Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen

by Claude Lalumiere

  “How do you feel?”

  Wu blinked. There was a white man looking down at him, smiling. Wu was on his back in a small, elegant room. The light stabbed into his eyes, so he closed them.

  “Do you speak any English? Hello? English?” The man jostled Wu’s shoulder.

  “Go away.”

  “Ah! You do speak English. It’s my train car, so I must decline your request.”

  Most of that speech went over Wu’s head. He forced an eyelid open, then another. Windows beside him let in a stream of sunlight, and he turned his head away while his eyes adjusted. The urge to groan again was strong, but he suppressed it. There was a time when he had endured much worse, without so much as a grimace. Have I really fallen so far?

  “Are you all right? You took quite a punch.”

  Memory came flooding in, and with it a wave of humiliation. Four clumsy, slow-moving amateurs, three of them preoccupied with Wu’s friends, and they had managed to best him. He brought his hands up in front of his face. His knuckles, grown soft in the long years he’d been out of training, were smooth, unblemished. He hadn’t even landed a punch.

  He sat up, gritting his teeth against the pain. He wanted to hold his neck, to explore the knot on the back of his head, but he wouldn’t do it with this smirking white man watching. He glared. The chair with its enormous wheels just deepened his shame. Wu, mighty warrior of the Granite Palm Brotherhood, had been rescued by a cripple!

  “Easy,” the man said. “You’ve taken quite a—”

  Wu lurched to his feet with a snarl. The train car spun around him, his vision faded, and he stumbled toward the door. The world went black before he reached it, and he groped blindly for the doorknob. He got the door open, stumbled down a short staircase, and was a half-dozen steps from the railcar before his vision came back.

  He made his way to the shack he shared with several other young men and sat with his back against the wall. He had the shack to himself, so he gave in to weakness, cradling his head in his hands. At first he was alarmed by the way his dizziness persisted. At last he figured out that he was still drunk. He’d been unconscious for no more than a few minutes.

  For more than an hour he sat there, steeped in pain, feeling sorry for himself. He couldn’t sustain the self-indulgent mood, though. Old habits, old training were reasserting themselves, and he found himself thinking strategically, tactically. Violence, once a mainstay of his life, had returned, and dormant skills were stirring in Wu’s mind.

  Those four men had lost much face. They would return, when the salvage team had moved on and the Chinese were alone. They would not be so careless next time. They would be cautious. They would be armed. And they would be looking for revenge.

  The others had no experience with mayhem. Only Wu had faced violent conflict before, and he was a wreck, a shadow of his former self.

  He stood, rolled his neck from side to side, and let the pain wash over him. Pain was irrelevant. When he had mastered the pain, pushed it into a box in the recesses of his mind, he lowered himself into a cat stance.

  He felt ridiculous, like a little boy playing at kung fu.

  “Power flows from within,” he murmured. It was the lesson at the heart of all his training. Water could not flow from a bucket of stones. An arrow would not fly straight from a crooked bow.

  A disgraced drunkard with a heart full of shame could not master kung fu.

  * * *

  Dan looked up at the sound of a knock, surprised that Phil had remembered a simple courtesy. “Come in.”

  The slim Chinese man entered, closing the door behind him. He had washed and shaved, and though he still smelled of alcohol, it was much less than before. He stood in front of Dan, his pose humble, and said, “Excuse. Did not close door when I left.”

  “That’s all right,” Dan said, perplexed.

  “Did not say thank you,” the man said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Dan said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything sooner. Are the others all right? That girl?”

  The man looked up, surprised. “Big…” He gestured with his fingers around his eye. “Marks.”

  “Bruises?”

  “Yes. Bruises,” he said. “Will get better.”

  “Oh, good.” They lapsed into silence. “My name is Dan.”

  “Hello, Mr. Dan. I am Lee Wu.”

  Dan grinned. “Just Dan. I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Wu.”

  Wu shook his head. “It is Mr. Lee.”

  “Wu Lee?”

  “No, Lee Wu. Mr. Lee. Or Wu. You call me Wu.”

  Dan shook his head, baffled. “All right. I’m pleased to meet you, Wu.”

  The silence stretched out. Finally Dan said, “Would you like something to eat?”

  Wu scowled, then smoothed his features. “No.”

  He can’t be eating much, Dan thought. But he’s proud. I’ve just insulted him. “How about tea?” he said. “You’re a guest in my home. I have to offer you tea.”

  Wu stared at him, then inclined his head. “I would like tea.”

  Dan wheeled his chair to the tiny stove in the corner. Phil, the oaf, had left the tea canister on a high shelf, and Dan braced an arm on the counter, straining upward.

  “I help?” Wu said.

  “I can do it,” Dan said testily. The chair started to roll, then stopped. Wu had to be holding it, but at least he didn’t reach for the tea canister. Dan strained and stretched, and at last brought the canister tumbling into his lap. He glanced back at Wu, checking for signs of amusement. Wu just stared at him, face impassive.

  Christ. I’m as touchy as he is. The thought made him laugh, and the tea canister fell to the floor as his legs shook. He could have reached it with only a little trouble, but he made himself sit still. “Do you mind?” he said, gesturing, and Wu picked up the tea. “Thank you.”

  Dan brewed the tea, but he let Wu carry the cups to the little fold-down table. After that he asked Wu to get a box of biscuits from a cupboard. That must have been an adequate sop to the man’s pride, because he sat across from Dan and devoured half of the biscuits in a minute or two.

  “I want you to be my new valet,” Dan blurted suddenly. He hadn’t known he was going to say it until the words were out of his mouth, and he saw Wu’s eyes narrow. The man was suspicious of charity.

  “The pay’s not very good, I’m afraid,” Dan said. “I have this lout working for me now. I need someone better.” He lowered his eyes. “There’s too many things I can’t do on my own.” The fact might have been perfectly obvious, but it still shamed him to admit it.

  “Yes,” said Wu.

  * * *

  Two days later the train rolled out of the valley and over the crest of Kicking Horse Pass. They were only a few miles from Golden City, a fast-fading town that wouldn’t long survive the death of the railway.

  Most of the workers trekked into town each night, choosing the comforts of hotels and boarding houses over the canvas tents that the train carried. For Dan the hotels with their staircases were no comfort at all, and he stayed in his train car. Wu was an alert presence at his side, attentive and cheerful. He was a tremendous improvement over Phil.

  In the evenings Dan would read or go over blueprints, and Wu would go outside and launch punches and kicks into the night air. He called his fighting style “kung fu,” and he was very good at it. Dan realized he’d hired himself a bodyguard as well as a valet.

  He was going over the designs of his walking suit one evening when Wu tapped on the door. “Come in,” he called, beginning to roll up the blueprints.

  He bumped the inkwell on the corner of the desk, grabbed for it, and barely caught it in time. He was putting a cap on the inkwell when Wu said, “What’s that?”

  “It’s nothing,” Dan snapped, and started rolling the blueprints. He could feel a flush rising on his neck. Then he caught sight of the hurt look on Wu’s face, and he paused. Finally he sighed and unrolled the papers.

  “It’s a steam-
powered walking machine,” he said. “I designed it. I doubt anyone will ever build it, though.”

  Wu’s brow furrowed. His English had improved considerably in the three weeks he’d been in Dan’s employ, but this had to be stretching his linguistic abilities. He reached down, tracing the lines on the top sheet without ever quite touching the paper.

  “It’s a dream, that’s all,” Dan said gruffly. “That’s my life. Ideas. You’re a hands-on man. You don’t know what it’s like to be trapped in your head.” He thumped the arm of the wheelchair. “Trapped in a chair. Nothing but ideas and no follow-through.” He rolled up the blueprints, ignoring the fact that Wu was still trying to decipher them, and shoved the roll irritably into a cubbyhole in his desk. “Forget about it.”

  * * *

  The next day the salvage train stopped beside an abandoned shed. Wu rolled Dan outside to take a look.

  A brass and iron machine filled one end of the building. Long wooden bins held chunks of rock, detritus from the endless blasting. Along the opposite wall there were small trays, each filled with gravel. Dan got Wu to lift a tray down. It held crushed stone, a mix of gravel and sand, most of it granite with some quartz mixed in.

  “Wheel me closer to that machine,” he said. He stared at the valves and gears for a time. “It’s a rock crusher,” he said at last. “Someone was prospecting.”

  “Pros…” Wu said.

  “Prospecting.” Dan repeated the word slowly. “Looking for gold. There was quartz in the granite, so someone started breaking it down, looking for traces of gold.” He handed the tray to Wu. “I guess he didn’t find anything.” He looked at the crusher for a bit. “Take me back to the car,” he said. “Then I have a different sort of job for you. That machine is salvageable. It’s not worth much, but we might as well take it apart and bring it along.”

  * * *

  The crushing machine was remarkably compact for the power it was able to exert. There was a boiler, a condenser, a complex gearing mechanism, and a steel hammer and strike plate. Wu took his time, examining everything before he tried to take anything apart. He checked the boiler, started a fire, then scrounged some blank paper from Dan’s desk and made careful sketches. By the time he was sure someone would be able to put the machine back together, the needle on the pressure gauge had moved halfway across the dial. He pulled the lever on the side and the machine shuddered into motion.

  Everything moved as he had predicted, and he smiled, pleased with himself. He extinguished the fire and returned to his sketches.

  As he worked, though, part of his mind wandered. Every piece of the rock crusher fit exactly in its spot. Wu had fit nicely in his place in a complex machine, once. Things had gone badly, he had fled to Canada, and he had never quite fit again.

  He had found a dreary place in the CPR for a time. But now the CPR, like this rock crusher, was a machine without a purpose, the parts about to become scrap and waste, rusting forgotten underfoot.

  The crusher was still too hot to touch. He returned to the train. Dan was on the little porch, engrossed in a ledger, so Wu moved past him and stood in front of Dan’s desk.

  Ideas were Dan’s department, not Wu’s. But Dan had taken action during the fight at the shantytown. If Dan could act, maybe Wu could have an idea. He took the blueprints for the walking machine from their cubbyhole, covered them with his drawings of the crusher, and returned to the shed.

  That afternoon, Wu jogged to the shantytown. He spoke to his friends, outlining parts of his plan. Wu wasn’t offering much, but the men were idle and hungry. He would buy a sack of rice and a sack of sugar with his meager salary, and in exchange his team would go to work.

  * * *

  A week later the salvage train was three miles further down the track. Dan was seated in a grassy meadow, sketching Kicking Horse Pass, trying to capture the majesty of what he saw in humble charcoal. It was Sunday, and he and Wu had the train to themselves. He was growing frustrated with the sketch when Wu cleared his throat somewhere behind Dan.

  Dan turned the chair around. Wu stood there, hands clasped behind him, looking strangely diffident. “I… show you something,” he said.

  “All right.” Dan set aside his paper and charcoal. “What is it?”

  In response Wu circled behind him, took the handles of the chair, and wheeled him across the grass. They reached the rail bed, bumped over the tracks, and descended to the meadow on the other side. The chair stopped, and Dan blinked in surprise.

  Standing beside the private car was a… contraption. That was the only word for it. The thing had a vaguely manlike shape, with legs and arms of steel and copper. He could see pieces taken from the crushing machine and pieces he didn’t recognize. Wu must have pillaged every bit of machinery in the shantytown, from sewing machines to scraps of corrugated iron. The result was a monstrosity, but Wu beamed with pride as he pointed at it.

  “Your design,” he said. “Some changes. But it works. It walks.” He gestured at Dan. “You go in. You walk.”

  Dan looked again at the monstrosity, and his perception shifted. In a flash he recognized what he was seeing. It really was his design for a walking machine, with nearly every part substituted for something else, something scrounged or cobbled together. It was a parody of his dream, a mockery, and he felt heat fill his face. “You bloody heathen!” He was as angry as he could ever remember being. “Get that piece of garbage out of my sight!”

  He twisted the chair around, turned his back on the travesty of engineering, and wheeled himself, one painful foot at a time, across the grass. He had no idea where he was going. He just needed to be away from Wu, away from the machine, away from it all.

  He might have travelled fifty feet, with exhaustion blunting the edge of his rage, when he saw the riders. There were six of them, staying well back from the train as they curved toward the pass. It was hard to make out details, but he thought they were wearing masks.

  The lead rider was a skinny man with a white Stetson. Dan didn’t need to see his face to know who that was, and what it meant.

  It meant trouble.

  He could see Golden City less than two miles away. It might as well have been on the moon. By the time he got halfway to town it would all be over.

  He spun the chair around, grimacing at the effort it required in the tall grass. The salvage train stood alone, the metal contraption beside it. Wu was nowhere in sight.

  The manlike machine seemed to stare at him, mocking him in his helplessness, and he squeezed the arms of the chair until the tendons stood out under his skin. If Wu had just stuck around, maybe they could have gone for help. But no, Wu, the man of action, was no doubt trying to save his people.

  He was busy getting himself killed.

  He’s not entirely a man of action. He had at least one idea. Dan sneered at the thought that was tickling the back of his mind. A man of action could become a man of ideas, but it didn’t work quite the same way in reverse. A man trapped in a chair could not simply decide to be a man of action. Maybe if the walking suit had been constructed properly, in a real workshop, with suitable supplies. The metal travesty in front of him didn’t look as if it could even move.

  And yet here it was. In the open meadow, two miles or more from the shed where Wu must have built it.

  He sat there, staring at the machine. He dropped his hands to the wheels of the chair and started himself rolling.

  * * *

  Wu was in his element, and he gloried in it. The battle was hopeless, but he felt more fully alive, more fully himself, than he had since fleeing China. He had broken men’s guns. He had broken men’s bones. One of the gang was dead, lying face-down in the street beside his horse. The man in the white Stetson was with him, both legs broken, his gun gone, sobbing quietly.

  The remaining four cowboys, though, were armed, unhurt, and angry. They were working their way from building to building, covering each other, shooting at anything that moved. Wu was one building ahead, slowly retreating. He let
them catch occasional glimpses of him, and encouraged them to waste their ammunition. He kept them afraid, and gave the others time to flee the town.

  Wu was going to die. He accepted it. The Canadian West, so different from Shanghai, gave a man so few places to hide, so few directions to retreat. And if he escaped they would return and take their revenge on any Chinese they could find.

  So he would let them kill him. The survivors would ride away satisfied. But he would hurt them first. He would leave them with no appetite for this sort of fun.

  He slid out a window on the east side of Ping Yan’s shack, once a makeshift saloon for railroad workers. The Chinese hadn’t been allowed inside, back then. He could hear the cowboys call to each other as they reached the west wall of the shack, and he measured the distance to the next building. For three buildings in a row he had retreated. They were hurrying now, growing impatient, growing careless.

  They were ripe for an ambush.

  He flattened himself against the wall at the north corner. The man to the north had shorter legs than the man to the south, yet he moved faster. He had the more aggressive nature, and it was going to cost him.

  In the last moment before he was about to move, Wu heard a strange sound. It was a grinding metallic noise, and he heard the cowboys call to each other, their voices rising in puzzlement. That meant distraction, so Wu stepped around the corner. The nearest fool was staring back over his shoulder, so Wu plucked the pistol from the man’s hand and dropped him with a palm strike.

  That caught the attention of the others, and Wu had to scramble back as bullets scorched the air around him. He sprang and pulled himself onto the roof of the saloon.

  That was when he saw Dan.

  The walking machine was lumbering across the meadow, arms and legs swinging, steam puffing out at the hip joints. We’ll have to tweak that, Wu thought absently. Or he’ll have to carry more water, and he’ll be even heavier.

  That the machine was heavy was unmistakable. Dan left a trail of crushed grass and dented earth behind him as he bore down on the shantytown. Wu couldn’t see the cowboys, but he heard them asking each other what the Hell that was, coming across the grass toward them.