“Wow,” she said, after allowing a suitably respectful moment of silence to elapse. “And I thought I was the big mouth on this team.”
She fished a heat-softened Toblerone bar out of her purse and Solanka fell upon it greedily. “He’s losing the men’s confidence,” she told Solanka. “The boy who helped you out tonight? There are plenty more like him, maybe as many as half the total, and for some reason they whisper to me. Khuss-puss, khuss-puss. It’s so sad. ‘Madam, we are decent persons.’ Khuss-puss. ‘Madam, Commander Sahib is acting strange, isn’t it?’ Khuss-puss. ‘Please, madam, do not mention my thoughts to anyone.’ I’m not the only idealist around here. These kids didn’t think they were going to war to flatten the earth or abolish the hours of darkness. They’re fighting for their families, and all this green-cheese material unnerves them. So they come to me and complain, and that puts me in a very dangerous place. It doesn’t really matter what advice I give—being a second focal point, a rival center, is quite dangerous enough. One rat—one mole—is all it would take, and speaking of toads, yes, I do love you, very much. Meanwhile, what I saw on the outside before I brought the team in here was an army that’s pretty sick of being a laughingstock. My information is they’ve been talking to the Americans and the British. The rumor says that the marines and the SAS may already be in Mildendo, in fact, I’ve been feeling pretty foolish for weeks about running out on you like that. There’s a British aircraft carrier just outside territorial waters, and Babur doesn’t control the military airfields on Blefuscu, either. The truth is I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’s time to leave, but I don’t know how Babur will take it. Half of him wants to fuck me on national television and the other half wants to beat me up for making him feel that way. So now you know the real reason why I’ve been wearing the mask: it’s the next best thing to putting my head in a paper bag, and you came all this way for me and walked into the lion’s den. I guess you must really dig me too, huh. I’m working on an out. If I can get the right Fremen in the right places, I think it can be done, and I have contacts in the army that can at least get us out to the British boat or maybe a military plane. In the meanwhile I’ll make sure you get looked after. I still don’t know about Babur, how far gone he is. Maybe he thinks you’re a valuable hostage, even though I keep telling him you’re not worth the trouble, you’re just a civilian who blundered into something he didn’t understand, a little fish he should throw back into the sea. If you don’t kiss me soon, I’ll be forced to kill you with my own bare hands. Okay, that’s good. Now stay put. I’ll be back.”
In Athens the Furies were thought to be Aphrodite’s sisters. Beauty and vengeful wrath, as Homer knew, sprang from the self-same source. That was one story. Hesiod, however, said that the Furies were born of Earth and Air, and that their siblings included Terror, Strife, Lies, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Fear, and Battle. In those days they avenged blood crimes, pursuing those who harmed (especially) their mothers—Orestes, long pursued by them after he killed bloody-handed Clytemnestra, knew all about that. The leirion, or blue iris, sometimes placated the Furies, but Orestes wore no flowers in his hair. Even the bow of horn that the Pythoness, the Delphic Oracle, gave him to repel their assaults proved to be of little use. “Serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-winged,” the Erinnyes hounded him for the rest of his life, denying him peace.
These days the goddesses, less regarded, were hungrier, wilder, casting their nets more widely. As the bonds of family weakened, so the Furies began to intervene in all of human life. From New York to Lilliput-Blefuscu there was no escape from the beating of their wings.
• • •
She didn’t come back. Young men and women attended to Solanka’s daily needs. These were some of the weary, immured fighters who, fearing their own leader, Babur, as much as the enemy outside the compound walls, had gone to their dark Aphrodite for advice; but when Solanka asked about Neela, they made dumb don’t-know gestures and went away. “Commander Akasz” didn’t show up, either. Professor Solanka, forgotten, washed up on the edge of things, dozed, talked aloud to himself, drifted into unreality, lurching between daydreams and panic attacks. Through the small barred window he heard the noise of battle, growing more frequent, coming closer. Pillars of smoke rose high into the air. Solanka thought of Little Brain. I’d have set his house on fire. I’d have burned his city down.
Violent action is unclear to most of those who get caught up in it. Experience is fragmentary; cause and effect, why and how, are torn apart. Only sequence exists. First this then that. And afterward, for those who survive, a lifetime of trying to understand. The assault came on Solanka’s fourth day in Mildendo. At dawn the door of his cell was opened. There stood the same taciturn young man—now carrying an automatic weapon, and with two knives stuck in his belt—who had so uncomplainingly cleaned up his mess a few days earlier. “Come quickly, please,” he said. Solanka followed him, and then it was into the labyrinth again, the bleak interconnecting rooms with masked fighters guarding the way, approaching each door as if it were booby-trapped, turning each corner as if an ambush lurked just beyond; and in the distance Solanka heard the inarticulate conversation of battle, the chatter of automatic rifles, the grunts of heavy artillery, and, high above it all, the leathery beating of bat-wings and the screeches of the dog-headed Three. Then he was enclosed in the service elevator, manhandled through the ruined kitchens, and pushed into an unmarked, windowless van; after which, for a long time, nothing. High-speed motion, alarming halts, raised voices, the motion renewed. Noise. Where was that shrieking coming from? Who was dying, who was killing? What was the story here? To know so little was to feel insignificant, even a little insane. Thrown this way and that in the hurtling, swerving van, Malik Solanka howled aloud. But this, after all, was a rescue. Somebody—Neela?—had decreed him worthy. War erases the individual, but he was being saved from the war.
The door opened; he squinted into the blinding daylight. An officer saluted him—an exotically mustachioed ethnic Elbee wearing the absurdly braided uniform of the Lilliputian army. “Professor. So happy to see you safe, sir.” He reminded Solanka of Sergius, the stiff-backed officer in Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Sergius, who never apologized. This fellow had plainly been assigned to chaperone Solanka, a task he fulfilled briskly, marching ahead like an overwound toy. He led Solanka into a building bearing the insignia of the International Red Cross. Later there was food. A British military aircraft was waiting to carry him, along with a group of other foreign passport-holders, back to London. “My passport was taken,” Solanka told Sergius. “None of that matters now, sir,” the officer replied. “I can’t leave without Neela,” Solanka went on. “I don’t know anything about that, sir,” Sergius said. “My orders are to get you on board that aircraft double-quick.”
All the seats on the British plane faced toward the tail. Solanka, taking his allotted chair, recognized the men across the aisle as Neela’s cameraman and sound recordist. When they stood up and embraced him, he knew the news was bad. “Unbelievable, mate,” the soundman said. “She got you out, too. Amazing woman.” Where is she. None of this matters, your life, mine, he thought. Will she be here soon. “She did the whole thing,” the cameraman said. “Organized the Fremen who were sick of Babur, contacted the army on shortwave radio, arranged the guaranteed safe-conducts, the lot. The president’s out. Bolgolam, too. That bastard tried to thank her, called her a national heroine. She cut him short. In her own eyes she was a traitor, betraying the only cause she ever believed in. She was helping the bad guys win, and it killed her. But she could see what Babur had become.” Malik Solanka had grown very still and quiet. “The army got tired of the jokes,” the sound engineer said. “They called up all reservists and dusted off a lot of old but still serviceable pieces of heavy artillery. Helicopter gunships from the Vietnam era, bought secondhand from the United States years ago, ground-based mortars, a few small tanks. Last night they took back control of the compound perimeter. Still Babu
r wasn’t worried.” The cameraman indicated a silver box. “We got it all,” he said. “She arranged incredible access. Just incredible. He never believed they would use the heavy stuff against the Parliament building, and certainly not while he was holding his hostages. He was wrong about the building. Underestimated their determination. But the hostages were the key, and Neela turned that lock. The four of us came out together. And then there was the whole second route, which she set up just for you.” After that nothing was said. The terrible thing hung between them like a fierce light, but it was too bright to look at. The soundman began to cry. What happened, Solanka finally asked. How could you leave her. Why didn’t she run with you, toward safety. Toward me. The cameraman shook his head. “What she did,” he said, “it tore her apart. She betrayed him, but she couldn’t run. That would have been desertion under fire.” But she wasn’t a soldier! Oh God. God. She was a journalist. Didn’t she know that? Why did she have to cross that goddamn line? The soundman put his arm around Solanka. “There was something she had to do,” he said. “The plan wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t stayed behind.” “To distract Babur,” the cameraman said, dull-voiced, and there it was, the worst thing in the world. To distract him: how? What did that mean? Why did it have to be her? “You know how,” the soundman said. “And you know what it means. And you know why it had to be her.” Solanka closed his eyes. “She sent you this,” the cameraman was saying. Helicopter gunships and heavy mortars, authorized by the freed President Golbasto Gue, were blasting holes in the Lilliputian Parliament. A bomber shed its load. The building was exploding, crumbling, on fire. Dirty smoke and clouds of masonry dust climbed high into the sky. Three thousand reservists and frontline troops assaulted the complex, taking no prisoners. Tomorrow the world would condemn this ruthless action, but today was for getting it done. Somewhere in the wreckage lay a man wearing Solanka’s face and a woman wearing her own. Not even Neela Mahendra’s beauty could affect the trajectory of the mortars, the bombs like deadly fishes swimming downward through the air. Come to me, she murmured to Babur, I am your assassin, the murderer of my own hopes. Come here and let me watch you die.
Malik Solanka opened his eyes and read the handwritten note. “Professor Sahib, I know the answer to your question.” Neela’s last words. “The earth moves. The earth goes round the sun.”
18
From a distance the boy’s hair was still golden, although the new growth beneath was darker. By his approaching fourth birthday the yellow hair would have mostly gone. The sun was shining as Asmaan rode his tricycle with great attack down a sloping path on the flowering springtime Heath. “Look at me!” he shouted. “I’m going really fast!” He had grown, and his diction was much clearer, but he was still clothed in childhood’s radiance, that brightest of cloaks. His mother ran to keep up with him, her long hair twisted away beneath a large straw hat. It was a perfect April day at the height of the foot-and-mouth epidemic. The government was simultaneously ahead in the polls and unpopular, and the prime minister, Tony Ozymandias, seemed shocked by the paradox: what, you don’t like us? But it’s us, folks, we’re the good guys! People, people: it’s me! Malik Solanka, a traveler from an antique land, watching his son from the privacy of a grove of oaks, uncomplainingly allowed a black Labrador to sniff at him. The dog moved on, having established that Solanka was not suitable for his purposes. The dog was right. There were few purposes for which Solanka felt suitable right now. Nothing beside remains.
Morgen Franz did not run. He didn’t “do running.” Beaming myopically, the publisher lumbered down the slope toward the waiting woman and child. “Did you see that, Morgen? It was very good driving, wasn’t it? What would Daddy say?” Asmaan’s tendency always to speak at top volume carried his words up to Solanka’s hiding place. Franz’s reply was inaudible, but Malik could easily write his lines. “Far out, Asmaan, man. Really nice.” The old hippie shit. To his eternal credit, the boy frowned. “But what would Daddy say?” Solanka felt a little surge of fatherly pride. Good for you, kid. You remind that Buddhist hypocrite who’s who.
Asmaan’s Heath—or at least Kenwood—was studded with magical trees. A gigantic fallen oak, its roots twisting in air, was one such enchanted zone. Another tree, with a hole at the base of its trunk, housed a set of storybook creatures, with whom Asmaan carried out ritual dialogues each time he passed this way. A third tree was the home of Winnie-the-Pooh. Nearer Kenwood House were large spreading rhododendron bushes inside which witches lived and where fallen twigs became magic wands. The Hepworth sculpture was a sacred spot, and the words “Barbara Hepworth” had been a part of Asmaan’s lexicon almost from the start. Solanka knew the route Eleanor would take, and knew, too, how to follow the little group without being noticed. He wasn’t sure he was ready to be noticed, wasn’t certain he was ready for his life. Asmaan was asking to be carried along the next part of the path, not wanting to ride the trike uphill. This was an old laziness, entrenched by habit. Eleanor had a weak back and so Morgen hoisted the boy up on his shoulders. That had always been one of Solanka and Asmaan’s special things. “Can I ride on my shoulders, Daddy?”—“Your shoulders, Asmaan. Say, ‘your shoulders.’”—“My shoulders.” There goes everything I love on this earth, Solanka thought. I’ll just watch him awhile. I’ll just watch over him from here.