The Ends of the Earth: Fourteen Stories by Lucius Shepard

Author:Lucius Shepard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Collections & Anthologies, General, Military
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2015-02-27T04:01:43+00:00

There was a goddess in Katmandu named Kumari, a living, breathing incarnation chosen from among the daughters of wealthy Newar families—chosen by oracular sign, some said, and by political necessity, said others—and until she reached the age of puberty and a new incarnation was selected, she lived in a temple on Durbar Square, where she was worshiped and pampered and paraded before the faithful on festival days. It astonished Clement that no one apart from himself found this notable, that people dismissed Kumari’s existence as an atavism left over from a simpler time, from an age when superstition had not yet been overthrown by logic. They seemed to neglect the fact that no matter how completely the phenomenon had been explained away, there was a goddess in Katmandu, an actual goddess whose followers numbered in the hundreds of thousands…and, even more remarkable in Clement’s opinion, scattered throughout the country were thirteen women who had once been Kumari and were now shunned, deemed unlucky and thus unsuitable for marriage.

If there was one overwhelming reason that Clement was so taken with Kumari’s divinity, so insistent upon its importance, it was that he needed something larger than himself on which to focus, something whose nature might afford relief from the grim realities of his profession. He was thirty-eight, a compact muscular man with sandy hair and what seemed a permanent case of sunburn, and blue-gray eyes that in certain lights appeared colorless. His face had a bland, boyish innocence, the face of an aging athlete or a young cleric, of someone to whom duplicity and violence were shameful but minor matters; for the past three years, however, he had served as the CIA station chief in Calcutta, a position that required him to commit duplicity and violence on a grand scale. Many considered him a murderer, while others considered him a man who was doing a nasty but essential job. For his own part, Clement refused to characterize himself, because life had grown too complex for him to accept the emotionality attaching to either label. In his business such uncertainty led inevitably to mental sloppiness and fatal error, and Clement knew he was in danger; but he had a secret that allowed him to defer hopelessness, to believe in salvation of a kind. He wasn’t sure it was a real secret, but it was at the least a mystery, and in order to determine its true nature, every now and then he would take a long weekend, and—accompanied by his wife, Lily—he would travel to small Asian hill towns and wander through the markets and inquire after an elderly foreigner who carved animals out of wood.

It was during one of these trips that Clement learned of Kumari, and he asked the station chief in Katmandu, Carl Rice, to assist him in tracking down the women who had once been incarnations. Within a matter of hours, Rice—a lanky olive-skinned Southerner, whom Clement had known for years—presented him with a list. “Most of ’em are

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