An hour later they were walking silently, grim-faced, through the ruins of Chemi's village, toward the chorten where they had promised to meet Anya. When the crumbling chorten came into view, Nyma pointed, relief flooding her face, toward a small figure walking around the chorten, then quickened her pace. Shan and Nyma were less than a hundred yards away when Shan stopped and held up his hand.

"It's her, I know it is," Nyma exclaimed, and began waving to get the girl's attention. She followed Shan's gaze and her hand slowly dropped. Lin sat on the ground forty feet from them, a chuba arranged under him like a blanket. The colonel was watching Anya with a melancholy smile. He wore his uniform, except a small piece of heather extended from his breast pocket. As Shan approached he glanced up and the smile disappeared.

"They say oil should come today or tomorrow," Shan said as he squatted beside Lin. "A delegation of venture officials are on the way."

Lin nodded slowly.

"I remember those snow caterpillars," Lin said suddenly, in a reluctant, hollow voice, as if compelled to continue the conversation Shan had offered the day before. "Suddenly last night I just remembered, how those women swept the snow, like you said. Sometimes little sparrows would be numb with cold and get swept up in the snow. My father would go down to the street sometimes when the caterpillar passed, to check for sparrows. If he found one he would put it in his pocket and we would take it home, then release it in the afternoon when it warmed.

"One day the block captain called a meeting," he continued, referring to one of the watchers who kept political order in residential units. "She had a burlap bag which she dumped on the table. It was dead sparrows, maybe twenty dead sparrows. She said from now on it would be our patriotic duty to collect the sparrows from the gutter after the sweepers passed, and eat them. Because the Chairman insisted that all resources be put to use for the cause of socialism. Then she gave us instruction on the approved methods for killing sparrows."

Shan stared sadly at Lin. He remembered children from his own youth filled with revolutionary zeal, stoning pigeons and seagulls, parading with the carcasses of mice. It was how the Chairman shaped good little soldiers, his father had said bitterly.

"So we killed the sparrows," Lin continued. "We ranged far beyond our block when the snow came, just to find and kill sparrows. One day I caught my father with a live one in his pocket and I told the block captain. I thought it was a joke I played on my father. But that afternoon I came home and there was a meeting. A tamzing. My father was in the middle, with welts on his face, and a sign pinned to his shirt that said reactionary pig. They wouldn't stop until my father killed that sparrow, in front of everyone. He was crying when he did it. The only time I ever saw my father cry."

They were silent a long time.

"Why," Lin said, looking at his hands, deeply perplexed. "Why would I have forgotten that until yesterday?" He glanced at Shan awkwardly, as if he had not intended to speak the thought out loud, then gazed toward Anya in the distance. "She's getting one more tonde," the colonel said. "Said that sometimes old chortens attract good tonde. Says I need one to keep rocks off my head." He spoke in a sober voice, as if he had come to fervently believe in tonde.

Lin turned to Shan and frowned. "I still have orders," he said, as if to correct himself. "People can't be allowed to do things to the government."

"Duties," Shan acknowledged with a small nod, still watching Anya.

The sound of heavy engines echoed up the narrow valley that led to the Yapchi road.

"There was something she did," Lin said, "when we were coming today. There was one of those rock rabbits, a pika she called it. It ran away and stopped about forty feet away. Then she sat and sang a song. She said, sit, Aku Lin." The colonel frowned again, as if displeased with his confessional tone. "She sang this song like I have never heard before. In Tibetan. I couldn't understand. But the words weren't important. It was like- I don't know, like what it would be if an animal could sing. And that pika came right up and sat in her lap. She picked up my hand and put it on top of the pika. I felt it breathing, like those sparrows when I was a boy." He cut his eyes at Shan. "A silly thing," he added, in a new, gruff tone. "A thing for children."

"A deity song," Shan said. "Anya calls them deity songs."

The machine sound was louder now. "A tank," Lin said in a weary voice. "And two or three trucks. Coming this way."

Shan looked at Lin. Was the colonel warning him, so he and Nyma could flee?

Anya straightened from where she was digging, and waved at them. Shan and Lin both waved back.

"You and I," Lin said awkwardly, "we're the same age I think." He sighed. "I had a letter from my mother before she died. She said two generations had been lost, but that the next one would be ready, the next one had the chance to put it all behind them and find a new way."

Shan stared at the man. They were not the words of an army colonel. He was saying that the turmoil brought by the party and politicians had ravaged men like Shan and himself, and their parents. But Anya was of the new generation.

"A good doctor could fix that leg. I promised to meet her at that resettlement camp in a week or two. I have some leave coming. I am going to take her to a good hospital." Lin spoke in a rush, as if he had to get the words out quickly or they might not come at all. With a strange sensation Shan realized that there was no one else Lin could speak them to, that Shan had somehow become his confessor. "If she wants I will take her to a real school. There are private schools now. I could pay-" Lin spun about. Three figures stood behind them, barely ten feet away. Nyma with Winslow and Tenzin, his dung bag on his shoulder. Lin glared at Shan, as if Shan had tricked him.

"Please," Shan said to them. "You should stay back. Soldiers may be coming-"

"Tenzin has an offer to make," the American announced as Nyma approached and knelt in the grass. "The papers the colonel has been looking for. Tenzin wants to return them."

As he spoke Tenzin lowered the dung bag from his shoulder, knelt, then accepted a pocket knife from Winslow, which he quickly used to cut the threads at the top of the bag. He ripped the double layer of thick leather apart, reached inside, and pulled out a thin sheaf of paper, perhaps ten pages in total.

As Lin stared at the paper a sound like a growl came from his throat.

"It's a report on a disaster," Tenzin said to Lin, as if he had to remind the colonel. "A unit of the 54th Mountain Combat Brigade was inside a mountain on the Indian border, a secret command center, still under construction. The mountain collapsed. Everyone inside was lost, with several million dollars of computer and surveillance equipment. Forty soldiers died. And the Tibetan workers who were being forced to hollow out the mountain. The last part is very sensitive. It says all the workers died. But one old monk survived for a few hours. He was laughing a lot. They thought he was delirious at first. He said the prisoners did it, that they had gradually dug away the support columns, that they had destroyed one of the army's crack units. That none of them minded taking four because it had become the right thing to do." Taking four. It was a gulag term, for choosing to commit the sin of suicide- and the incarnation as a lower life-form that would follow, a life on four legs- instead of continuing the misery of the gulag.