Chapter Twenty-Three No, Impossible
Twenty-Three
No, Impossible
Dilyara, the mistress of Tashbulak, had succeeded in reinventing several procedures in basic physics by reconstructing the apparatus to perform them with.
She was led by her instinct for play, which had lain dormant for the first part of her life, and about which she felt privately enthralled now; privately, because there was no one to talk to about it.
Chen’s conversational resources were soon exhausted.
Dilyara regarded the various pieces of equipment that had survived the clean wind of God as the best things ever invented.
The little rag doll and the wooden ball she’d had as a child had been lost a long time ago, but the test tubes, the pipettes, the microscopes, the Bunsen burners, the dry ice in the deep freeze, the magnets, the thermometers, the flasks and tanks of various shapes and sizes, the tongs, the balance—it could all keep a person happily busy till they died.
One day, something different happened. She was accustomed to surveying the horizon every morning and evening, just in case, and the binoculars she discovered in the director’s office were very useful.
She sat on the canvas chair she’d carried up to the roof of the stores with her daemon on her shoulder and gazed around in every direction, taking note of the flight of birds towards the mountains, of the rise and fall of clouds in the middle sky, of the inconstant light making the far-off sands shiver and coalesce and shimmer like water, of the smoke from the evening fires in the nearby village.
And this particular evening, her daemon uttered a tiny gasp of surprise: there was a little black wavering figure out on the sands, shaken apart time and again, but always coming together again, stubbornly getting larger, insistently coming closer.
The traveler was coming from the east, from the region of the wandering lake.
She knew about Lop Nor from villagers who claimed to know a secret way through the shifting watercourses, and from others who scoffed at the very idea, and from Chen, who had once begun to tell her some tall tale but fell asleep himself partway through.
Was it one figure or more than one? Was it someone riding a camel?
Impossible to tell at first. Dilyara sat forward on her rickety chair and shaded her eyes against the waver and glitter, adjusting the binoculars this way and that, and presently the shimmering pieces of darkness coalesced into the shape of a man alone on foot.
She looked around: Where was Chen? At this time of day he was usually on his way to the village, where she was sure he had found another woman to share his new cleanliness with, and where there was drink to be had.
With luck, he would know nothing about her new visitor.
The traveler was close enough now for her to see the robe he was wearing: a deep red, with a leather belt around the waist, and part of it thrown up around his head to protect himself from burning and shade his eyes, for he was walking towards the setting sun.
His face was only partly visible: a gold-bearded chin, so he was not like Chen or the villagers or her own people, but perhaps a westerner.
The thought suddenly struck her: perhaps he had come to claim ownership of the research station. To demand an account of what had happened to it.
She ran to the ladder and climbed down quickly, and then hastened through the building and out into the dried-up remains of the herb gardens and the rose beds, along the sandy path towards the broken gate at the boundary fence, where the desert began.
She brushed her skirt and bodice and pulled back her hair as if she were going to receive some potentate, some ambassador or great leader, and stood waiting beside the broken gate for the traveler to come close enough to speak to.
He was limping, she saw, and he leaned on a staff; the battered sandals on his feet were barely holding together, and his hands were deeply sunburned.
The face under the cowl of the robe was gaunt, the beard less golden than it had seemed from a distance.
He stopped a few paces from her and looked around, pushing the cowl back now that he was in the shade of the building. His hair was thin and stiff with sand and sweat. He seemed to be at the very limit of exhaustion. So was his little lemur daemon, who lay limply across his shoulders.
He began to speak and then stopped to clear his throat.
“Chen?” he said, looking around.
She explained in her own language that Chen had gone to the village, and that she was Dilyara, and that she had tried to keep the station clean after the destruction by the wind of God.
He couldn’t understand everything she said, but replied in Chen’s language: “My name is Brynmor Strauss. I used to work here.”
She told him her name again, and repeated what she’d said a moment before as well as she could in Chen’s language.
He nodded, and said, “What happened here?” He gestured at the broken windows, the shattered fence, the tumbled walls.
“The wind of God,” she said. “In the form of the men from the mountains.”
“Oh, I see. Did they destroy everything?”
“Much, but not everything.”
“May I come in?”
She stood aside, watching the little face of his daemon and her huge frightened eyes. Strauss nodded his thanks and painfully moved past and into the ruin.
She felt the sorrow in his slumped shoulders, his painful movements, as he slowly took stock of the place he used to know as a thriving home of work and discovery and companionship.
They went all through the building, and he said little, though she knew he was looking at the cleanly swept floors and the way the rubble had been piled together in tidy heaps.
Then they reached the laboratories, her special place. And she began to feel nervous: perhaps he’d disapprove of what she’d done, the alterations, the improvements, the constructions she’d put together. But there was nothing for it. She unlocked the door and let him in.
The sun had set by this time, and it was almost too dark to see, but she knew that the solar-powered batteries would cut in soon so he could see, first, that the place had been ransacked like everywhere else and, second, that someone had carefully tidied up and mended things, and arranged what was left intact neatly on the benches, and cleaned and dusted everywhere, and had begun to put together some pieces of apparatus in ways he recognized and other ways he didn’t.
He pushed back the cowl over his head and said, “What is your name?”
He used the respectful form of Chen’s language, the one for addressing superiors or equals. Dilyara was nonplussed; she even looked around to see whether someone else had come in behind her.
“No, you,” said the visitor. “Your name, if you please?”
“Dilyara,” she said very quietly.
“Where did you come from?”
“Not this region. Further west. I used to clean here.”
“The station?”
“Yes. Every day I clean.”
“Did you…” He looked at the equipment on the benches.
“Yes, sorry, sorry,” she said, “not breaking anything. Very careful.”
“I can see.”
He bent over to look at an inverted glass tank resting in a shallow aluminum tray. One of the bench lights stood next to it. In the tank lay a sheet of coal-silk foam.
“You made this?”
“Yes. Sorry. Not break anything.”
He stood up and stretched, as if his back was aching. “And Chen? Is he still here?”
“In the village. Then he comes here to light his devils.”
“To light…”
“To guard. Keep bad things away. See later. Maybe see soon.”
He nodded. She had seldom seen anyone so tired.
“Come,” she said, beckoning him to the door, which she locked as soon as they were through.
“Does Chen know about what you do here?” he said.
“No. Not Chen. Just me.”
“And your name again, sorry?”
“Dilyara. And Samal,” she added, indicating her daemon.
“Dilyara. I’m Brynmor. And Cariad.”
“Now you want drink and food?”
“Yes. Drink and food. Thank you.”
She led him to the kitchen, on the other side of the building from the laboratories.
This was where she and Chen had begun to make a rudimentary home, in which he had shown very little interest, except as a place for sleeping and eating in.
It was better than the storerooms he’d slept in at first, but Dilyara was more aware of that than he was.
There were rugs on the floor, and cushions piled up for sleeping on, and one of the stovetops had been used as a fireplace, with a bed of ashes in the middle and split logs piled beside it.
Strauss sat down stiffly and Dilyara brought him a beaker of water. It was cold and fresh and he drank it all at once. She filled it again from a bucket.
“From the well?” he said.
“Yes. It still good.”
She beckoned him to the sink, and then poured more water over his hands, rinsing away the dirt of several days’ travel, and gave him a clean rag to dry them on.
He sat down again and leaned back to watch as she kindled a fire and chopped vegetables. Something in this man made her self-conscious, and that made her uncomfortable, but she could do nothing about it. She was used to ignoring her own discomfort.
After a few minutes he said, “Did Chen ever speak about me and the other man who went into the desert?”
“Sometime. Chen tell me other man come back and speak to him. But then he leave again and then the men from the mountains come.”
“Did he say anything about what we’d seen?”
“I don’t know Chen then. I just clean and that’s all. He try to tell me sometimes about red building, but then he stop and fall asleep. Is red building there, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You go in?”
“Yes, and come out again. I must tell people important things. But if…” He looked around, and gestured to say “Everything is broken.”