Gateway

by Sharon Shinn

  “It’s not that far,” he told her in an encouraging voice.

  She nodded wearily and looked around. Her fellow passengers were almost all Chinese, most of them more shabbily dressed than those who had been at the red gate. Of the other thirty or forty people crammed onto the trolley, Daiyu saw only five besides Kalen who were Caucasian and two who were black. One of the white women was middle-aged, dispirited, and dressed in layers of ill-fitting clothing. If she’d been back in St. Louis, Daiyu would not have been surprised if this woman had come up to her asking for a handout.

  If she’d been back in St. Louis. . . .

  Where was she?

  The trolley made a cheerful racket but fairly slow progress as it wound its way through a maze of streets, stopping every few blocks to pick up or drop off passengers. As it moved into an increasingly residential district, the makeup of the ridership changed, and soon almost all the passengers were white. It was quickly clear that this particular neighborhood was not for the affluent. Most of the buildings were small and squat, built out of a dull gray stone or an even drearier brown material. Here and there, filling in gaps between sturdier structures, Daiyu spotted what looked like tents—heavy cloth strung over avariety of makeshift supports.

  “People live there?” she asked Kalen.

  He nodded. “Most of the cangbai laborers make their homes in this district.”

  “The what?”

  “Cangbai. Like me. Pale.” He gestured in an indeterminate direction. “Across the river is where most of the Han live.”

  “Han?”

  “Like you,” he said.

  Chinese,she thought. What kind of world had she stumbled into?

  He smiled as if a thought had occurred to him. “Well, the poor Han live across the Zhongbu River. The rich ones live in big houses on this side of the river.”

  Sheofferednoanswer, and they made the rest of the journey in silence. They finally got off at a tumbledown street corner and walked three blocks to a one-story building of tired white stone. The two windows that she could see were open to allow in the sultry air. It was pretty clear there wasn’t going to be air-conditioning inside.

  There wasn’t—and not much else, either. Daiyu stood just inside the doorway and took along, comprehensive look. There was one main room that seemed to serve as kitchen and common area. Three doors, all closed, probably led off to other rooms, and she hoped one was a bathroom. The furnishings seemed to consist mainly of rag rugs over a scarred wood floor, a couple of benches close to a sturdy table, and shelving units holding an unclassifiable assortment of objects. If there had ever been any paint on the interior of the stone walls, it had long since peeledoff. Her father would be absolutely in his element trying to rehab this place.

  The thought of her father gave her a sharp stab of pain, and she turned rather fiercely on her new acquaintance.

  “My parents—they’ll be so worried about me,” she said. “I don’t know why I was brought here, but I don’t want to be here. How can you just take people away from their homes? What do you want with me?”

  “Your parents will have no reason to fear for you,” said a deep, rich voice, and Daiyu spun around to see a black man stepping in through the door behind them. He was shorter than Kalen and at least fifty years older, with closely cropped hair that had turned entirely gray. He was dressed in black pants and a sleeveless black shirt that showed off powerful arms. “You will be returned to them unharmed, only seconds from when you saw them last. Your iteration does not vibrate in synchronicity with this one. You exist here, as it were, outside of time.”

  Daiyu pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “What?” she said faintly.

  “This is Ombri,” Kalen said helpfully. “He can explain everything.”

  Daiyu dropped her hands to glare at Ombri. “Are you the one who brought me here?” she demanded.

  “I would more truly say I invited you here and you accepted,” Ombri replied.

  “There was no invitation! There was no acceptance! How can you say that?”

  He pointed to her hand. “You wear the dragon ring. Only someone who is willing to sojourn between iterations can wear the ring on her finger.”

  “I’m not willing to—to sojourn between worlds!” she said. She tugged the ring off and flung it across the room.“There.It’s gone. Now, take me home.”

  Kalen loosed an exclamation of dismay, looking between Daiyu and Ombri as he spoke in some rapid, unintelligible language. Ombri kept his dark eyes on Daiyu as he responded, his voice much calmer than Kalen’s, though equally impossible to understand.

  Daiyu threw her hands in the air. “I have no idea what you’re saying. I don’t care. Just take me home.”

  Kalen turned to her with a pleading look and spoke even more urgently. Again, she couldn’t make out a word. Now Daiyu felt another spike of fear. It hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder how she was able to understand these strange people in this utterly strange place. If she had somehow lost the ability to communicate with them—

  Kalen dove across the room to search the pile of shoes and papers where the dragon ring had landed. As soon as he found it, he hurried back to Daiyu, offering the black jade circlet to her with a single pleading word.

  “I don’t want it,” she said.

  Kalen slipped the ring on his finger and then spoke into it as if it held a concealed microphone. Then he held it up to his ear and his expression of exaggerated bewilderment cleared up. “Oh!” he exclaimed, followed by a few more happy words.

  The ring appeared to be a translator. Daiyu could certainly use some translating right about now. She slipped it back onto her finger, where she was annoyed to find it made her hand feel just right.

  “I’m not wearing this to tell you that I accept your invitation to travel to your world,” she said icily. “But if it lets me have a conversation with you—”

  “Yes, that is exactly what it does,” Ombri said, and Daiyu felt a rush of relief when she was able to understand him again. “We also have a pair of black jade earrings, if you would be more comfortable wearing them.”

  “I don’t want to wear your jewelry!” she exclaimed. “I just want to understand what’s happening, or I would take the ring off right now!”

  “For now, we will agree that the ring does not constitute any kind of offer or acceptance, and let it serve only its more practical purpose of interpreting speech,” Ombri said. “As long as you wear it, you will be able to understand any of the dialects in our iteration, and your speech will be comprehensible to any individual you encounter.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” she demanded. “What’s an iteration?”

  Ombri gave her a sober smile. “That, Daiyu, is the very essence of existence. Let me tell you our story.”

  FOUR

  “OUNCE MILLENIA AGO, the world was formed, and it was perfect,” Ombri said in his resonant voice. He and Daiyu had seated themselves across from each other at the table, while Kalen made tea in the tiny kitchen.

  “Letusnotconcernourselveswiththemyriadgodswhohad ahandinitscreation,”Ombriwenton.“But there were factions among the gods—those who believed they could have created a better model—and they produced their own worlds.And more factions arose, and more, and each designed their own version, always taking as their template the original pattern. Eventually, the gods reached a truce and no more worlds were called into being, but by then there were at least a dozen copies, all variants of the original model. We call them iterations. Some were designed by spiteful gods, some by playful gods, some by sober gods, and no two are exactly alike, although all of them bear a great resemblance to each other, as if they were siblings born to the same two parents.”

  Daiyu stared at Ombri. It was too bizarre to believe. “Is my world the original template?”

  He smiled. “Hardly. It was constructed by one of the gods who has a—shall we say—streak of whimsicality. Your iteration is one of the most unstable of them all. Though I have to
admit it is one of the most intriguing as well.”

  Daiyu folded her hands and did not answer.

  “In the normal course of events,” Ombri continued, “people do not travel between worlds. There are a few of us—servants of the gods—who move freely between iterations, carrying messages or watching over the native peoples. Although we monitor and report on the evolution of each iteration, we do not interfere with the way history unfolds in any of these worlds. Most of the time.”

  Kalen brought over a tray holding a teapot, three cups, and a pile of what looked like scones. Daiyu realized that she was starving. Kalen sat on the bench beside Ombri, and they all took a moment to serve themselves. The sconelike bread was delicious. The hot tea was sweeter and more flavorful than the tea back home, but it was aromatic and soothing, and Daiyu took a couple of cautious sips before she said, “Go on.”

  “It seems that one or two of the gods chose unwisely when they selected their servants,” said Ombri. “And these individuals—with the ability to slip between dimensions, as it were—have upon occasion moved from iteration to iteration and created great havoc. It has fallen to the rest of us to chase them down and return them to our original world. Most of them are now safely contained, but one or two remain unfettered.” Ombri blew on his tea to cool it, and then took a swallow. “One of them resides in this world. His name is Chenglei. We want to send him home.”

  “We?” Daiyu said.

  “Aurora and I. You will meet Aurora soon.”

  Daiyu shook her head and then she laughed. “Everything you say sounds utterly ridiculous.”

  Kalen looked up from his cup and asked diffidently, “I know it’s all very hard to accept, but how else do you explain what’s happened to you?”

  She put a finger to her temple. “Concussion. Coma. At the very least, a bad dream. I figure I’ll wake up tomorrow and I won’t be in Oz any longer.”

  “Oz?” Kalen said in a puzzled voice.

  “It’s an imaginary place where someone went after she suffered brain trauma,” Daiyu said.

  “If you believe that none of this is real, then you may as well accept everything I’m telling you as absolute truth,” Ombri said mildly. “It would at least be true within the logic of your dream construct.”

  Daiyu took a deep breath. “Even if it is true,” she said, in a voice of exaggerated politeness, “what does it have to do with me?”

  Ombri took another sip. “We cannot capture Chenglei without your help.”

  She laughed in disbelief. “You’re a servant of the gods? You can move between parallel dimensions anytime youc hoose? And you need my help? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Chenglei is much too wily to allow Aurora or me to get anywhere near him,” Ombri said, unruffled by her scorn. “He surrounds himself with the affluent Han of this iteration, and so we need someone who looks like they do to approach him on our behalf.”

  “I saw plenty of Chinese people on the trolley tonight,” Daiyu said. “Why don’t you recruit one of them?”

  “Most of the people of this world are practically transparent to Chenglei—and to Aurora and to me,” Ombri said. “We have little difficulty reading their thoughts and emotions. If we tried to recruit some of the locals, Chenglei would almost certainly be able to read their intentions when they drew near to him.”

  “But he won’ t be able to read my mind?” Daiyu asked skeptically.

  Ombri smiled at her over his teacup. “Well,” he said, “I can’t. People from your world tend to be more opaque, even to the servants of the gods.”

  “If he can’t read my mind when he meets me, won’t that make him suspicious?” Daiyu said. She could hardly believe she was buying into this fantasy enough to ask the question. “Won’t he guess I’m from another world?”

  “No, for now and then even Aurora and I encounter natives whom we cannot scan. Chenglei will believe you are merely more complex than most of the individuals he has met so far. He may even be drawn to you for that reason—because he will see you as a puzzle, or possibly a challenge.”

  Daiyu remembered the vendor from Fair Saint Louis, the one who had sent her on this journey to begin with. “Is that why that strange old woman extended the invitation to me? Because she couldn’t read my mind?”

  “That was an important consideration,” Ombri acknowledged. “But that ‘strange old woman’ is another servant to the gods, and she has a knack for sensing who might be open to making such a crossing. You have already journeyed a long distance in your short life, from China to the United States.”

  “I was a baby!”

  He shrugged. “There is a part of your soul, no matter how deeplyburied, that responds to the call for more adventure. That is what our friend saw in you when she offered the ring.”

  “And then, how did I get here? One minute I was standing under the Arch—”

  “You were at a gateway,” Ombri interrupted.

  “What? You mean the Gateway to the West? But—”

  “The Arch you know is more than a symbol of man’s exploration of the western reaches of your continent,” Ombri said. “It is a magical portal to worlds beyond worlds. Every iteration constructed by every god contains a doorway in that very same spot.”

  “The red gate,” Daiyu whispered. “I saw it when I first lookedaround.”

  “Exactly. In another world it is a small wooden framework that leads between two simple gardens. In another, it is a massive gate built of towering stone. In every case, for wayfarers who know how to traverse it, it leads to other worlds.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Daiyu objected. “I’ve walked under the Arch a hundred times—”

  “You have to be carrying the talisman that will bring you to the world you want to visit,” Ombri said.

  Suddenly, Daiyu remembered the necklace that the old woman had asked her to deliver to “her friend” at the fair. “The pink stone...”shes aid, and glanced around as if looking for it. “I must have dropped it when I came through.” She opened her eyes wide.“ Does that mean someone else might find it? And go through the gate and end up in my world?”

  Ombri shook his head. “That particular talisman can only bring someone to this specific iteration, and only if that person walks through a gateway. In this world, no matter who picks it up, it is harmless—just a pretty bauble. Though an expensive one.”

  “And how do I get back to my own world? Is there a talisman for that?”

  Ombri nodded. “Normally we would give you a small piece of rose quartz, a stone that is only found on your world, and send you through the gateway. You would arrive back on Earth in the place where you left, with no memory of your experience here—”

  Daiyu blinked at him. “Wait. You mean I won’t remember any of this?”

  Ombriwavedahand. His dark finger swere long and elegant. “One of the peculiar attributes of planet Earth is that it erases your memory of previous iterations. Every sojourner who goes there arrives with his mind blank of time spent anywhere else. Even the servants of the gods have trouble crossing to your iteration. We adjust, but the effort is immense. It is unlikely that you will remember anything more of your time here than an image or two, dreamlike indeed.”

  “That’s not going to bother me,” Daiyu assured him. “So you’ll give me a piece of rose quartz and send me through the gate—”

  “That is what we would normally do,” Ombri corrected. “But because we think it is possible you might be in danger when you confront Chenglei, we will craft a powerful talisman that will instantly transport you back to your world, no matter where you are in this one. You will not need to go through the gateway to activate it.”

  “That sounds good,” Daiyu said, holding her hand out. “Let’s have it.”

  “It’snotreadyyet. Aurora must shape it to the uniqu emake- up of your particular body. If you would entrust me with a few strands of your hair—”

  Daiyu closed her eyes for a second. Now he was asking for
DNA. It was getting more and more surreal. But . . . “Anything to be able to go home again,” she said, opening her eyes and quickly yanking out a couple of hairs. Ombri took them carefully and folded them into a piece of paper that he stowed in a pocket of his black pants. Daiyu said, “So where is this Aurora?”

  “She’s working,” Kalen answered.

  “If you’re really who you say you are, it seems odd that any of you would need a job,” Daiyu said.

  Ombri gave her that serious smile. “We don’t need money,” he said. “We need entrée into the society that governs this particular city in this particular world. Aurora works for a childless woman who has great personal ambition. This will serve us well now that you have arrived.”

  Daiyu leaned her elbows on the table. “Okay. I guess it’s time to talk about why exactly you brought me here. What you want me to do.”

  “They want to send Chenglei back to where he belongs,” Kalen said.

  “I heard that part already. How can I do anything about it?”

  “First let me tell you a little about Shenglang, the city where you now reside,” Ombri said. He waved vaguely toward the windows, through which only darkness was now visible. But the coming of true night had cooled off the air a little, and Daiyu felt a welcome breeze tiptoe in. “Like your own St. Louis, Shenglang is located in the middle of a large continent. It is arguably the most important city in the nation. Chenglei has managed to get himself elected prime minister of Shenglang, and so he might be considered one of the most powerful men on the planet. He has used that power unwisely.”

  “Some people like him,” Kalen said. “Mostly people with money.”

  Ombrinodded.“He ha sdone a great deal to enrich the highest social class of the city and a great deal to destroy the precarious well-being of the poor,” Ombri said. “So far his scope has been fairly limited and local, but he will soon be signing pacts with neighbor nations on Jia that will extend his most onerous policies. There will be a great deal of suffering, and those who will suffer most are those who can least afford to sustain another loss.”