Lin trudged up the path to the top of the ridge and then used the map Guo Wenxiang had drawn, walking over the pass, along an ancient landslide of jumbled rocks, and through a cleft which showed him, in a depressing sun-battered sweep, the valley down below where the camp had been. Although Lin could see the remains of a road, and the broken-down huddle of mud buildings, he did not descend into the valley. Instead he followed the face of the dirt mountain around to his left, as he’d been instructed, and came to a small, jutting butte, protected behind by piles of rock.
Guo had said this was where they were buried.
Yes. Lin narrowed his eyes against the sun. He could see the row of shallow, regular swellings in the earth. He started at the right, as Guo had told him to do, and counted back seven.
Then he stood a long time in the beating blue glare, looking down at it.
This is my Meiyan at last, he thought in a clutch of misery. He unhooked the water bottle from his belt, set it on the ground, and lay down in the dust beside her, curled into a ball, his knees pressed up to his chest.
Alice stood in her room by the curtain, staring dully out the window. The courtyard behind the guesthouse was empty, shimmering in the oven of midday. The hot sage fragrance of the brush along the base of the building rose to her.
All she felt was emptiness. There was an ache in her chest where love had been. It had been love, hadn’t it? The real thing. Sometimes one didn’t know until after. Now she knew.
It was gone, though. All in the past.
"I can’t get a line to Beijing now," the Yinchuan operator told her. "Perhaps you should try later."
"It’s so important," Alice pleaded. "I really have to get this call through to Washington-"
"I’m sorry. There are no lines now."
"What’s the problem?" the bank manager said. He was at an adjacent desk, checking through some papers. It had been kind of him to let her use the phone again. But she could feel him wanting her to be finished and gone.
"Dabutong-le, " she answered desperately, trying to keep the tears out of her voice, I can’t get through.
The manager moved his shoulders in sympathetic resignation.
"I’m sorry." She swallowed, replacing the receiver. "I’ll come back later."
"I hope your father will be better," the manager said.
But he won’t, she thought, walking out of the bank into the harsh sunlight. I’m losing him. Losing Horace. Is that really who he is to me, Horace? The man in the Capitol, the man on TV, the champion of hate? But he’s my father, my family. My ancestor. I love you, sweetheart-she could hear his voice, the softness in it, the constancy.
Horace had made her what she was. She was his daughter through and through. From him she got her intelligence, and her pluck. Also the pale skin on her legs, her small knotty hands, her slight body and forest-colored eyes. She pushed through the crowd of young Mongol men loitering outside the bank and stepped into the dirt-packed street.
Yes. It was Horace who’d endowed her with intuition and sensitivity and then-cruelly-put her on national display. Ihave a little girl named Alice. She winced at the memory of his voice, the words caught in countless recordings and documentaries and now distilled in the minds of people everywhere. Because of this she’d lived all her life inversely: always the foreigner, the other, forever pretending to be something apart from what she truly was. Unloved and unloving. It all went back to Horace.
Suddenly everything around her jolted into sharper focus. How could she have ever expected to be a part of Asia? She saw how people moving in the road stepped carefully around her, avoiding her, turning their faces and their eyes away from her. She was the redheaded outsider. She always would be.
Of course, Horace hadn’t intended to do all this. Renzi jiang-si qi yen ye san. Before a man dies you must forgive him. That was what Lin said.
Forgive him. Forgive him. The word was a drumbeat of agony in her head. Impossible. It was all too big, too crushing, too many years of shame that never should have been hers in the first place. Anger made more sense than forgiveness. Didn’t it? Rage, thundering fury-to these feelings she had every right. Ke bu shi ma? Yes. Anyone would say so.
Yet at the same moment, under this current of emotion, she knew that neither vengeance nor absolution would work. She had to find some middle way to acknowledge the past and free up the future. Some way to choose her own life, for herself.
And meanwhile he’s going to die, she thought. Whatever else I do-whether I succeed or fail-I have to travel to him and say good-bye.
She walked quickly away down the street, conscious of the crowd’s awareness of her, conscious of the tears seeping from her eyes. The saving breath of his love, the death grip of his power. When he passed on it was all going to drain away from her at once.
She pushed through the front door of the guesthouse and saw Spencer and Kong bent over a pile of flakes, cobbles, and hammerstones in the lobby sitting-room. "Alice!" Spencer cried. "Just the person! Come and help us!"
"With what?" she whispered.
"You won’t believe what Dr. Kong has found! Look at this!" He held up a piece of incised bone.
Alice walked over, took it, tried to focus her swollen eyes on the etched design of an animal face surrounded by streaming sun-rays. "Is it-"
"It’s the monkey sun god!"
"But where-"
"Kong dug it out of the ash layer! In an irrigation trench he found!"
"But it’s what-a tool? A piece of a tool? What does it mean?"
"Don’t you see?" He stared at her. "It means we’ve found the monkey sun god people! We can excavate the site, we can get a firm date on their culture-this is bone, you see, it’s been buried all this time and not exposed to the air, so we can carbon-date it-Alice! A whole world of research just opened up here-articles-books-conferences-"
"Dicheng yidian ye mei dajiao-ne," Kong put in excitedly.
"And the site is totally undisturbed," Alice translated. Spencer laughed. "Amazing, isn’t it? People walk away from their homesteads twenty thousand years ago. The climate keeps everything perfect. Nobody disturbs it, nobody knows it’s there-hell, nobody even passes by it for all these centuries except a couple of shepherds and to them, it’s nothing but some rocks!" He looked radiantly at the small prize in front of him, then turned to Alice. "Will you help us?"
"With what?"
"Well, we’ve got at least one monkey sun god site here and I’m sure there’re dozens more. We’ll be the first to survey and the first to identify and date the culture. Kong and I. We’re going to do it together." He pointed to Kong.
The Chinese scientist nodded.
"These notes here-we’re starting to frame out a grant for NSF. I am sure they’ll go for this. It’s airtight. We have a few hours left before we leave for Yinchuan. Will you help us, Alice? Translate some of Kong’s ideas while I’m drafting it? I mean"-he colored again-"hey. You’ve given me more than I had a right to ask for already. I know that. I just mean, if you’re here and you’re feeling, well, you know, terrible, and maybe focusing on something else might help you-" He broke off. "God, Alice. You look awful. Listen. I’m sorry about the thing with Lin. I’d really like it if things went well for you. You know-as a friend-if there’s anything I can do-" He stopped, nodding wordlessly at the papers in front of him. "You know."
"Yeah," she said. "I know. But something else has happened."
"What?" He looked at her.
"My father’s sick."
"How sick?"
"Dying sick."
"What! Horace Mannegan? What’s wrong?"
"Prostate cancer."
"Oh, God-" His eyes filled with feeling. "Alice-what are you going to do?"
"I’m going straight back to Beijing, as soon as we get to Yinchuan. Fly to Washington."