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"The hill tribes," I said

"They’ve got soiraffe Ripley wrote about the," I said "They put copper rings around a young girl’s throat and keep adding rows"

"Until she winds up with a neck a foot long"

"The neck isn’t actually lengthened," I said "The ribs and collarbone are pushed down If you res, the woman can’t hold her head up"

"Out of shame?"

"No, literally The s and her head flops over and she suffocates"

"Woure them?"

"Uh"

"We can’t live with them and we can’t live without them, Tanner" That last sentence came out as a dry croak, and he drank some water "This past year," he said, "SLORC decided to join the twentieth century while there’s still ti a pitch for tourism Let the Chinese come in and build hotels all over the country Forced the minority tribes to pay a heavy labor tax, with each faood roads built, you have to give thehts"

"Are they getting tourists?"

"Not too many Before they kept the reporters away fro the world to stay away, that tourist dollars only helped SLORC There’s another side to it, the argu up Bure of governood asif they want Far as I’m concerned, there’s only one person who has to catch the noon balloon to Rangoon"

He didn’t have to tell me who that person was

"Passport," he said "What kind of shape is yours in?"

It was rectangular, as I recalled, but that wasn’t what he , because it had a few years to go the last tietting caught up," I said "And I didn’t know I’d be going anywhere"

"I’m not sure it’s renewable at this point," he said "It’s probably too long out of date You ht, didn’t you?"

"I don’t think so"

"Well, you will He’ll have soet your photo taken We’ll see to the passport and arrange a Burs I can pull By the tiot started on your malaria pills, your papers should be in order A few days, I’d say A week at the outside You’ll get word as to where and when"

It was hard to knohat shots I needed A yellow-fever inoculation, for instance, is good for ten years, and I’d had one in 1969 That was either three or twenty-eight years ago, depending on how you counted On the one hand, I couldn’t explain to a public health official in a third world nation that I’d spent all that tiht numbers on my health certificate But hoould my system handle one shot three subjective years after the last one?

I got the shots the book said I needed and let it go at that I had two days of rade fever, but it wasn’t so bad Truth to tell, I was too busy trying to learn Burmese to pay e is always more difficult for me when it has its own alphabet, and the Burmese alphabet was particularly elusive, with all the letters looking pretty much the same They were e of written Burh-power le around the way geruage was a little easier, but it gave me trouble, and I wasn’t sure how much point there was in the little time I had As far as I could tell, lish The British had run the place long enough for their tongue to have had lasting impact, and what the eard was now seen to by CNN and SkyNews If Bur up to English In recent years it had becoe

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that I’d always hated the whole idea of Esperanto, the sie barriers between nations As a es, I liked those barriers; they kept out other people while I slipped right past theue of Chaucer and Shakespeare was a little different from the artificial creation of L L Zamenhof I still disapproved on principle, but I couldn’t work up nation

I wasn’t sure hoell English would serve me in the tribal areas I read a dozen books on the country, and navigated the Internet to half a dozen web sites, uing facts I learned was that 350,000 of the Chin people lived in Burible dialects There were barely enough of the able to ask your next-door neighbor for a cup of shriainst a fact like that, it was hard to say it would be such a bad thing if they all learned English

I had ten days to study Bur and Minna handed it to me and that same uninflected voice said, "Hotel Maxfield, Room 314, half past two" Am or pm, I wanted to ask, but he broke the connection before I could get the words out

I’d never heard of the hotel, but I found it in the yellow pages It didn’t even have a bold-face listing, and when I got to it, on Forty-eighth Street west of Broadway, I could see why

The desk clerk eyed uess he wasn’t used to custo woave the room number, and he pointed etically that the elevator wasn’t working

The Chief aiting for me They’d had, he said, a little trouble with my passport "It’s your face," he said "Daht of doing so of your photo, but then it wouldn’t look like you, and where does that get us? Just look like you were using a stolen passport"

"Couldn’t you get the passport and alter the date?"