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For no sane reason! Just stupid fascist politics and power mongering-" Her voice caught hoarsely.
"Laura-I'm older than you. I know that situation. I re- member it vividly." He smiled. "I'll tell you how it worked.
We just waited and went on living, that's all. It didn't happen- maybe it'll never happen. In the meantime, what good is this doing you?" He stood up. "We're through here. Come with me, there are things I want you to see."
She followed him unwillingly, feeling wretched, spooked.
The way he talked about it so casually-ten warheads-but for him it was casual, wasn't it? He'd lived through a time where there were thousands of warheads, enough to exterminate all human life.
Responsible for mass death. It filled her with loathing. Her thoughts raced and suddenly she wanted to flee into the desert, vaporize. She never wanted to be near anyone who had ever touched such a thing, who was shadowed by that kind of horror.
And yet they were everywhere, weren't they? People who'd played politics with atomic weapons. Presidents, premiers, generals... little old men out in parks with grandkids and golf clubs. She had seen them, lived among them-
She was one of them.
Her mind went numb.
Gresham slowed, took her elbow. "Look."
It was evening now. A ragged crowd of about a hundred had gathered before one of the domes. The dome had been pulled in half, as a kind of crude amphitheater. The Inadin musicians were playing again, and one of them stood before the crowd, swaying, singing. His song had a wailing meter and many verses. The other Inadin swayed in time, some- times giving a sharp cry of approval. The crowd looked on open-mouthed.
"What's he saying?"
Gresham began speaking again in his television voice. He was reciting poetry.
Listen, people of the Kel Tamashek,
We are the Inadin, the blacksmiths.
We have always wandered among the tribes and clans,
We have always carried your messages.
Our fathers' lives were better than ours,
Our grandfathers' better still..
Once our people traveled everywhere,
Kano, Zanfara, Agadez.
Now we live in the cities and are turned into numbers and letters,
Now we live in the camps and eat magic food from tubes.
Gresham stopped. "Their word for magic is tisma. It means,
`the secret craft of blacksmiths.' "
"Go on," she said.
Our fathers had sweet milk and dates,
We have only nettles and thorns.
Why do we sufffer like this?
Is it the end of the world?
No, because we are not evil men,
No, because now we have tisma.
We are blacksmiths who have secret magic,
We are silversmiths who see the past and future.
In the past this was a rich and green land,
Now it is rock and. dust.
Gresham paused, watching the Tuaregs. Two rose and began dancing, their outstretched arms curling and waving, their sandaled feet stamping in time. It was slow, waltzlike dancing, elegant, elegiac. The singer rose to his feet again.
"Now comes the good part," Gresham said.
But where there is rock, there can be grass,
Where there is grass, the rain comes.
The roots of grass will hold the rain,
The leaves of grass will tame the sandstorm.
But we were the enemies of grass,
That is why we suffer.
What our cows did not eat, the sheep ate.
What the sheep refused, the goats consumed.
What the goats left behind, the camels devoured.
Now we must be the friends of grass,
We must apologize to it and treat it kindly.
Its enemies are our enemies.
We must kill the cow and the sheep,
We must butcher the goat and behead the camel.
For a thousand years we loved our herds,
For a thousand years we must praise the grass.
We will eat the tisma food to live,
We will buy Iron Camels from GoMotion
Unlimited in Santa Clara California.
Gresham folded his arms. The singer continued. "There's a lot more," Gresham said, "but that's the gist of it."
The question was obvious. "Did you write it for them?"
"No," he said proudly. "It's an old song." He paused.
"Retrofitted."
"Yeah.'
"A few of this crowd may join us. A few of the few may stay. It's a hard life in the desert." He looked at her. "I'm gone in the morning."
"Tomorrow? That soon?"
"It has to be that way."
The cruelty of it hurt her badly. Not his cruelty but the pure cruelty of necessity. She knew immediately that she would never see him again. She felt lacerated, relieved, panicky.
"Well, you did it, didn't you?" she said hoarsely. "You rescued me and you saved my friend's life." She tried to embrace him.
He backed off. "No, not out here-not in front of them."
He took her elbow. "Let's go inside."
He led her back into the dome. The guards were still there, patrolling. Against thieves, she thought. They were afraid of thieves and vandals from the camp. Beggars. It seemed so pathetic that she began weeping.
Gresham flicked on the screen of his computer. Amber light flooded the tent. He returned to the door of the dome, spoke to the guards. One of them said something to him in a sharp, high-pitched voice and began laughing. Gresham swung the door shut, sealed it with a clamp.
He saw her tears. "What's all this?"
"You, me. The world. Everything." She wiped her cheek on her sleeve. "Those camp people have nothing. Even though you're trying to help them, they'd steal all this stuff of yours, if they could."
"Ah," Gresham said, lightly. "That's what we high-falutin'
cultural meddlers refer to as `the vital level of corruption.' "
"You don't have to talk that way to me. Now that I can see what you're trying to do."
"Oh, Lord," Gresham said unhappily. He stalked across the dome in the mellow light of the monitor and gathered an armload of burlap bags. He lugged them next to his screen and terminal and spread them for pillows. "Come on, sit here with me."
She joined him. The pillows had a pleasant, resinous smell.
They were full of grass seed. She saw that some were already half empty. They'd been sowing the grass in the gullies as they ran from pursuit.
"Don't get to thinking I'm too much like you," he said.
"Honest and sweet and wishing everybody the best... . I grant you good intentions, but intentions don't count for much. Corruption-that's what counts."
He meant it. They were sitting together inches apart, but something was eating at him so badly that he wouldn't look at her. "What you just said-it doesn't make any sense to me."
"I was in Miami once," he said. "A long time ago. The sky was pink! I stopped this rudie on the boardwalk, I said: looks like you got some bad particulate problems here. He told me the sky was full of Africa. And it was true!. It was the harmattan, the sandstorms. Topsoil from the Sahara, blown right across the Atlantic. And I said to myself: there, that place, that's your home."
He looked at her, into her eyes. "You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have borne from time immemorial-they all lived. It wasn't that the world didn't care. They struggled heroically, for gen- erations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity."
"That's too complicated for me, Gresham. It's perverse!"