourage religious parasites!
”

  “I only—”

  At that instant, someone inside the temple let out a cry, scarcely muffled by the stone walls. A burst of gunfire answered it. Bullets must have ricocheted from the ceremonial bells and bowls, for a hideous, metallic, many-voiced music followed the sound of the guns. This fractured wailing was drowned out by the screams of the villagers, who in that instant rushed the trucks and crowded toward the temple steps.

  Zhogmi’s gun was already in his hand, but the size of the mob startled him. He sprang back into the entryway while other men of his team ran forward to defend it. Broad pillars inside the door offered excellent cover while they fired down into the crowd. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jowo Tenzin dash down a side corridor; other monks rushed about, trying to find cover. He squeezed off several shots over the heads of the villagers, who, after their initial indignant charge, had realized the futility of their position and begun falling back behind the trucks. Most were already running down the road toward the village. A few bodies struggled on the bare ground before the temple, and then it was over.

  Zhogmi called a cease-fire. There had been no answering shots from the mob, not even a flung stone. It occurred to him that they had charged the temple out of concern for the monks; but in the moment of their assault, he had felt claustrophobic, on the verge of being overwhelmed. Now that feeling passed. The work team was in control

  Jing Meng-Chen stumbled from the interior of the building, holding his hand to a bloody shoulder. “One of your men fired,” he reported.