Escape From Kathmandu

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  But they weren’t done with me yet.

  Because the day after we got back, there was a knock at my door.

  People rarely visit me in my room. So I picked up my Bluet stove, planning on heaving it at Freds’s face if it was him and then making a run for it, and I yanked the door open shouting “What do you want!” and it was Freds and I let fly with the stove and he ducked and it went sailing down into the courtyard of the Star, clanging across the cobblestones.

  But there was a couple there standing beside Freds, and who was it but Nathan Howe and Sarah Hornsby. “Nathan!” I said. “Sarah!”

  “George!” they said, taken aback by my welcome.

  Other than that, they looked the same as the last time I had seen them, two years before. Nathan still had his perfect seal-fur beard, and now he wore the jacket with leather patches on the elbows that the beard demanded, so that I assumed he had gotten tenure or would get tenure as soon as an academic committee spotted him; as upright, clean-cut, straightforward and true blue as they come, our Nathan. And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild. I am not into New Age greetings myself, but I decided to change my ways in order to give Sarah a big hug, and it was inspiring. Shaking Nathan’s hand I caught sight of rings on their fingers and said, “What’s this? Married?”

  They nodded. Big smile from Nathan, the lucky devil.

  “Fantastic!” I said. I recollected myself and waved them into the room. “Come on in!”

  “What happened to you, George?” Sarah asked as they entered. “You look like you were in an accident.”

  “I was,” I said. “I agreed to do Freds a favor.”

  “We had a blast,” Freds said, sitting in his usual spot on the floor.

  “That’s funny,” Nathan said as he and Sarah and I sat on bed and chair. “We wanted to ask you to do us a favor too, and we found out last week from Freds that you were still living here at the Star—but we haven’t been able to find you at home.”

  “Well, that’s because Freds and I…”

  I noticed the blush flaring on Freds’s cheeks. I stared at him, and he hung his head and tried to sink down into the floor. “It’s because Freds needed my help keeping some friends’ jungle camp in business. Didn’t you, Freds?”

  Freds nodded, head still bowed onto his chest. “Uh huh, that’s right,” he muttered.

  Now Freds is a bad liar. That is not to say that he isn’t great at evading the truth, or omitting it, or twisting it to serve his purposes; as someone who has been manipulated more than once by him into maniac deeds, I have a healthy respect for his cunning and unreliability. But at the actual act of bald-faced lying, he is inept. He blushes, his face contorts, he squints at you like Popeye to see if you are watching him, he stammers. He tells howlers so stupid a five-year-old would doubt them.

  So I stared hard at him. “If Nathan and Sarah asked you where I was, they probably mentioned to you that they were going to ask me to do them a favor, right?”

  “I don’t recall,” Freds muttered.

  “But Nathan probably does,” I said, shifting on the bed so that I was hanging over Freds a little better. “Don’t you, Nathan? Didn’t you tell Freds what you wanted with me?”

  “Why yes,” Nathan said, tilting his head curiously. “I think I did.”

  “And as soon as you did, Freds here ran and got me and dragged me off to the jungle. It’s enough to make you suspect that he doesn’t want me to help you”—and I leaned over and shouted into Freds’s ear—“isn’t it?”

  “I forgot,” Freds said. He raised his head to look at us, and it was like there was a big lie detector right behind him with a whole bank of red lights strobing and a siren going off. His eyes looked like they were about to spin in their sockets. “I just plain forgot, that’s all, and when my buds down at Chitwan Camp asked me to bring some friends down I naturally thought of George here.” Reddened southern country face, long blond hippie hair tied back in a pony tail: there couldn’t have been a worse liar in the world. He was blinking a hundred times a minute, he looked desperately from one face to the next trying to find some iota of belief in us; his mouth hung open. “Besides,” he cried to me, “you just hear what they want from you and you’ll see I wouldn’t of needed to take you away anyway!”

  “Nathan,” I said levelly, “what is it that you want me to do?”

  “Well,” Nathan said, looking with concerned alarm at our mendacious friend, “I’m working now for the South Asian Development Agency, trying to help improve conditions for the people here.”

  I nodded. It sounded like Nathan, and in fact I approved completely. “Good for you,” I said. “And you?” I asked Sarah.

  “I’ve got some more animal studies I’m doing,” she said. “It’s worked out well, so that we can both be here.”

  “It’s great,” Nathan said. “Currently I’m working on an aid project to put a sewer system into the northwest quarter of Kathmandu. They don’t have sewers and it’s something they really need—you know how the garbage gets piled up in the streets and all.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s a good idea.”

  “Thanks. Anyway the plans are set, and everything was going fine until the proposal got to the Palace Secretariat. It’s been stopped there, and we don’t really know why. And I remembered how well you handled Royal Nepal Airline, and how much experience you had with the Kathmandu bureaucracy, and I was hoping we could hire you as a consultant to help us get this proposal approved and into action.”

  I kept a straight face and said, “I’d love to help you, Nathan.”

  “What?” Freds cried, leaping to his feet. “What do you mean ‘I’d love to help you’? I come and ask you to help me with the Kathmandu bureaucracy and you tell me I can go to hell and then Nathan asks you to help him with the Kathmandu bureaucracy and you say ‘I’d love to help you’?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It ain’t fair!”

  “I don’t care. I want to help do something for this city, and putting in sewers is just about the first thing you’d want. It doesn’t change the character of the town any, except in a way that would help keep the kids healthy. Like my beggar buddy and his little girl. Why would you want to stop such a thing, Freds?”

  Freds stared back and forth at us wildly. “George won’t be any help to you anyways,” he said to Nathan. “He’s horrible with the bureaucracy, he spent a month trying to help us and all he did was spend two thousand rupees and get a lot of people mad at him. He’s useless.”

  “You ask A.S.J.B. Rana if I’m useless,” I said sharply. “I nailed that guy! Besides, if you don’t think I’d help them, why’d you slip me off into the jungle where they couldn’t find me?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did.”

  Sarah stood and went to Freds, put her hand to his arm. “Freds,” she said, “we’re your friends. You don’t have to worry so much. You can tell us what’s bothering you.”

  She squeezed his arm. He took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, wiping his face with his hands. “I reckon I’m gonna have to. I’ve told George about it already—”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah. The tunnel system, remember?” He turned to Nathan. “Nathan, you’re my oldest friend, so I’m gonna trust you with this, but it’s gonna put you in a hard spot, because I’ve got to swear you to secrecy, and that may be a problem for this project you’re working on.”

  Nathan frowned.

  Freds took in another huge breath, blew it out. “Hell, I’d better show you. You ain’t gonna believe me unless you see it anyway.”

  VII

  FREDS LED US DOWN into the section of the city between Thamel and Durbar Square, a fairly prosperous commercial district composed of narrow streets lined by two- and three-story buildings, made of brick and wood in a style that is slightly ramshackle and som
ehow nineteenth-centuryish, but quite solid. The thoroughfare has no official name and is called Freak Street by the Westerners, because of all the bustle and color and hash dealers. It is lined by a great number of open shopfronts, busily hawking food and books and carpets and mountain gear.

  Freds turned off Freak Street into a narrow alleyway that led to our friend Yongten’s carpet shop. Yongten did a lot of money-changing from his shop, and between the customers getting confused over which carpet to buy and the ones lined up to change traveler’s checks into rupees, we had to wait awhile. But finally Yongten nodded at us and exchanged a word with Freds, and led us into his back room, then through a door that was a piece of the room’s back wall, cut open and stuck on hinges.

  We found ourselves in a narrow room that looked like an air space between buildings, except it was roofed. It was perhaps used for storage, as dark old boxes were stacked against one wall. Yongten lit a Coleman lantern and handed it to Freds, and then closed the door to the shop. By the light of the lantern he and Freds moved one stack of boxes to the side, revealing another rough wood wall, with a door cut into it that was no more than waist high. Huge black iron hinges and a matching clasp and lock kept this door secure, and Yongten took a key the size of my hand out of his jacket and unlocked the lock. He and Freds pulled back on the door together to open it.

  Cool dank air gusted out at us, from a dark square hole. “Follow me close,” Freds said, and crouched to enter the hole. The three of us followed, and Yongten shut us in.

  “Watch out, the ceiling stays low for a stretch.”

  We ducked along behind Freds, hands out to protect us from any low points in the wooden ceiling above us. The walls hemming us in were brick, the floor packed earth. Then we stepped onto flagstones and down steps, until we could stand upright.

  The lantern revealed what seemed to be a low, roundish gallery; in many places the light showed nothing at all, so it was hard to tell the shape of the cavern we were in. “This is the old tunnel system,” Freds said in a low voice as we huddled around his light. “What we came down was just cut recently, because the only entrance left in Kathmandu that hadn’t been covered up long ago was on the palace grounds, and it got covered by the foundation of a new building a couple years back. That’s why the Manjushri Rimpoche wanted Dawa and me to relocate the jungle entrance. No one’s too happy about this one here being in Yongten’s store. He just rents that space, you know, and anything could happen.”

  “Who’s the Manjushri Rimpoche?” Nathan wanted to know. “And what does all this have to do with our sewer project?”

  “It’s a long story,” Freds said. “George, do you want to tell them?”

  “Hell no.”

  So Freds led us farther into the tunnel system, and as he did he told Sarah and Nathan all about our recent adventures in Shambhala. Nathan and Sarah listened speechlessly; I couldn’t see enough of their expressions to figure out what they thought of the tale, but I thought I caught heavy vibes of amazement and disbelief, confirmed by the occasional wide-eyed glance they shared.

  We continued to descend, into a large squared-off tunnel, worked stone on all sides of us. Then things opened out again; we couldn’t see a wall in any direction. Freds led us to a staircase that descended in a long curve down the side of what must have been an immense boring. It was impossible to believe that human labor had built it. Perhaps a natural cave had been worked smooth.

  The stairs had a thick wooden bannister on the open side, for which I was grateful. The wood of the bannister was slick with hand oils. The bannister posts were carved and painted. The wall of the cavern was pocked with niches containing statues of Buddha, or Bönpa demons; it reminded me of the tunnel up in the mountains, extending from Shambhala to Nangpa La. Part of the same system, if Freds were to be believed.

  We must have gone down several hundred steps when we came to the bottom of the cavern. Here the light of the Coleman lantern caught gleams from a long gallery; we followed this passageway, and found little chambers cut into the rock, some walled with highly worked bronze, others with silver, one with what appeared to be pure gold.

  Freds led us into this last one. The walls, floor and ceiling were curved, so that it was like being inside a giant egg. The lantern light glowed in the soft yellow metal surrounding us. It had been worked with the Tibetan letters spelling Om Mani Padme Hum, repeated over and over so the inner surface of the chamber was covered with them, the tiny hammer marks black or bronze or a darker yellow or even white, depending on how the light struck them. Om Mani Padme Hum—the jewel in the heart of the lotus—it seemed that we were actually there, inside the jewel itself.

  “Hermitage,” Freds said matter-of-factly. “Padma Sambhava, the guru who brought Buddhism to Tibet, came down here once. They say the walls turned to gold when he left, with the writing already on them.”

  Nathan and Sarah were staring around, mouths open like fish in air. No doubt I looked much the same.

  The tunnel system, Freds went on, had its center in Shambhala, and from there it radiated out in every direction. “It’s not just under the Himalayas,” he said, “and it doesn’t just come here to Kathmandu. It’s thousands of years old, and it’s been very important to Shambhala—you know, in influencing the course of things, trying to keep the world from self-destructing.”

  I could see Nathan and Sarah trying to digest this news, and only partially succeeding. Even with the advantage of having visited Shambhala, and run for miles through its tunnel system, I had a hard time comprehending it; for them it was harder. I approached one wall and ran my fingertips over the letters. The metal was cold, the curved letters in bas-relief, with tiny chiseling marks etched at the border of the letters. Touching the wall, it seemed to me I could feel a faint vibration. The flame in the lantern flickered, the walls very slightly trembled, there was just the faintest ambient hum in the air; you could just barely sense the crowded city of Kathmandu, pounding with life over our heads.

  VIII

  “LISTEN, FREDS,” NATHAN SAID, when we were safely back in my room at the Star—when he had had a chance to recover from the experience a bit. “Those tunnels are very interesting, and I’m sure the archeological community would be fascinated by them. But you can’t allow something like that to get in the way of improving the health conditions for the people living here today! You’ve got to keep your priorities straight. I mean that gold-lined cave is impressive, sure, but it doesn’t really matter where Padma what’s-his-name hid thousands of years ago. What’s important is that the people in the city now have a better chance to live healthy lives! A decent sewer system is like a minimal step in that direction, I mean without it they’re living in their own garbage, and it’s impossible to avoid disease in those conditions. The sewers have got to be built!” He turned to me. “George, you’ve got to help us get that approval over the final hurdle in the Secretariat.”

  “Hey no!” Freds said, reaching across the bed and shaking me by the arm. “You’ve gotta help stop it for good! The tunnels ain’t just ancient history,” he insisted. “They’re still being used and they lead straight to Shambhala, and if they start digging and run across them they’ll strip them and they’ll follow them up to Shambhala and strip it too, and everything we did this summer to save the valley will go to waste! Nathan just don’t understand what that means.”

  “I do understand,” Nathan said. “But it’s a question of helping the people in the city. You know what it looks like without any sewers under the streets—the streets themselves are the sewers.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  And Nathan nodded, and Freds shook his head and said “Come on, George, remember the valley,” and Sarah looked at me, her eyes big behind her glasses. Freds and Nathan argued with each other, until they got pretty heated about it. Sarah tried to calm them down; they were glaring at each other, and raising their voices.

  She got them to stop and then they both stared at me, hard, as if I’d better take the
ir side. As if, in fact, it were all my fault in the first place.

  “Hey,” I said, hands up. “Don’t look at me.”

  “You gave a lot to the valley,” Freds said to me hotly.

  “That’s true.”

  “You know perfectly well they need sewers here or they’ll be sick forever,” Nathan told me with a solemn glare.

  “That’s true too.”

  And I kept agreeing with everything they said until they were both furious at me. They couldn’t stand my wishy-washiness. But I wouldn’t budge. Or I couldn’t. They were both my friends, and they both had a point. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. Except put them off while I tried to figure something out. So I did that, and they got extremely disgusted with me.

  IX

  FINALLY THEY LEFT AND I went to bed, and was sixty fathoms under when Freds rolled me into the wall and sat on the bed beside me. He stuck a lit hash pipe in my mouth, exhaled noisily. “Get prepped bro we got to take another journey to the center of the earth here.”

  “Wha?” I pushed him away and lit chunks of hash bounced out of his pipe and spilled all over me and the bed, glowing like tiny charcoal briquets and smoking fiercely. By the time we had leaped up and slapped them all out my one sheet was ruined, but I was wide awake, and considerably stoned, so I suppose Freds was happy.

  “Freds, God damn you! What time is it?”

  “Time to go, bro. I got to show you some parts of the sacred tunnels that Nathan and Sarah weren’t supposed to see.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, come on. It’ll be a real adventure, you’ll love it.”

  “I hate your adventures, Freds.”

  “Not this one. Come on, you’ll see.”