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“Fuck off.”

“But I am correct, am I not? It is time we moved on as a species. At present we are still at the Klamath level. Have you ever heard of them? The Klamath are a Pacific tribe, in North America. They are my exquisitely ludicrous favorites, Jacob, my favorite example of the noxious and warbling stupidity of religion. The Klamath worship a flatulent dwarf goddess who wears a buckskin skirt and a wickerwork hat, and whenever the mosquitoes are especially malign on Pelican Bay, the Klamath ask their midget goddess to blow away the mosquitoes by farting out the wild west wind. They also believe the world was initially created out of a minuscule purple berry.”

Jake felt the cold wind on his scalp, the shaven patch where his hair had been, where his soul had been.

“Are we any better than the Klamath, Jacob? Are we? When we take Holy Communion or pray to Mecca or commune with the smirking Buddha we are, in essence, still requesting the sixty-centimeter-high dwarf goddess to fart away the mosquitoes, no?”

Jake inhaled; the world was drifting. He tried to fight the sensation. He knew it was pointless. What was done was, incredibly, done.

He walked away from the table and gazed across the silent chasms to the silent peaks. The strangeness of it all was this: Tyrone was right, he felt clearer. Calmer.

Happier.

45

“That is Balagezong. We chose it for its remoteness.”

Sovirom Sen was standing beside Jake.

Jake said nothing. He gazed at the wildness of the view.

Sen spoke again: “The village of Balagezong is so remote the locals speak their own language. Their own version of Tibetan, barely comprehensible to anyone else. Until we built the dirt roads for the lab, you had to walk five days to reach the gorges. Then another five days to reach the next village. It was perfect for our purposes.” He sighed. “Until recently. At the moment we live and work in pristine isolation — but now they want to put a national park here. They will demolish the labs, turn them into stores. And then there will be tour buses, guides, bringing people to the most beautiful place in the world. The last frontier of China. Someone in Beijing wants to make money from the landscape. These days they all want to make money.” Sen grimaced and gestured to the left. “The mountain next to it is sacred. White Buddha Mountain. Piquant.”

Jake gazed at this imperious summit: the slender yet mighty gray pyramid of stone was delicately striated with snow.

“Twenty-two thousand feet. The Holy Mountain of Balagezong. Of course, you will no longer feel the holiness. Correct?”

Jake sought inside himself for his reactions, his new and true reactions: and with another jolt of surprise, a reflex inflected with more delight, he sensed that he did feel differently. That cringing awe was gone, the shrivel of feeble smallness, the reverential humiliation of man confronted with the ineffable hugeness of the universe. Gone. Instead Jake surged with species pride. I am me. Alive. I am conscious. Man, noble man, the most noble work of evolution.

“I feel… different, cleaner. Lighter.”

Sen laughed. “Of course you do. You have had a parasite removed, a prion of stupidity. The most poisonous of mental viruses.”

“I feel, somehow, more free? Maybe blithe is the word.”

“Absolutely so, Jacob. And you will get used to it. Very quickly. We find that our subjects need only a few hours to adjust. Indeed, the swiftness of the transformation is remarkable, given the complexity of the neurosurgery. Mr. Fishwick is truly a genius, which is why we pay him the salary of a European soccer star. This is, of course, not very Marxist, but we do what we do! The end justifies.”

A Tibetan villager passed close to the terrace, carrying a basket of juniper wood. Jake smiled at the villager, who glanced his way and nodded, with a feudal humility, touching a forefinger to the fold of his purple headscarf, then he walked on along the mountain path, to the lower fields.

Sen continued, “Our early operations, our first surgical errors, these were, I accept they were… tragic errors. I am candid enough to confess this. My wife volunteered and I could not stop her, likewise my son in law. It was perhaps foolish to try such ambitious surgery with the primitive facilities and incomplete knowledge we had at the time. But we were true Communists, as we remain today. Keen and zealous, Jacob — and ardent for perfection. And you cannot make an omelette for the emperor without breaking thousand-year-old eggs. I did my utmost to help those we maimed. I employed Ponlok. Many of our guards are wretched victims of our earlier, botched operations. But the tragedies of my wife and Chemda’s father only fueled my desire to get it right. I knew the ultimate goal was worth any suffering. And so we learned over the decades by trial and error, and now we have succeeded.”

Jake stepped forward. Hesitantly. Something else was echoing in his mind, a lost voice, an absent voice, telling him… something.

Leaving Sen behind, he walked down the steps of the terrace onto the path. He followed the route of the peasant for a few seconds, then paused in the hard, high mountain sun.

The spectacular view stretched away beneath him. A precipice fell to the tiered and tile-roofed houses of the heaven villages, maybe a kilometer down; then small enclosures of jasmine and apricot trees; and then the mighty gorges beyond, infinitely deep. Black, subtropical, three kilometers down, a different world. They were surrounded by cliffs and gorges and mighty summits. Maybe the most beautiful place Jake had ever seen.

And yet his reaction to the splendor was calm, less impassioned. He no longer wanted to take photos. He didn’t need to mediate the beauty or the terror, the world was what it was. Not so frightening. Mountains and sun, cliffs and turnip fields. Barefoot women with headscarves crouching in the mud, tugging roots. Jake didn’t care too much. He didn’t care at all.

He didn’t care.

That was the difference, that was the substance of the change. His mind was entirely lucid now, deliciously clear, clear as the air of Balagezong: he could stare across an unclouded landscape at last, to the blue remembered hills.

He saw himself as a small boy. Running down the road with his sister. This memory was new, this memory was old, this memory had lain locked away inside him for so long — but now all the doors of perception had been slammed open, the fire doors, the barriers he had erected to the truth: they had all been blown away. And he remembered.

Jake was seven and his sister was five, and they were running down a street from school and then Becky tore herself from his hand and ran laughing stupidly into the road, and Jake saw again his sister hit by the car, thrown like a gruesome doll, batted casually to the side and broken, blood everywhere, dead. Her body smashed. Blood framed her blond head and her white eyes rolled and stared.

The heaven villages stared up at Jake; he stared down. He was standing above heaven, superior to heaven. I don’t need you anymore.

All this time he had been thinking it was his fault: all this time, somewhere inside him, he had felt the gnawing guilt, without quite knowing why, because he had repressed the memory. But the memory was now presented to him, and he was glad amid the tragedy.

His sister, his poor sister, she had run into the road and there was nothing he could have done. It all happened in a second. Not his fault.

Energized and heartened, Jake paced back along the yak path to the stupa at the other end of the village. A Tibetan man in chuba and cotton trousers was spinning the glittering brass prayer wheel. He acknowledged the white man with a vacant, smiling shrug; Jake smiled back and sat on the steps of the stupa and gazed at the elegant triangle of the Holy Mountain. White Buddha Mountain. The forests were hanging from the steep gray slopes, catching the mist in their dark green branches.