IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE

by

Dolores J. Nurss

Volume I: Welcome to The Charadoc!

Chapter 3

DRIVING

Thursday, February 13, 2708, continued.

A scabby little old man squats by the road as Soskia ushers us to her limousine. "Spare a little?" he asks, clawed hand reaching out. I can smell the old sweat and liquor from here.

"Certainly," Jonathan says. "Why not?" He pulls out several bills, as the beggar's eyes bulge, and hands them over. We walk on, but I turn to spy the derelict as he scuttles away in a hurry to a liquor shop, his gait unsteady before he even gets there.

"You always had a soft heart, Jonathan," Soskia murmurs as Miro the chauffeur opens the door for us. "I understand that all the Tilián do." She lets Jonathan in, then takes the middle seat out of courtesy.

"It's my religion, actually," he says. We move into a compartment deeply cushioned in butter-soft leather. "Muslims give alms--it's one of our commandments."

"I have my charities, too," she says with a sniff, "but subsidizing alcoholism is not one of them." A footrest folds out and I can adjust it to suit me perfectly.

"Oh, don't be so harsh, my dear. A man has a right to die on his own terms, after all."

"At our expense?"

"Oh come, I gave voluntarily--he didn't rob me. And it is a rather elegant, if slow, mode of suicide when you come right down to it--the brain dies first." He glances out the back window, but by now the car has moved far beyond the port, already into rainforest. "He feels no pain, remembers nothing of the harsh circumstances that drove him to this pass, he can just sort of saunter downwards towards the grave in peace, erasing--in your own faith's reckoning--pride, lust, envy and greed, gluttony, wrath, and vanity as he goes. Especially vanity."

Soskia laughs. "You make it sound almost romantic. Is debauchery part of your religion, too?"

"Quite the reverse--though you wouldn't think so to read some of our more daring poets. We aren't supposed to drink at all."

She winks and nudges him. "Ah, but I've seen you lift a glass or two!"

"Never much, and never strong, just a sip for courtesy's sake." She just chuckles. "No, really. I have never been drunk in my life."

"Maybe a little relaxed?"

"Maybe a little," he concedes with a smile. "But I didn't say I was devout."

"Oho! So the entire sermon has been mere speculation! What do you believe in, Jonathan?"

"Lovequest," he says quite gravely. "What all Tilián believe in." Then, laughing at his own solemnity, he hugs our hostess and exclaims, "Oh, Soskia! How wonderful to debate with you again--philosophy, religion, death and life! You're certainly one of the most intelligent women I have ever had the joy to meet. And now an inventor, too, I hear. I have loved the letters that you've written about your experimental shop."

"I try to keep busy," she says, stroking her chin coyly. "Those of us with inheritances have much time to devote to good."

Jonathan winks at me. We both know that real inventors do the main work, under her patronage. But she does direct the lines of research.

It takes several hours to drive from Sargeddohl to Alcazar, the capitol of the Charadoc. I feel like I could sink into the upholstery of Auntie Soskia's limo like a foundered ship into silt, so tired do I feel--luxuriously tired, my cheek pressed to the padded interior by the window as I watch the night-dark forest slipping by. Jonathan and Soskia chatter away like they starve for each other's voices, like they have entered into some perfect symbiosis, feeding each other with all the little details of their lives for these decades spent apart. Miro drives on like an automaton and speaks no word.

"Is this one of those new vehicles that you wrote about?" Jonathan asks her as he looks about at the thing that encloses us.

"My dear, it was the prototype. You don't imagine they could finish the research without my funding?"

"It runs so smoothly! And smells like..."

"Like nothing at all.” I do catch a whiff of something pleasantly nutty or grainlike, but I don’t mention it. “I hate those dreadful bioconversion engines that you Tilián saddle yourselves with. How do you ever abide the stench?"

Jonathan laughs. "In here I wonder that myself. But what fuels it, Soskia?"

"The common people grow a grain, native to the mountains, which they call 'stapleseed'. You'll have never tasted it, I daresay; I won't allow the greasy stuff in my kitchen. It's much too caloric for anybody."

"But its oil has other uses?"

"An old recipe, rediscovered, and adjusted just a tad. Stapleseed produces the most splendid, clean-burning fuel--like nothing else on Novatierre. And the byproduct makes an ultra-rich soap. If you have any left over, you can always compost it."

"What a clever pioneer you are!"

I can feel her smile as my own, keeping to myself the knowledge that a number of countries have already rediscovered biodiesel. "Me and my research people,” Soskia says with pride. “We'll bring this poor little planet out of the dark ages yet."

Yet my sense of imbalance or whatever returns, or maybe I'm just tired.

Jonathan says, "I don't suppose more affordable versions of this vehicle have hit the market yet."

"The common people prefer donkey-carts and such. They love their animals like children." She sighs with a smile. "They are so close to the natural order, Jonathan--sometimes I envy them."

My blinks become longer and longer; I can't hold my eyes open a minute more. I slip into an uneasy dream...

(...Having finished filling the last set of children's teeth for the night, I load my equipment into the back of my van as the crickets sing all around. Tape won't hold that drill-arm together much longer; much as I hate to, I'll have to ask Uncle Donal for the money to buy another. I squeeze behind the wheel and hit the road.

But I still haven't replaced that dental chair that fell apart last year; Uncle's money always goes to something else. Material for fillings doesn't just fall out of the sky, after all, not to mention what passes between all of the teeth that I work on.

It doesn't take long for the dark to become monotonous. I reflect way too much on night drives like this. I can't hold back my mind from gnawing, over and over, the same old litany of my helplessness, my frustration. It will only make things worse in the end; I know that, but I cannot distract myself.

The wheel rubs uncomfortably against my belly, reminding me of everything that I long to forget. How I wish that the sight of other's needs didn't make my own crazy hunger worse! Yet have I no hope? Isn't it true that I've lost weight anyway, these past couple years? Not enough to show, but enough to enable me to walk miles where I used to struggle to walk blocks. Shouldn't that count for something? At this rate I can hope someday to become a mere fat man, not "morbidly obese".

I can't help but smile, just for a moment; under all this flab I must fairly bulge with muscle for the daily lifting of it. Wouldn't it impress people, if they could see that, and not the rest of me!

But I cannot sustain a smile for long. I still sees such things that all I can do when I get home (and I know, so agonizingly I know, that tonight will be no different) is eat everything in the house and cry, then hate myself and promise to fill more teeth tomorrow to make up for it.

Maybe I can skip the dental chair altogether. I've gotten by without it for awhile now. I think of all the times when I've used a mother's lap for a dental chair, but more often a grandmother or a lame aunt--someone too debilitated to work in the mines or the fields. And someone else holds the lamp overhead, maybe the father or a brother or an uncle, whoever in that family got crippled on the job.

But that won't really cut my expenses; it means packing food with the tools—a dangerous business. I've had too many lamp-holders faint because it gets arduous to lift the light high for so long above a hollow stomach. I don't know how much longer I can force myself to eat nothing all day long, for fear it'd go just like at home and I couldn't stop, I'd eat their share, too. But so far, every day, I find enough strength to do it, at least till I get home and wipe out all my stores.

Then I have to start the next day shopping and restocking, as early as possible, before I hit the road to fill more teeth. I wait for the store to open under the blushing sky, side by side with the pacing drunks, desperate for their morning bottle. The shopkeeper always sneers when I come in, eyeing up the sheer volume that I have to buy, every single day, along with the volume of me. But why should I tell him what I really need the food for? He wouldn't believe me.

The tires rattle over ruts in the road as I peer down the unlit miles, trying not to miss a bend and hit a tree. "I'm not their enemy," I mutter. "All the gluttons in the world can't cause a thing like this." Delicate equipment rattles in the back--no, the tape won't hold forever.

I have other draws upon my bank account to drive me back to Uncle; I can't help myself. I give my indigent patients the same anesthetics that I'd use on the rich; I swallow the expense and try not to think about it—except for moments like now, when I realize that I have to write to him yet again, inevitably, no way around it.

I can give my patients a shot, a pill, but for me nothing can anesthetize the spreading, empty ache inside--not just to see the pain of others but to feel alone in seeing it, like trying to testify to hallucinations, like living in some private madness that I know is true.

All I can see right now is road and trees, endless trees, and a few incredibly distant stars above the road. And I know there isn't another human soul for miles around.

Except possibly a rebel or a highwayman, if the two aren't the same thing, I wouldn't know. What would they make of a monstrous thing like me, anyway? Sure, I wear a peasant shirt, because the sleeves don't get in the way, but anyone can see that I'm no peasant. My pale, round face and light brown hair mark me as a foreigner in this predominantly Mountainfolk stretch, though many regions in the country have people of my color, just as poor. Still, my accent, my body-language, it all stands out, even without my girth—as if anyone could overlook the girth! Friends have warned me that I don't understand the Charadoc, the way things run here, not like the natives do; I could get in trouble.

But dentists grow thick skins. All day long people scream in my ears, salivate on my hands, breathe tooth-rot exhalations in my face. Dentists don't listen, or at least this dentist doesn't listen. My skin has grown so thick, in fact, that someday it'll probably strangle me to death, a defensive perimeter of fried sugar-pastries.

I don't run into much sugar-decay around here, not among the peasants. I recall my own problems with that; admittedly, I went into dentistry after destroying my mouth with sweets, and my teeth are not my own. I came to love the idea of alleviating so much pain as dentists had done for me--oh, if only I could alleviate just half the pain!

But here I don't encounter the same kind of cavities that I suffered in my youth. Here the teeth just crumble from inadequate material. Or there's malformed jaws; sometimes I have to draw perfectly good teeth because they just don't fit. Happens, when the kids don't get the right minerals in their diet. Sometimes I treat teeth ground down from chewing clay and sucking rocks. I wish I had more background in orthodontics.

But that didn't go over too well, did it? Sure, I did apply for continuation classes in orthodontics and other topics, thinking to spruce up my training, catch up on the latest discoveries, all that. The schools wouldn't let me in. They said they were full, then took applicants after me. Ah well, my friends warned me. I just don't listen.

I may not listen, but I feel. I think of guns every times I drive these dark dirt roads between the villages. I think of snipers, but I see nothing in the foliage save for glints of animal eyes. I picture the bullet entering the tight spot right between my shoulder-blades, and the thought makes the muscles tighten more. Actually, I know darn well that I'd probably get it in the side of the head, through the left window, straight through the glass and into my skull. But I can't quite feel it there; it's only a picture.

I have no idea what ideology the rebels espouse, or whether it would work or not, or whether it would even make sense. But I do know that the government suspects anyone who actively sympathizes with the poor of being rebels. That attitude alone deserves rebellion, so I drive the rough roads of the mountainside, down and up and swinging wide on brinks of cliff and burrowing deep through forest, I drive armed with drills and hypodermics to wage my war against decay and pain.)