“Our use of local labor makes it possible,” Promise said quietly. “We are interested in expanding our interests into the international market. Given that that is the case, we are willing to take a loss on our first project with you, to demonstrate the quality of our work.”
“And your track record is your guarantee of quality.” Kanagawa watched her shrewdly. “I suppose there is no way you could know that your bid undercut the nearest competitor by seven hundred thousand dollars.”
“No.” Yes. Bless Wu’s flinty little heart. “The bridge construction is identical to a job we completed last year in São Paulo. I think that we can modify local materials. Two months for the training program. We will be turning a good portion of the cash back into the local economy, so there is an additional benefit to you.”
Kanagawa’s gaze locked with hers. “The situation seems … if I might hazard to say so … almost too good to be true.”
His eyes flickered to where Leslie, wearing a charming pink dress, sat in one corner of the room, reading by natural light.
“Your daughter?” Kanagawa inquired politely.
“Yes. Leslie? Say hello to Dr. Kanagawa.”
Leslie smiled politely. “Kanagawa-san, ohayo gozaimas.”
Kanagawa’s left eyebrow rose in surprise. “Nihon-go ga dekimasu ka?”
“Hai, sukoshi dekimasu. Hon no sukoshi.”
Kanagawa laughed out loud. “I hope to meet you.” He regarded Promise. “Your child is delightful.”
Promise nodded almost shyly. “I am very proud of her.”
“Well …” Kanagawa’s eyes shifted, as if weighing a thought. “There is a state of emergency at the CAR border town of Daglia, more than a hundred miles north of Swarnaville. I think we can provide sufficient security forces. It should be safe to recruit labor here.”
“For that,” Promise said, “I would be extremely grateful.”
He paused, and seemed to be checking a set of off-camera notes.
Promise’s only safe assumption was that PanAfrican computers would turn up the assassination attempt in Los Angeles. But that was not necessarily disastrous: if that operation was directed by Swarna’s covert-operations people, Kanagawa was unlikely to have been informed. The entire operation would be classified. And it was equally unlikely that the originator of such a “black bag” operation would concern himself with a minor engineering bid in a northern province. Swarna’s holographic simulacrum was boilerplate. Dr. Kanagawa, an important enough man in Public Works, would have no reason to suspect that Swarna had ordered the assassination of an American named Aubry Knight.
Bureaucratic inefficiency was her greatest protection.
“I think that we can do business, Ms. Cotonou. What is your next step?”
“Checking materials, and recruiting labor. I will want access to the following areas.” She scanned Kanagawa a list. A holofax appeared before him, so quickly she might have handed it to him.
Kanagawa examined it without hesitation. “None of these areas are secure. I will run them past the computers, but once again, I think that we can do business.”
6
SEPTEMBER 25. IRON MOUNTAIN.
A succession of men and women nursed Aubry, cared for him, tended to him. He began to recognize them the way a child knows the adults in his neighborhood. He felt safe, and warm, and drifted mindlessly from dream to wakefulness to sleep, and back again.
The woman who had been with him in the truck was named Tanesha. Despite the wrinkles starring her eyes, her skin was very fine, and he grew to anticipate her touch when she checked his temperature, or helped to change him.
From time to time, there would be quiet visitors, men and women who appeared in the doorway filled with smiling curiosity, almost as if they shared a private joke.
They were clearly worker-folk, dressed in dust-stained overalls. And he saw them as being a kind of Scavenger, and felt himself at home among them.
On the fourth day, Aubry awoke feeling famished. A delighted Tanesha ordered food for him: a kind of coarse rice, meal pancakes, and an enormous salad. Fresh fruit for dessert. He bolted it down almost without thinking, and only after finishing did he realize that he had eaten no meat since awakening in Iron Mountain.
He rent the air with a long, satisfied belch. Tanesha laughed wholeheartedly. “Good,” she said. “I believe that you will live.”
“Where is Old Man?” he asked, and then paused. “And why …”
“Why does he call himself that?”
Aubry nodded.
“He has a name,” Tanesha said. “But it is a custom of our people—if there is an enemy who has dishonored us, our warriors forsake their names until honor has been regained.” Aubry’s expression changed to one of puzzlement. “Do not concern yourself with this thing. Old Man is in the conveyor room. I will take you there.”
For generations, the Ibandi had worked Iron Mountain, the most productive source of ore in Central Africa. A hundred years before, they had used the methods of their ancestors. Then, inevitably, the modern world had caught up with them, and the technology had changed.
But one thing remained the same—these mountains belonged to the Ibandi, and had through all tribal memory. In the last forty years they had pulled back into the mountains, had tunneled deeply within, creating a network of shelters and protected domiciles that could withstand a nuclear attack.
And the mining continued. Beyond the mountains, there was farmland, land that had been carefully irrigated and fertilized over generations. With the growth of Ibandi financial power, experts from around the world had contributed to their knowledge of agriculture and land reclamation, until their thirteen thousand square miles of land, a kingdom within the PanAfrican Republic, was self-supporting, as well as an exporter of textiles, ore, and food.
The living spaces within the Iron Mountain coexisted with the mining operation itself. Conveyor belts rumbled twenty-four hours a day, as steady as the beat of a mother’s heart.
The halls were seven feet high, with arched ceilings and darkly tiled floors. Living quarters were often on one side of a hallway, while on the other was a cavernous, glass-walled hole. To peer into it was to look into the heart of the Iron Mountain itself, to look down into the labyrinth of tunnels, seeing men and women who seemed the size of ants laboring, running machines and ore cars, supervising the conveyor strip carting iron ore from the depths of the Earth. The dry stench of burnt and powdered rock hung in the air like a curtain.
Tanesha led him down a complex system of elevators and slidewalks, and into the heart of the mines, where, finally, he saw Old Man.
The Ibandi patriarch wore overalls and a hard hat, and was in conference with a younger, larger man whose hard, dark face was spiderwebbed with smile lines.
Tanesha said, “I have other business. He will speak with you when he can.” He turned to thank her, but she was already gone.
After about four minutes, Old Man slapped the younger man on the shoulder, pointing at something on a clipboard. They both laughed uproariously, and then Old Man turned to Aubry.
He waved his hand in greeting, and motioned him over. “Aubry,” he said. “Peter Challa.”
They shook hands. Challa was three inches shorter than Aubry, but still a large, powerful man with an infectious grin. “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “You don’t look so abominable.” Then he laughed and shook his head, going back to his work.
“So,” Old Man said. “What do you think of all of this?”
“All of this belongs to the Ibandi?”
“Yes. We have mined these mountains for a thousand years—and will until the Earth has no more bounty.”
“Swarna didn’t try to nationalize it?”
“He tried.” Old Man grinned. “The price we made him pay is too high. So now, we pay each other tribute. He gets the ore he wants, at a fair price. And he gives us … other things.”
“And who are the Ibandi? I’ve heard that name.” He searched his memory. Sudd
enly, his tired eyes opened wide. “Now I remember—the Ibandi were Swarna’s people. He was a priest, wasn’t he?”
“We are your people as well,” Old Man said. “When Swarna took power …” He paused, perhaps searching for the right phrasing. “He was careful to remove those who might challenge him. There was utter chaos—remember, in creating PanAfrica he consolidated six different countries into a single entity. Hundreds of thousands sought to flee the continent. You were one of the refugees, when you were only a baby.”
“How …” Aubry took a moment to digest that. “My … father brought me to America?”
“No. Your father died before you were born.”
“Then who …”
“The man who brought you to America was Thomas Jai, a great Ibandi warrior. He was sworn to protect you.”
Aubry could hardly hear his own voice as he asked the next question. “Why? Why me?”
Old Man smiled. “You were helpless, and needed aid. You need make nothing more out of it.”
Aubry was quiet, and he looked out over the factory from inside the control room, the conveyor belts carrying the ore from the mountain down to the loading docks.
The windows were slanted out at a thirty-degree angle, and the glass, he sensed, was tinted so that those below couldn’t see up into the control room. Most of the men and women working the conveyor belts were as dark as Aubry. Some were not. There were a few Japanese, and a few scattered Indians.
“This is all so confusing.”
“Of course. Nothing is as it seems. Everything is as it is.”
Aubry looked at him, and realized that Old Man was laughing at him. Gently, but definitely.
“I don’t know what is next,” Aubry said.
“Next, you finish healing. And then, if you wish, you can return to America.”
7
The mining equipment droned steadily through the night, never completely dying away. Nor did it ever completely grasp consciousness. Aubry lay in bed thinking about the people he had seen, and the things that had been said, and realized that for the first time in … weeks?… he felt whole.
He levered himself up to sitting position, and decided to attempt the Rubber Band, the series of exercises that he had learned in childhood.
A series of exercises taught him by …
His father? No. Not his father. By Thomas Jai, a warrior who had given his life for Aubry. Who had given this one piece of his heritage to a small, frail boy, that that heritage might not die completely.
Aubry stood, feet close together. Breathing deeply, he felt a swell of warmth in his feet, let the warmth roll up his legs, connect with his hips, let himself begin to sway.
He bent backward, feeling his back muscles contract as his chest expanded. His muscles, unstressed for days, moved stiffly beneath his skin. He arched powerfully, expanding as he inhaled, swaying. Then he thumped down into an inverted V and placed his palms flat on the ground; as he had been able to do, with absolutely no warm-up, for all of his memory.
All his weight went onto his hands. His tendons creaked as they began to bear the load. The first of a long, unbroken series of breaths hissed from his mouth.
For the next ten minutes he was lost in the movements, as he transported himself to another time, and place.
He was once again in the city of his youth, a warren of alleys and sewers and abandoned shops. It was a place alive with memories. Sometimes the movements mimicked the shapes of the city, and sometimes the air in his lungs escaped like steam, mimicking animal sounds.
At the fifteen-minute mark, his breath began to grow ragged, and he felt the first trembles of exhaustion. And at seventeen, his entire body was shaking.
Sweat was pouring from him in a torrent, and he could no longer control himself. Then, during a complex movement where his weight was balanced on his arms, his entire trunk rotated to the side and parallel to the floor. Aubry could take no more, and collapsed, lying on the cold tile in a pool of sweat. Trembling.
But not unsatisfied. He was on the way to recovery.
From the doorway came five sardonic claps. There stood Challa, an enormous smile splitting his lips.
“Is good,” he said, in stilted English. “You have no teacher, for long time, yes?”
Aubry bit back his retort. This man suddenly reminded him of something … of himself.
Challa didn’t have Aubry’s size, but he conveyed the impression of concealed speed and effortless, efficient movement.
Aubry wiped sweat from his forehead, spattered it from his fingertips onto the ground. “You know this?”
“Every child know fire dance,” Challa said, still in English. “You do high form. I know low form. You want see?”
Aubry nodded, almost foolishly grateful.
Challa said, “You want see, you come to the dance tonight. You see!”
And he laughed, and left Aubry lying in the stink of his own sweat, thinking on things that he hadn’t considered for many years.
8
SEPTEMBER 27
Aubry showered, shaved, and dressed himself, and for the first time left the complex of tunnels and catwalks that composed Iron Mountain. The tramway took him to a balcony next to an elevator system, from which he could look out over a valley.
From where he was he could see train tracks stretching off into the distance, warehouses and geodesic domes, and a four-story concrete block ventilated with steam and smoke pipes.
Below him and to his left, a huge conveyor belt rumbled. It seemed to Aubry that a million tons a minute flowed out of that mine. Then it would be down the chute and onto boxcars at the foot of the mountains, where it would be loaded again and sent to the refineries.
He took the elevator down and trotted to the four-story concrete block, testing his body gently, and cautiously pleased at the results.
The building was Iron Mountain’s small private refinery; most of its ore was carried a hundred miles to the south in boxcars, to more extensive refineries. But here in the valley at the foot of the Iron Mountain, coal was carted in, ore was heated and pressured to extract the iron within, and molded and tested by Ibandi workmen whose fathers had mined this ground, and refined its fruits, for a thousand years.
A corrugated-steel door opened before he reached it, and closed automatically behind him.
The air within was hot and dry. Most of the refinery seemed to be automated, but there were human beings everywhere, checking pipes and conveyor belts, wiring and scanning systems with sober, dutiful care. A thin stream of liquid fire gushed from an enormous vat as he watched. Even at a hundred meters, the heat crisped the hair on his arms.
He climbed a winding metal staircase to a small surveillance platform, where Tanesha stood checking a clipboard against a readout meter. She didn’t notice him until he squeezed her shoulder with one large hand. She gave him a short, pretty smile that made him burn. “How did you build all of this?”
“These mountains …” She raised her voice to pitch it above the roar of the machinery. “… have always belonged to our people. Many have tried to take them. None succeeded. In the end, the Europeans, and later the Japanese, helped us build factories, and brought in the mining equipment, and we built what you see here. It has grown. We mine the mountains, and we plant trees and brush to cover the scars. We brought water to our desert.” She looked at him sharply. “And we are a free people.”
She turned, very lightly and tightly, with a physical grace that he recognized. “I know someone who would appreciate you,” he chuckled. Jenna.
Grief for loss of Bloodeagle, and fear for Jenna, hit him like a wave of fever. God. Was she even alive? And where was she? And was there even any way to find out?
She looked back at him, over her shoulder, and the light made her face seem a liquid opal instead of a human form. The liquid steel gushed sparks. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. She waited for him to continue, but he remained silent.
She paused, and let her clipb
oard slide into a slot on the ceaseless machine. “Are you going to be at the dance this evening?”
“What kind of dance?”
“It is a celebration. All the mine workers will be there. And many of our people from the entire Ibandi nation. It is almost time for our boys to become men. Almost time for the Firedance.”
—you want to see, you come to the dance tonight …
“You mean the morning exercise routine?”
“That also carries the name. The emphasis is different. Say it as if one word.”
“You mean Firedance, instead of fire dance.”
“Good,” she said, almost shyly. “It is very good.”
9
At dinnertime, Tanesha came to him in his quarters and took him back outside. She wore a dress composed of earth browns and sky blues, dense, heavy fabric that looked handmade and much more traditional than anything he had seen her in.
Pungent food smells, the aroma of onions and garlic, potatoes and spiced beef drifted from kitchen units set up farther down the valley. There, the communal meal was being prepared by the young men and women of the tribe, in a ritual as old as the Ibandi themselves.
But now, before a circle of flaming torches, hundreds of young Ibandi men and women stood in a huge circle of packed earth. They stood swaying, gazing up at the sky, bodies moving in response to music that Aubry could not hear.
Then, at some unspoken signal, they took in a deep, sighing breath, and began to perform the Firedance, what Aubry had always called the Rubber Band.
The first thing he noticed was that they seemed boneless. Their motion was effortlessly fluid, and absolutely synchronized with their breathing. Somewhat shamefacedly, Aubry realized that he had allowed his own morning rituals to become unsynchronized, shamelessly sloppy when compared with the precise rhythms of this group.
They rolled and somersaulted backward and forward, making strange music with the thrum of their breathing, the impact of their young bodies against the hard-packed earth.
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