Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

What ruined Ricky, though, was the abject happiness of this monstrous pantheon. Even the sickest tore around in uncontrollable excitement. They spun through the village shouting in hill dialects how everything was at last coming true. The monkey army had arrived, fresh from the City of Angels.

On the whole, the assortment of internationals responded better than Kraft to the shock of these village children. Slight Janie Hawkins, whose teaspoon tits had recently begun debuting in the boy's nightly revue as he fell off to sleep, instinctively cradled in her white-fuzzed arms a limbless newborn the size and pallor of a bleached rugby ball. She sung the first song that came into her head, a lullaby from her long-forgotten Kentucky:

Every time the baby cries,

Stick my finger in the baby's eyes.

What'll we do with the ba-a-by?

What shall we do with the baby-o?

There is a patois known by everyone below the age of consent. A system of shouts and postures is enough; words would just confuse things. Within an afternoon, troops from opposite ends of the planetary playing field had formed a work force. They set to the improvisational plans as to a life-size mud castle. Boys who had never heard of a latrine pitched in to dig a bank of them on no instruction at all. Carters, haulers, trenchers, plumbers, joiners, carpenters, metalworkers, masons, sanders, water fetchers, day carers for the as yet too small to day-labor: everyone fell to a task without being assigned. The engineering feat fashioned itself out of nothing, memory.

Children who only grinned foolishly, as at a comic myth, at tales of seasons, the back-and-forth battle of summer and winter, children who wouldn't know the grim stomach-pit thrill of oranging September if it came up and rattled their lunch boxes, collaborated in their own undoing by erecting the edifice that would forever, for generations to come, stamp the school calendar upon them. Kraft began to wonder whether they had chosen the wrong place, whether he had somehow misinterpreted that distress call transmitted to him across the citizens band.

Work proceeded rapidly. The Institute candy stripers had not booked themselves much time — two weeks of winter break, a whirlwind gift-spattering run, even by Santa Claus standards. The floor plan called for a circular sala whose walls could be thrown open to the weather, extending the tent of learning like a processional umbrella or a catch-all sarong.

Once the ground had been readied and the pilings sunk, the skin went up with a speed that surprised everyone. Each set of pint-sized hands hammered in gearwork happiness, humming inside the dovetailing whole. Walls went up in half an afternoon, so smoothly was the effort shared. The heavenly pavement could be laid by this time next month; Cleveland, Djakarta, Addis Ababa could explode with great textured marble cylinders of learning, structures that would make New York and Tokyo seem botched hick towns if all adults worked as they once toyed.

One afternoon, midway through building, when the rapid rise of teak lintels sent waves of anticipation through the crew, the landscape began to throb softly as if the piece they had just inserted had set off an oscillation in the fabric of air. The children of the strategically meaningless hamlet placed the sound before the city sophisticates. They scattered into the undergrowth with barks of pleasure-threaded panic.

Farangs, as usual, failed to recognize their own handiwork until it swarmed them. Kraft's first thought was that Dad had tracked him down, sent out a pin-and-interdict against this Operation Claus, which, acting on its own initiative, was not in the best of coalition interests. The megaphones would start up, or they'd go gunship first and ask questions later. One well-placed shaped charge underneath the teacher's desk, or a ten-thousand-fléchette canister. Or, most ingenious of all, a camera rocket trailing a metal wire beaming back pictures, steered by some JD four years older than Ricky, parked up in his hovering air platform in front of a monitor as if watching American bandstand. Any of history's current munitions and delivery systems would do.

The airships landed and Nam Chai came out from cover. The machines spit up a small team of pale, bellied men with film equipment. Endless hanks of cable and portable generators appeared from nowhere, glutting the makeshift landing area around the school. An albino dressed in the camouflage fatigues worn only by teenage heavy-metal fans and greener members of the press corps hit the turf asking who was in charge.

Headmaster's quiet news leaks as the group departed the city had, like a banyan branch, taken root. Word of the unlikely roving charity had reached the international media, message-in-bottle style. Temporarily sated with soldiers setting one another on fire, briefly glazed-eyed with the tedious predictability of horror, and always on the lookout for the latest curio, TV dispatched a mobile cell to get the take on this group of kids cheekily trying to work its own welfare.

Not your cheap feel-good, the producer rushed to assure. Not your toss-off geopolitical PR puff piece. "Just, like, you know: 'Out-of-the-mouths-of-babes?"

Headmaster nodded in acquiescence, serving the turn of the Wheel.

Even the Northerners stood in awe at the unloading of equipment. The hardware was a cargo cult's fetish come true. Sampao executed a series of sketches on rice paper. The village kids, thinking it Stage Two of the incomprehensible project, served as native bearers.

"Can you give me a good cross section of colort" the producer requested. Headmaster selected a sample core of babes, out of whose mouths the world would learn just what it was up to. He chose one student from each of the lost continents, and Kraft, the trip's most colorful North American.

Ricky suggested that they include a hill tribe kid. He picked one, a boy named Lok whose hobby was gumming up the nostrils of domesticated animals with red clay. The film crew jumped at the novelty. They patted the boy on the head, violating a dozen cultural prohibitions, and asked his name. Lok replied, "Yet ma," which Kraft refrained from translating.

The man they propped in front of the camera was a former pro athlete who seemed surprised that none of these children asked for his autograph. Kraft lied and said he thought he'd heard of him, and this settled the man enough to get him started.

"Deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia, just a few hours from the Mekong," he started, and Gopal ruined the take by snickering."… is exactly the place," the ex-sports star continued, after the splice, "you might expect to find a guerrilla army. But this army will surprise you." His voice sashayed in pitch, as if he were about to rattle off the toll-free number you could call to place an order. "This is an army of peace," he said, emphasizing the last word's outrageousness. "The guerrillas come from over a dozen different countries." Gopal nudged Kraft and asked if Americans could count that high. "And every one of them," enunciated the genial ex-jock, working up to his punch line, "is a child."

He gave the first question to Elaine Chang, who looked Oriental and had been pointed out to him as the Institute brain. "Can you tell us what you and your schoolmates are doing here?"

"A television interview?" Elaine replied tentatively. On the second take, she got the answer right: "We're building a school."

"And can you tell us why?" Come on, you can do it, his voice pleaded. Kraft held his breath, but Elaine, eminently sensible, answered to perfection. "Because they didn't have one."

"Yes," the reporter granted, grinning at the home audience, like that show host whose book, Kids Are the Wackiest Wonders, was upstaged by his daughter's subsequent plunge from an upper-story window. "But do you think your choice to build a school here has anything to do with what is happening nearby?"