Chapter 30

An Linh refused to leave Stoner.

The helicopter brought them to the International Peace Force hospital near Mwanza, on the shore of Lake Victoria. There on the outskirts of the Tanzanian city, swollen to more than a million by the tide of war, the Peace Enforcers had erected a minimetropolis, prefabricated buildings of plastic and lightweight metals manufactured in the orbital factories a few hundred miles overhead. Crowded, busy, as impersonal as any big-city hospital, staffed by harried doctors and overworked nurses, abuzz with computers filing data and robots whisking along every corridor--still the hospital was infinitely better than the camp.

A brash young intern from Queens examined An Linh's wound and pronounced it healed.

"She's got a slight fever and a mild case of malnutrition," he told Stoner. "It's nothing compared to what we've been getting. A few days' rest, antibiotics, and some real food, and she'll be as good as new."

He was smiling into An Linh's wan but lovely face as she lay on the crisply clean sheets of a real hospital bed, in the long, noisy ward filled with black women who had been

wounded, raped, starved, burned, who had miscarried or seen their babies killed, who had been too weak to fend off the diseases that lurked in the very air and turned virulent in the wake of war. Human nurses and robots answered their calls, tried to comfort their sobs, ease the pain, quiet the screaming. An Linh smiled weakly back at the young American and asked, "What about him, Doctor?"

"I'm all right," said Stoner.

But the doctor insisted on examining him, too. Stoner put up with it and even submitted to the tests that the doctor ordered. For the remainder of the day he was subjected to needles, probes, and scanning machines. Stoically he endured it all, thinking, It's just like the space agency's prodding when they took me in for astronaut training.

By that evening the same doctor reappeared in the ward, stethoscope stuffed in a pocket of his white coveralls, a knowing grin on his long, horsey face.

"I thought I'd find you here," he said to Stoner as he strode confidently up toward An Linh's bed. "It's where I'd be, if I had a choice."

"You're very gallant," she said.

He made a surprising little bow, then turned to Stoner and said, "I've gotten a bed assigned to you, over in the men's temporary ward. The only thing wrong with you is malnutrition, but I can't let you out of here until you've gained ten pounds. Too big a risk of coming down with pneumonia or diphtheria or any one of the zillion other bugs floating around the area."

Stoner argued, but only mildly. He stayed at the hospital for a week, gaining strength each day. And knowledge. He easily talked the nurses into letting him watch the television news broadcasts in their lounge. He learned how the war was going: the alliance of the rebels in Nigeria, Chad, Zaire, and Uganda had invaded both Kenya and the Sudan, but their onslaught had been ground to a halt by the Peace Enforcers-- for the time being. Both sides seemed to be taking a breather, building their forces and waiting for the opportunity to renew the fighting.

He visited An Linh every afternoon and evening. After the first two days, they started taking dinner together at the walking patients' cafeteria.

"I've got to get to this Colonel Bahadur," he told her over dinner. "He's the chief of the Peace Enforcers."

"And where is he?" An Linh asked.

"Not far from here, in a place called Namanga, just over the border in Kenya. It's near Kilimanjaro, from what I hear."

An Linh chewed on her soyburger thoughtfully, then said, "I've always wanted to see Kilimanjaro."

Before Stoner could shake his head, she went on, "I've nowhere else to go, Keith. I've got to stay with you."

A thousand reasons why she shouldn't come with him sprang into his mind. But one look at her trusting, vulnerable face took all the argument out of him. I can't leave her alone, he told himself. And he tried to ignore the feeling that his other self, that observer buried deep inside his brain, wanted to see how their relationship would work out.

"You are an extraordinary man, Dr. Stoner," said Colonel Banda Singh Bahadur.

Stoner nodded an acknowledgment of the compliment. "You are far from an ordinary person yourself, Colonel."

They were walking across a grassy field, past a row of helicopters painted in blotchy jungle-green camouflage, bristling with gun ports and rocket tubes. The morning sun was not yet truly hot, and off in the hazy blue distance the flat, snow-covered summit of Kilimanjaro seemed to hang in midair, unsupported, disconnected from the mundane earth below. Stoner could understand why the local tribes worshiped the mountain. It was godlike, floating there in the distance, beautiful, unreachable, yet ever-present.

Colonel Bahadur was a Sikh, somewhat of a mountain himself, big in every dimension. His full, curly, iron-gray beard made Stoner's dark growth look almost puny. He towered over Stoner and outweighed him by half again. Yet despite the man's size, Stoner had the impression that Bahadur could move with blinding speed when he wanted to. The colonel wore a white turban and the duty uniform of the International Peacekeeping Force, light blue fatigues decorated only by a pair of silver oak leaves clipped to his lapels, his name stenciled over his left breast, and the Peace Enforcers' shoulder patch: a jagged yellow bolt of lightning on a

field of sky blue. Stoner wore similar coveralls, minus decoration.

The colonel's duty, as he saw it, was twofold: to stop the fighting and to build self-sustaining communities in the areas that the war had devastated. His troops were few, but the Peace Enforcers' style of fighting used technology more than manpower. They never initiated hostilities. They never launched an attack. Their task was to discourage others from attacking their neighbors, to stop aggression in its tracks. They were counterpunchers, by design, by doctrine, by training and equipment.

When surveillance satellites saw troops, tanks, artillery, trucks, supplies being massed for an attack, the Peace Enforcers warned the politicians and generals preparing the aggression. If they did not disband their operation, the attackers were met by swarms of drone missiles, either guided remotely by technicians in space stations and aboard highflying aircraft or running under their own automated guidance systems. The missiles sought out the implements of war--the lumbering tanks and phallic artillery guns, the supply depots and ammunition dumps, the sleekly deadly planes waiting in their revetments--and demolished them. The object of the Peacekeepers was to destroy the implements of war. Soon enough the aggressor's troops learned that it was death to remain near those weapons once the Peacekeepers had spotted them.

The theory was simple enough. But the practice was difficult. Very difficult. Sprawled across a thousand miles of thick tropical forest, mountains, and grasslands, the Central African War was a confused struggle of rebels against central governments, of provinces seceding and guerrillas terrorizing villages. There was no battlefront, no organized confrontation of uniformed armies. The Peace Enforcers reacted where they could, devastated armed concentrations where they could find them. But the Enforcers' numbers were few, and the blood-maddened fighting forces who made war on each other were legion. The carnage went on, mindlessly, it seemed.

"Too many young men," said the colonel to Stoner. "It was a mistake to give these people the means to select the sex of their offspring. They opt for boys over girls, always."

"That hasn't happened in Europe or the Americas," Stoner pointed out. "Or in Asia. Even in your own India . . ."

"We are members of a high civilization! Our religious teachings prevent us from tampering with the natural order of births. Even among a warrior race such as we Sikhs, we know better than to select a huge oversupply of male children."

"But here in Africa ..."

"They are villagers. Primitives. Still tied to the land, still an agricultural society."

"So they pick boys whenever they have the choice," Stoner said, "and end up with armies of young men who have no jobs and nowhere to go."

"Except to war. Which is why your mission will fail," Colonel Bahadur said. His voice became heavy, deep, as if it came from the bowels of the earth.

"It might fail," Stoner agreed cheerfully.

"No man can bring the leaders of all the various factions together under one roof," the colonel insisted.

Stoner looked up at him. "Then I'll bring them together out in the open, where your satellites can watch us."

Behind his curly beard and mustache, the colonel may have smiled. But he shook his turbaned head. "Not even with such a beautiful woman to help you will you be able to bring them together. We don't even know who half of them are!"

"I'll find them."

They stopped at the helicopter at the end of the row. Unlike the sickly green of the armed choppers, this one was painted all white, with the sky-blue insignia of the International Peacekeeping Force stenciled on its sides. An Linh was already inside the helicopter, dressed in blue fatigues, chatting with the pilot--a golden-haired Norwegian.

"I wish you luck, then," said the colonel, very serious, almost grave.

"Thanks." Stoner put out his hand, and the Sikh's huge paw engulfed it.

Then he clambered into the helicopter and waved a farewell to the head of the Peace Enforcers. The engine whined to life as Colonel Bahadur backed away, and the speedy little helicopter lifted smoothly off the ground.

"He's right, you know," An Linh said over the noise of the engine. "This is a hopeless crusade."

Stoner laughed. "Have you got anything better to do?"

The planet swung around its star in the orbit it had followed for billions of years. Africa's dry season yielded at last to the life-giving rains, and Kilimanjaro took on a new blanket of white that gleamed when the sun shone upon it.

A tall, bearded white man, with a beautiful Asian woman at his side, arrived in Kampala and somehow managed to gain an audience with the chief of state of Uganda. Three weeks later they were seen in Kinshasa, Zaire, and a few days later in Kolwezi, where the rebellious Katangans had made their headquarters. Reports placed them in Chad, in four different locations in Nigeria, on the bank of the White Nile in Sudan, on the shores of Lake Rudolf in Kenya.

It happened that on the very day when the planet was at its closest to its star, men from each of these places flew to a meeting in a dry, wasted gulley carved out of the earth by a river that had disappeared a million years ago. The place was called Olduvai.

It was a strange meeting, witnessed only by a team of paleontologists startled from their digging by the sudden thundering of a dozen helicopters.

The paleontologists, five women, three men, and twenty-eight assistants, watched goggle-eyed as the helicopters descended a respectful distance from their tents. One of the helicopters bore the insignia of the IFF; it had been white, but the hard-driven miles had dirtied its once gleaming finish. The other helicopters all wore battle camouflage, and each carried a different insignia.

One tall, bearded man in sky-blue coveralls ducked out of the white helicopter, then turned to help a slim Asian woman, similarly clad, to alight. No one came out of the other machines, whose rotors kept turning, filling the air with their angry whooshing roar.

The elderly woman who was in charge of the dig came scrambling up the embankment toward Stoner. The rains had not yet reached Olduvai, and the steep slope was dry and crumbling as she climbed. She was short and squat, and by the time she reached the top she was panting, perspiring, and as angry as a bee-stung mule.

"What's the meaning of this? I've told you media idiots time and again that I--"

But she stopped once she got a good look at Stoner.

"Who the hell are you?" she snapped in a flat Kansan accent.

Stoner lifted both his hands and smiled at her. "I know we're disturbing your work, but this was the only neutral ground that they would all agree on."

The paleontologist looked from Stoner to the ugly green helicopters and back again. The sky was thick with clouds. It would rain soon.

"What's going on?" she asked more gently.

"A peace conference," replied Stoner. Then he added, "If we're lucky."