Her tears flooded onto his shirt, her shoulders shaking.
He held her stiffly.
She burrowed into him, wrapped her arms around and pressed her body against him. Any moment, any moment, he would soften and return her embrace, he would hold her, show his love to her through his body the way he had been doing for days. "Shiyang?"
But he did not answer. He only kept a secure hold on her.
"Shiyang, please," she begged, looking up. "Don’t cut it off like this!"
Pain and regret and confusion roared across his face. But still he did not return her touch.
"Shiyang!"
He began, with no more than a soft and minute motion, to shake his head.
From outside the door, footsteps. Voices.
"Alice!" English-the voice of Spencer. "Are you all right? "
"Interpreter Mo!" Dr. Kong chimed in.
"Don’t open it," she whispered in English to Lin Shiyang. "Please! Bie kai men."
He dropped his arms and stepped away from her. There was a cold, unhappy cast to his face.
"Jiu zheyang jiesu-le ma?" Is that it, then?
He didn’t answer, but turned and opened the door. There hovered the balloon faces of Spencer, frightened, concerned; and Kong, who looked from Lin to Alice and gave a nod of infinite sadness and understanding.
"Excuse me," Lin said shortly, and pushed past them.
"Alice?" Spencer said. Across his open blond face marched fascination, pity, kindness. "Hey! Are you okay?"
Not even bothering to wipe at the tears that now made an ugly river on her face, she hiccuped, "Just leave me alone," and slammed the door.
18
The world should have stopped. Everything ought to have gone dark and shrunk into some permanent nuclear winter. But the routine morning light appeared anyway and advanced across the plain stones of the lobby floor as if this were just another cruel quotidian turn of the wheel. She walked across the lobby, dead. She was dimly aware of Spencer, bent over some papers in the side sitting room.
"You all right, Alice?" he asked.
She stopped and stood motionless, her eyes closed.
"You don’t have to answer." He sighed. "I just wanted to say, you know, I’m sorry." He resettled the papers on his lap and went on with what he was writing.
She nodded and walked on. She needed to go out. To walk. Even if everything else was a stinging piano wire of pain, she could still move her body. It was a thing that sometimes got her through.
So she walked Eren Obo for a long, uncounted time, until the sun was far and hot across the sky. The desert light, in which she had once taken pleasure, now seemed to beat on her relentlessly.
Horace was going to die. He was going to leave her.
And Lin didn’t want her after all.
She trudged up the meandering creek through the scattered houses, past the temple complex. She ignored her thirst until it was a screaming need, and then she walked back to the center of town and bought an orange soda, loosely bottled, of extremely dubious hygiene. She drank it frantically. I’m Alice Mannegan, not Mo Ai-li, she thought. An American obsessed with China. Is that why I loved Lin, because he is China? No. Because he is Lin, a man. Not that it matters now. He’s gone. And I’m alone again.
At the edge of Eren Obo, where the town dissolved into bare desert that rolled gently to the edge of the mountains, Dr. Kong Zhen was walking too. He kept his eyes moving in a practiced sweep over the ground. He knew how to spot the microliths, the flakes and detritus and the tools themselves, the scrapers and hammers and points. So like plain rocks to the ordinary eye. To him, relics beyond price.
He stopped suddenly, at the edge of a crudely dug hole. He studied the hole, about a meter deep, and three or four meters long-a trench, actually. There was a creek not far away. Probably, he thought, the ditch had been started as an irrigation sluice. Begun-when? Ten years ago? Fifty?-partly dug, then abandoned.
Dr. Kong dropped into the hole and examined it. A dark horizontal streak, four inches thick-could it be? His pulse picked up. Stay calm, he told himself, running his fingers over the darkened earth. Was it ash? When one excavated cross-sections of primitive huts they looked like this, from the years and years of fires inside. Trembling he turned to the trench wall, to the pebbles and rocks studding it. With practiced care, despite the anticipation roaring in his brain, he removed these objects from the ash layer one by one and examined them. Each breath caught in his throat. A flake. Another flake. A cobble. Had this been a hunter-gatherer dwelling? Oh, yes. Yes it had. He stuffed the artifacts in his pocket, scrambled out of the trench, and hurried back to find Spencer.
She went to the bank and begged the manager to let her call her father’s office. On the other side of the world, in Washington, the secretary recognized her voice and called Roger to the phone at once.
"How bad is it? Tell me."
"Bad, Alice."
"So he’s having surgery? Chemotherapy? What?"
A tiny but perceptible pause. "Neither of those is indicated right now. They’re mainly trying to make him comfortable-"
"What?" She heard her voice rising. "Why aren’t they doing anything?"
"Alice,…" Roger sighed. His voice was flat, exhausted. "Look, he’s desperate to speak to you himself. He’ll be back here in four or five hours. Can you call again then?"
She looked frantically around. "No, the bank’ll be closed then. This is the only phone in the town."
"I see." Roger sounded deflated.
"I’ll keep trying, though. I will. And I’ll come right home, of course."
"Good. He’s stepping down from Congress on Friday, Alice. We’ll make the public announcement then."
"Friday! Are you kidding?"
"Can you be here by then?"
"I don’t know-I’ll try…" She calculated quickly. It was Monday. They were supposed to drive back to Yinchuan tomorrow. The next flight from Yinchuan to Beijing wasn’t until Tuesday night anyway. If she could get on that flight, it might be possible. She knew enough people in Beijing to get a quick ticket from Beijing to Hong Kong or Tokyo. Once she got to Hong Kong or Tokyo, it’d be a clear shot. "I’ll try," she repeated. "If not Friday, I can definitely get there before the weekend’s out."
"Good."
"Roger? How long does he have? A month? Six months?"
Silence again. "I’d rather he talked to you himself, Alice, so when you call back-"
"Roger, please. You know how hard it’s going to be for me to get him on the phone. Just tell me. How long."
She heard a long, defeated exhalation. "Alice," Roger said at last, "just get here as quickly as you can."
When Kong Zhen found Adam Spencer, he had no language to tell him what he had just found. So he made a quick sketch of the landscape, the canyon mouth, the alluvial fan, and then drew the trench. Speaking rapidly in Chinese even though he knew the American couldn’t understand, he colored in the ash layer and tapped the pen against it for emphasis.
"An ash layer?" Spencer said. "Are you kidding?" He stared at the page.
Kong pulled double handfuls of microliths from his pockets and scattered them on the table between them. He pointed to the microliths and then the ash layer.
"You found these in the ash? Oh, my God."
"Zou-ba, " Kong said, indicating the door.
"I’m with you," Spencer agreed, looking around for his hat. "Let’s go take a look."
"Thank you, elder brother," Lin said, climbing down from the truck.
"Will you be all right?" the Mongol asked him, hands on the steering wheel.
"Yes. I have water, some food. So this was the place they called Camp Fourteen?"
"Across that ridge." The Mongol pointed up the winding dirt track that led away from them and disappeared over the boulder-strewn hills. "But I believe there’s nothing left now-"
"I know," Lin cut him off heavily. "It’s all right. I know."
The Mongol raised a hand and drove away.