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lumps of dough had dropped from his
eyes. He might have been staring at the two of them.
    Kate jumped
to her feet in panic and revulsion, unable to restrain herself. Her movement
caught the eye of the thin, grieving man—the only mourner in the procession. He
hesitated, staring at her, apparently wondering where he had seen her before.
His hand went to the white scarf slung around his neck.
    For a moment
she was certain she saw thanks in his eyes. Thanks, no doubt, for the little
they had done in capturing his friend’s murderer.
    The man with
the drum and horn made a gesture to one of the monks, who ran up to rearrange
the corpse and draw the sackcloth back over it.
    She caught
her breath and sank back to the rock.
    The
procession ambled on up the hill. The lean man occasionally glanced back at
them until the party reached a bend in the road and disappeared through the
trees.
    Peter and
Kate climbed down from the rock. Neither spoke during the walk back to town;
they kept their hands tightly clasped.
    Later,
toward sunset, Kate looked back at the hill that rose above the buildings and
the market square. From the peak, a coil of smoke drifted up into the flaming
sky. Fumes from a funeral pyre.
    She put a
hand on her belly, feeling nauseous again.
    That was
their last night in Dharamsala.
     

3.
Recognition
     
     
    Peter and
Kate Strauss hiked up Geary Street, hauling two carts full of groceries behind
them. It was a cold August day, with wind and fog streaming over the buildings
of downtown. The sidewalks were lined with open-air markets and squatters’
homes set back in the broken facades of ruined hovercar showrooms. Summer was
the cruelest season in San Francisco, and hit the homeless the hardest. Kate
often wondered why they didn’t simply move east or south, away from the fog-belt,
toward Oakland or San Jose. There was no firewood in the city, nothing to burn
for fuel; Golden Gate Park had been stripped to the ground and reclaimed by
sand dunes. But the people stayed on, long after their pleas for assistance had
gone unanswered, their loans for rebuilding unapproved. Developers had kept
their money in the expanding Great Plains metropoli, having finally seen the
absurdity of stacking fortunes on a major earthquake fault.
    To Kate, San
Francisco resembled a graveyard of tumbled gray stone and broken black glass.
Streets and alleys had buckled during the quakes; grass and dandelions sprang
triumphant. Equally hardy groups of citizens clung to the seaport, promising to
restore the city’s vitality without the help of investors. In the future,
people would not build so high, nor out of such heavy materials. The Fellowship
had sent the Strausses to help with the restoration.
    As they
climbed the hill, they gradually came in sight of the church to which they had
been assigned. Its low walls of gray and reddish-brown stone had survived with
only minor damage, but the steeple tower had collapsed entirely, destroying
everything inside the walls. Fog streamed around the new spire, a tall cone of
emerald Plexiglass surmounted by a circle and cross. The summer wind whistled
through the symbol.
    She smiled
over at Peter and found him looking at the church with a builder's pride. She
reached out and squeezed his hand.
    “The work is
good,” she said.
    He nodded.
    They covered
the last block in silence. A banner hung over the main entrance: DEDICATION TONIGHT. ALL WELCOME.
    Inside, the
church was warm and crowded. There was the smell of food cooking, the shouts of
children, and the eternal sound of hammering. Kate could still hear the wind in
the cross; she was thankful to be inside.
    “I’ll take
these to the kitchen,” she told Peter, catching the handle of his cart. He
nodded, already looking preoccupied as he saw a man walking past with a plank
under his arm. Repairs would continue until the dedication ceremony, then
resume the moment it ended. As long as Peter was in the church, he thought of
little else.
    At