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NOTHING SACRED

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

FIRST EDITION

FOR JANNA SILVERSTEIN FOR FIRST LISTENING TO THE DREAM

FOR THE BESIEGED PEOPLE OF TIBET, AT HOME AND ABROAD

AND FOR MY BROTHER MONTE, WITHOUT WHOSE INVALUABLE TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE THIS BOOK WOULD HAVE BEEN EATEN.

PART ONE

KALAPA COMPOUND, TIBET.

Late September, 2069. DAY 11?

The guards gave me this paper with instructions to write about my career as a war criminal, starting

with my life at age eight. This is fairly standard practice in these places, according to what I’ve read, and

to what the Colonel told me when I first got here. He also said they “haf vays off” not only making you

talk but making you believe it after a while. So before my brain gets too well washed, I am saving out

some of this paper to keep a true record of what happened, just to keep it straight in my own mind and

give me something to fill up the time. The Colonel and the others told me some of the jargon the

interrogators like to have included in a confession and I think I get the drift. It behooves the smart

prisoner to indulge in a lot of verbal self-flagellation before the authorities decide to flagellate said

prisoner in a more literal sense. There’s a very strict prose style involved. No problem, though. I’m a

good mimic and can write the most incredible bullshit as long as I don’t have to keep a straight face.

My name is Viveka Jeng Vanachek. I am currently, albeit reluctantly, a warrant officer in the North

American Continental Allied Forces, 5th Cobras, attached to the 9th New Ghurkas at Katmandu. I was

captured September 15, 2069, following a plane crash near the Kun Lun Mountains while on a mapping

mission. Not that I am this great cartographer, but I do know the section of the file in the program that

allows the computer to reconfigure existing maps while scanning the countryside from an eye in the

bottom of an XLT-3000 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. Anyway, I’m trained to use that

knowledge, although that flight was the first actual mission I’ve been on. Right up until the crash, I’d been

having the best day since I sold out and joined the military.

Major Tom Siddons was a very nice guy, and I think he must have enjoyed working with me as

much as I did with him. I suppose he got as far as he did in the military just by being relatively

good-natured and an exceptionally good pilot. Unlike the other pilots, he could express himself not only

in words rather than in long strings of symbols and numbers, he could even express himself in words of

more than one syllable. He also liked poetry, and I think he liked me chiefly because he was impressed

with my ability to recite dirty limericks in Middle English and translate Chinese verses.

I hadn’t been in Katmandu very long, but I had already told him over a beer how much I hated the

monotony of knowing one section of one file of one program. Each of the other warrant officers in

Katmandu with the same rating knew another section of the same file of the same program. If anyone

was transferred, died or committed suicide, he or she was replaced by a brand-new specialist in the

same section—specialists were never cross-trained, so the left hand never knew what the right hand was

doing. It made me feel like a not-very-expensive microchip. Here I had spent almost twenty years, off

and on, studying the humanities and what do they do with me? Stick me in computers, because I’d once

taken a class to fulfill a math requirement. My art history background and the one drafting class I’d gotten

a C in qualified me for the mapping section. I told Siddons all of this and he sipped his beer slowly and

nodded in most of the right places.

I forgot all about griping to him until one morning when he strode into the hangar office, decked out

in a silver suit with so many pockets he looked like a walking shoe bag.

“Grab a flight suit and your kit, Ms. Vanachek,” he told me. “We have us a mission.”

It didn’t occur to me to bring a weapon. I’d been in what was technically considered a combat zone

for the best part of six months and had yet to see more than a fleeting glimpse of an indigenous civilian,

much less an enemy.

I gawked through the canopy as we climbed to 19,000 feet, then settled down to the keyboard and

punched up my section. Siddons had explained that the plane’s computer would do just as mine did back

at the hangar, except that while the computer in the hangar usually had to make do with adjusting data,

inputting new topographical information from a graphic mock-up to existing map data, this one had a

special adapter that translated the terrain passing through an eye in the bottom of the plane into a graphic

image and instantly altered the corresponding map data accordingly.

We need map updates frequently because the terrain constantly changes so that it no longer

conforms to earlier maps. And while our hangar-bound graphics adjustments are fine for recording the

changes our own side wreaks on the local scenery, our allies and our enemies are not so conscientious

about informing us of all of their destructive activities. Furthermore, the war precipitates natural

disasters—earthquakes, avalanches and floods—that also make unauthorized and, worse, undocumented

alterations.

We overflew the pass, into the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The more heavily populated areas had

been kept up to date, but the whole central plateau was still a battleground. New valleys are dug daily

and mountains of rubble make strategic barriers that need recording.

The problem with fast travel through or over any country, of course, is that it so thoroughly

objectifies what you’re seeing that you might as well be looking at a holovid screen. The landscape of

Tibet, vast plains with mountains pinched up all around the edges like a fancy piecrust, seemed highly

improbable to me and I returned to my screen after about fifteen minutes of admiring the view. Siddons

wasn’t about to let me ignore it, however. His voice crackled into my headphones saying, “Nah, don’t

bury your nose in your goddamn graphics yet. Take a gander out there at the real world.”

I stared down over and through a swath of cloud. The tail end of the cloud snagged on the ragged

snow-splattered tops of raw-rock mountains, but beneath it spread a lake covering—I checked my

screen—twenty square miles. It cupped the plane’s shadow in waters that looked like a huge opal, milky

with shots of blue and red fire reflecting off the surface. “Gorgeous,” I said “What makes it look like

that?”

“Poison,” he said. “Check your coordinates. This is where the PRC dumped its toxic wastes before

some of our forces helped India shoo the bastards back behind the border again. The lake’s Tibetan

name is Lhamo Lhatso. It was sacred. The holy men saw the birthplace of their last spiritual leader in it.”

With an innocent-looking twinkle, the lake passed under our starboard wing and away.

“We’re going to veer over India way now, toward Karakoram Pass. Between the avalanches the

saturation bombing triggered and the floods this spring, the area is useless to ground troops.”

“Not to mention a little tricky for the local inhabitants,” I said.

“There aren’t a hell of a lot of those left, except guerrillas,” Siddons said. “And they’re tough bozos

who play their own game and don’t kiss anybody’s ass.”

“Sounds like you admire them.”

“Well, hey, when you have been in the service of our beloved organization as long as I have, little

lady, you too may come to admire anybody who doesn’t basically sit back and leave all the fighting to

our troops wearing their patches. The Tibetan guerrillas have to be about the only people on the face of

the planet fighting anything worse than a hot game of Parcheesi who don’t have NACAF allies

specifically assigned to them, evening up the odds manpower- and firepower-wise.”

“Major, I had no idea you were such an idealist.”

“Doesn’t mean I won’t blow the little buggers off the face of the earth if I get a chance, you

understand. There’s no need to get sentimental about it. If we blow up our fellow AmCans who are

working for the PRC or the Soviets, I see no particular reason to extend professional courtesy to anyone

else.”

I watched the high wild mountains sweep past our belly and noticed how often the bomb pocks and

avalanches showed up on the screen as a major change in the landscape. I remembered that before

NACAF entered the three-sided conflict among China, India and the USSR, with all the territory in the

middle, including Tibet and the Himalayas, as the battleground, Mount Everest had been the highest

mountain in the world, instead of the fourth highest. I told the major, “I once took a course in myth and

folklore. Did you know that in the old days, Tibetans never climbed their mountains much? They were

afraid of disturbing the demons of the upper air.”

“Well, we got those demons good and stirred up now,” he said.

Soon we were past one range and once more flying over a vast flattened plain, flyspecked with the

ruins of villages and monasteries, the jagged hills bursting from the plains at times like the work of some

giant gopher. The flatlands were as pocked as the mountains, the earth blasted and sickly tan, the whole

thing treeless. NACAF-made planes, NACAF pilots or pilot trainers, NACAF defoliants and NACAF

bombs made it all possible.

“Hey, maybe they meant us,” I said to Siddons. “Maybe they foresaw us.”

“Who?”

“The old-time Tibetans with those myths. Maybe we’re the upper-air demons.”

“Don’t let the scenery give you an attitude now, Warrant Officer. We didn’t do all of that by our

lonesome, you know. This little old country’s been a stompin’ ground for a good hundred years now for

all kinds of people who didn’t like the way the local pope ran things—”

“Dalai Lama,” I corrected, remembering Comparative Religion and Central Asian Soc.

“Yeah, I knew that,” he said, grinning back at me. His grin was as jerky as a stop-motion film clip as

the aircraft hopped from air pocket to air pocket in a series of stomach-churning dips and bumps. I took

a deep breath. My digestive tract preferred ground travel.

“Anyhow,” he continued,” one thing good ol’ NACAF does do is keep it all a clean fight. You got

any idea what we need all these updated maps for?”

“Making sure whichever rock the enemy hides behind doesn’t move before our side finds it?” I

asked.

He ignored that. I think he began to feel at that point he was setting a bad example for a junior

officer. So he said, “Nope, so we can still locate any possible covert nuclear devices, no matter when or

where they were hidden, and send crews to disarm them. Fighting for Peace, just like the recruitment ad

says.”

I would like those words to be remembered as the major’s last.

The XLT-300 model aircraft we were in flew very far, very fast and changed altitudes with very little

difficulty. Ask a pilot why and how, or an engineer. All they paid me to know was that my

Ground-Air-Geocartography program, or GAG as it was affectionately called, was specifically designed

to keep up with the plane. We covered the plateau within about an hour and when we took the hit, were

on the far side of the Karakoram Pass, headed east for the Kun Lun Mountains. Radio transmission this

far from base was damn near impossible, satellites or no satellites. The mountains didn’t get in the plane’s

way, and they didn’t get in the satellite’s way, but they sure got in Ground Control’s way.

The wind was fierce that day, and blew the little jet around as if it was a paper airplane instead of a

real one. So when we took the hit, I thought for a moment it was just another gust of wind. Siddons

caught on quicker, and I saw his hands fly across the switches and buttons on the control panel.

Suddenly the canopy popped and all those upper-air demons I’d been thinking about roared in and

snatched us from the plane. Something kicked me in the rear. My seat bucked like the barroom

bull-riding machine they keep in the Cowboy Museum my grandparents once took me to in Tacoma.

Except that this bronco didn’t come down again but blasted me through the shrieking wind, up and over

the body of the jet. I screamed, not of my own accord but as if the scream was ripped from my vocal

cords by the velocity of my plunge to earth.

When I haven’t had worse things to dream about, I still see the bolus of flame spewing from the

underside of the geometrically precise angle of the starboard wing, and I spin to face a maw of rock and

snow yawning like a fast forward of some boa’s jaws as it swallows prey. I bolt awake as once more the

feeling of the automatic chute opening reminds me of being plucked from midair by a giant bird and I try

to come fully awake before Siddons’s body, twisting beneath a burning chute, plummets past me.

But my actual landing must have been a testimony to the parachute maker’s technology. For though

I had a bad case of vertical jet lag, my mind skipping a few beats between ejecting and landing, when I

came to myself enough to take inventory, everything was intact—no broken bones or missing teeth.

Encouraged, I attempted to stand, but the force of the wind complicated matters, billowing my chute

against me so it molded to my face, blinding and smothering me within a wave of blue, red and white

silon. I yanked the suffocating fabric from my head. The stench of burning metal, wiring and flesh pricked

my nostrils before I focused sufficiently to visually locate the smoke.

Pulling off my helmet, I divested myself of the yard or so of chute attached to it and scanned the

horizon for a telltale plume, but it was as if I was still swathed in some larger, grayer fabric, a bolt of

wildly swirling gauze which obscured everything.

The ground on which I stood was indistinguishable from the air in front of me. I was standing on

some mountain plateau then, shrouded with cloud. Vaguely, near the toes of my boots, ghostly tufts of

grass emerged and vanished as the wind whipped the ground cover. But I saw no sign of Siddons.

I’ve dreamed of his death since then, so I must have seen it, but I honestly don’t remember seeing

him die other than in the dreams. Shock probably. I tried calling to Siddons, but my words vanished in

the cloud before they were out of my mouth.

As I gathered up the chute and uncoiled it from my legs, the wind whipped away a corner of the mist

and I saw four people jogging down a mountain path toward me, carrying rifles. They all appeared to be

Asian but I wasn’t alarmed by that, since many of our NACAF troops are American or Canadian of

Asian origin, or Asian allies. I even felt a small surge of relief, thinking perhaps we were being rescued.

The rifles didn’t alarm me either. There’s a war on. Of course they carried weapons.

I waved a cautious greeting and would have shouted at them but they didn’t return my wave. That

was when I began to realize that the crash might be more than a temporary setback. Even if these were

our people, I didn’t know any passwords. They pointed their guns at me and one barked an order. He

must have been used to talking over the wind or else the wind had died down because I heard him very

well. He was speaking in Han Chinese, of which I had learned a smattering in Intro to Chinese Dialects

101. Before I could try to puzzle out exactly what it was that he’d said, the man who’d spoken pushed

me down while a woman rapidly scooped up my helmet, then gathered the rest of my parachute. When

she finished, the first man prodded my ribs with his rifle, forcing me to stand again, while a third covered

me with another rifle, presumably to make sure I didn’t overpower the guy with the gun in my ribs. A

fourth man trotted through the mist toward us carrying two winter kits, slightly charred and smoky around

the edges. A pair of jump boots dangled from his shoulder by their laces and bounced in rhythm with his

gait. Siddons’s helmet—I could read his name in black block letters across the front—dangled from one

hand.

The woman tied my wrists together. I stared at them stupidly. Right then the tangible evidence that I

was a prisoner cut through the shock of the crash. We had had a frightening little lecture about enemy

torture in basic training, but the only advice about getting captured I was able to recall was “Don’t.” Each

of us knew so little about each piece of equipment that almost everyone was expendable. People in my

grade who got captured fell into the category of “acceptable losses.”

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - Nothing Sacred.pdf

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