IV. On the X Axis;

Lidice, Bohemia, 1866; A Minor Event during the Seven Weeks' War

A wise man once observed: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Fiala… Marda… Fiala tossed her head violently, battered her temples with her fists. What was happening? Was it the Prussians?

The pain broke the grip on her mind.

Father lay sprawled half in, half out of the doorway. Mother knelt before the Virgin, moaning.

Fiala was having a fit. He heaved on his pallet, shrieking.

Her brother? She was an only child… And her mother had died in the Uprising.

Couldn't be the Prussians. The armies were north of Lidice.

Lidice? What the devil was Lidice?

Who was Marda?

"Uncle Stefan…" Oh, Lord, her mouth wouldn't shape the words right.

Mother whirled, stared in horror.

Where am I? What's happening to me? Who are these people? What's wrong with my mind?

What's wrong with my mind? God help me! Something's in my head. Possessing me.

German. That was it. Only no one spoke German anymore. Not outside a classroom.

It was a strong demon. "Mother… Priest… "Mother ran from the house. Would Father Alexander believe her?

What was this mumbo-jumbo? Only recidivist subversives believed that nonsense anymore. Only stupid, ignorant country people…

"Oh blessed Jesus, help me!"

Slap! "Marda!"

The blow floored her. And terminated the contest. The terrified thing in her mind twisted away with a fading shriek, as if sliding off round the treacherous curves of a Klein bottle.

Who was this ragged brute? The man who had been lying in the doorway.

"Father?"

"Yes. Come on. Get up."

The words were butchered by lips and tongue that had never spoken Czech.

"What happened?"

"I'm not sure. There's no time to worry about it now. Just accept it. Help me with Stefan."

His absolute calm enveloped her, included her. The thing inside her, the other, momentarily gave up trying to reassert itself. Numbly, she seized the feet of the hovel's remaining, now silent tenant and helped swing him onto the rude table. He was just a boy, yet his face was a land on which several bad diseases had left memorials.

No one outside a labor camp lived this way. Dirt floor to sleep on, a pallet stuffed with straw. Only furniture a homemade table… No, there were a few crude pieces in shadowed corners. No water. No toilet.

This wasn't her world.

"The woman. She went for someone."

Then she studied herself.

And received a greater shock.

The body she wore, beneath the crudest peasant clothing, was tiny, emaciated, just entering puberty. It was the female counterpart of the boy on the table. "Oh…" It couldn't be a labor camp.

One of those places, only rumored, where they experimented on enemies of the State?

Outside, the sun was rising. On a morning like this, the spires of Hradcany Castle would be visible from the church belfry.

A scant sixty miles to the northwest, men named von Bismarck and von Moltke were defining her history with words spoken by the mouths of cannon. Already the troops were moving at Kцniggratz.

She had come to a land more alien than she could believe.

Its name was July 3,1866.

V. On the Y Axis;

The collapse of South Vietnam had begun in January, a slow, snowballing thing that had not seemed serious at first. But when Hue and Da Nang went and the North Vietnamese started whooping down the coast routes like a juggernaut, it became obvious that the end had finally come. Those with an emotional investment in the country could, like watching the football Cardinals go into the second half down by seventeen, hope for a miracle, but that hope was wan.

One night Cash woke to find Annie sobbing beside him. He pretended not to notice.

Later that week he found her sniffling in the kitchen when he returned from work.

"What's the matter?"

"Been a rotten day. Everything went wrong. And now I burned my finger."

She was lying. The stove wasn't hot. But he let it slide. Even shared griefs had to have their private facets.

"Nancy's bringing the kids over tomorrow."

"Yeah? Second time this week. What's up? I thought she didn't like us that much."

"People change."

"I guess." They just could not get it out in the open.

The worst cruelty, for Cash, was the indifference of the people he encountered. But they were dead-tired of Vietnam. Most would have been pleased to see the damned country follow Atlantis's example.

Cash was angry and unapproachable most of the time.

During the downhill plunge to the fall of Saigon he remained utterly distracted. Nothing could draw him out of the netherworld to which he had retreated. He had little time for murders or murderers. His thoughts all revolved around that one little country, that pimple on the ass of the world, where his oldest son was still missing…

He did not really care about Vietnam per se. He was no rabid anti-communist. The system had done wonders in China. Through the later years of the war he had been critical of United States involvement, though for reasons at variance with those vocalized in the streets. Those he could not comprehend at all. They had no apparent relation to reality, only to wishful thinking about how the world should be. He felt that, like a too cautious coach, the United States had gone, at best, for a draw. He felt the military should have been allowed to go for a victory with everything but nuclear weapons, and to hell with futile arguments about the propriety of being there in the first place. Once you're wet, you should go ahead and swim, not cry about falling in, he thought. But he kept his opinions to himself, being rational enough to know they were opinions and not something Moses had brought down from the mountain in his other hand.

He had greeted the January, 1973, news of United States withdrawal with relief. The Kissinger "peace" had seemed a last, comic punctuation to an era of futility. He had predicted the disaster even then, and had tried to school himself to live with its inevitable consequences.