'Put on floor,' Mr Li said to her.
'We have all the necessary permits,' she explained quite evenly. She said it directly to the officer. 'Out in our car, permits, understand? Passports. Documents.'
'Please you put on floor,' Mr Li repeated very softly. He pointed at her baby. 'That,'
he said, as if it were a dirty thing.
Holly Ann despised him. Despised China. Despised the God that allowed such things.
'She,' said Holly Ann. 'This girl goes with me.'
'Not good,' Mr Li softly pleaded.
'She will die otherwise.'
'Yes.'
'Holly Ann?' Wade loomed behind her.
'It's a baby, Wade. Our baby. I found her. On a pile of garbage. And now they want to kill her.' Holly Ann felt the infant stirring. The tiny fingernails pulled at her blouse.
'A baby?'
'No,' Mr Li said.
'I'm taking her home with us.'
Mr Li shook his head emphatically.
'Give them the money,' she instructed him.
Wade blustered foolishly. 'We're American citizens. You did tell them, didn't you?'
'This isn't for you,' Mr Li said. 'It's a trade. This for that.'
She could feel the infant's hunger, miniature lips groping for a nipple. 'A trade?' she demanded. 'Who are you trading with?'
Mr Li glanced nervously at the soldiers.
'Who?' she insisted.
Mr Li pointed at the ground. Through it. 'Them.' Holly Ann felt faint. 'What?'
'Our babies. Their babies. Trade.' The infant made a tiny sound.
Over Mr Li's shoulder, Holly Ann saw the officer aiming his gun. She saw a puff of color spit from the barrel.
Holly Ann barely felt the bullet. Her fall to earth was more like floating. All the way down, she held the child in safety.
Above her, violent shadows thundered. More guns went off. Her name roared out. She smiled and rested her head gently against the bundle at her shoulder. Little
no-name. No-luck. I belong to you. Before they could reach her, Holly Ann did the only thing left to do. She unveiled the daughter China had refused. Time to say good-bye.
In her search around the world for a child, Holly Ann had seen babies of every race and color. Her search had changed her forever, she thought. Black eyes or blue, kinky hair or straight, chocolate skin or yellow or brown or white, crooked, blind, or straight: none of that mattered.
As she opened the sweater wrapping the baby, Holly Ann fully expected to recognize her common humanity in this tiny being. Every infant was a chalice. That was her conviction. Until now.
Even dying, Holly Ann was able to kick the thing away from her.
Oh God, she cursed, and closed her eyes.
A sound like giants walking wakened her. She looked. It was not footsteps, but the old man carefully planting one shot at a time as he tracked the foundling.
Finally it was done. And she was glad.
...nature hath adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper for their view...
– JONATHAN SWIFT, Gulliver's Travels
12
ANIMALS
The July Tunnels
In a gut of coiled granite, the mortal fed.
The meat was still warm from life. It was more than food, less than sacrament. Flesh is a landmark, if you know its flavor. The trick was setting your clock, so to speak, then categorically marking the shifts in tone or odor, or changes in the skin and muscle and blood, as you moved through the territory. Memorize the particulars, and you could begin to orient yourself in a cartography based on raw flesh. In terms of taste, the liver was often most distinct, sometimes the heart.
He crouched in the pocket of darkness with this creature squeezed between his thighs, the chest cavity opened. He rummaged. Like a mariner finding north, he committed to memory the organs, their relative position and size and smell. He sampled different pieces, just a taste. Palmed the skull, lifted the limbs, ran his hands along the limbs.
He'd never encountered a beast quite like this one. Its uniqueness did not register as a new phylum or species. The kill barely registered at the level of language. And
yet it would permanently acquaint him. He would remember this creature in every detail.
Head held high to listen for intruders, he inserted his hands in the animal's hide and let his wonder run. He was utterly respectful. He was a student, no more. The animal was his teacher.
It was not just a matter of locating yourself east or south. Depth was sometimes far more consequential, and the consistency of flesh could serve as an altimeter of sorts. In the deep seas, such bathypelagic monsters as anglerfish were slow moving, with a metabolic rate as low as one percent of fish living near the surface. Their body tissue was watery, with little muscle and no fat. So it was at certain depths in the subplanet. Down some channels, you found reptiles or fish that were little more than vegetables with teeth. Even the ones that weren't poisonous weren't worth eating. Their food value verged on plain air. Even them he'd eaten.
Again, there were more reasons to hunt than filling your belly. With care you could plot a course, find a destination, locate water, avoid – or track – enemies. It made simple survival something more, a journey. A destiny.
The body spoke to him. He felt for eyes, found stems, tried to thumb open the lids, but they were sealed. Blind. The talons were a raptor's, with an opposing thumb. He had caught it drafting on the tunnel's breeze, but the wings were much too small for real flight.
He started at the top again. The snout. Milk teeth, but sharp as needles. The way the joints moved. The genitals, this one a male. The hip bones were abraded from scraping along the stone. He squeezed the bladder, and its liquid smelled sharp. He took one foot and pressed it against the dirt and felt the print.
All of this was done in darkness.
Finally, Ike was done. He laid the parts back inside the cavity and folded the arms across and pressed the body into a cleft in the wall.
They entered a series of deep trenches that resembled terrestrial canyons, but which had not been cut by the flow of water. These were instead the remains of seafloor spreading, fossilized here. They had found an ocean bottom – bone dry – 2,650 fathoms beneath the Pacific Ocean floor. That night they made camp near a huge coral bed stretching right and left into the darkness. It was like a Sherwood Forest made of calcified polyps. Great, oaklike branches reached up and out with green and blue and pink pastels and deep reds secreted, according to their geobotanist, by an ancestor of the gorgonian Corallium nobile. There were desiccated sea fans under their spreading limbs, so old their colors had leached to transparency. Ancient marine animals lay at their feet, turned to stone.