Shanghai Steam

by Calvin D. Jim

  “Late!” Mene bellowed from the papasan behind the low counter. The wicker creaked as he shifted his bulk around to fix her with a furious glare. “Always late from the market.” His fat arm flicked in her direction and she ducked on reflex. The dowel clattered against the door behind her. “Bring that back.”

  She snatched up the wooden dowel and carried it to the counter, setting it on the glass top without stepping into range of his fists. Even so, she moved back a pace before retrieving the packets from her pockets. She laid them in a line, one at a time, while he read the labels. His lips flapped as he mumbled the powders’ names. She held her breath when he stopped and tensed for the blow.

  “Dragon’s blood?”

  “I — I dropped it, Master.”

  His lips twisted, but his eyes dropped to the shelves below the counter. “Xiang is holding a luau.” He leaned forward and reached into the case. “He’s ordered fresh amulets. One of each.”

  She exhaled and nodded. Her shoulders settled and she leaned one elbow on the countertop. Mene pulled out a parcel. He placed it on the counter and untied the string.

  “Protection from fire.” He peeled away the paper and lifted the first pouch. “Protection from flood.” He removed them one at a time, lifting the thongs from which the talismans would dangle around Xiang’s neck. “Disease, Assassins, Impotence. Protection from demons and hostile magic.”

  Leilani leaned toward the scent of herbs and inhaled. She could make these pouches in her sleep but still, they fascinated her.

  She shouldn’t have relaxed, but Mene had known she would. She leaned a fraction closer and the back of his hand smacked her face hard enough that she stumbled away. Blood filled her mouth and she blinked against instant tears.

  “Seven pouches,” he continued as if nothing had happened. “You will take them to Xiang and you will not drop anything along the way.” He sniffed and rewrapped the bundle. “Clean yourself up first. I won’t have you showing up on the hill like that.”

  Leilani nodded. She pressed one hand against her mouth to stop the blood and looked out under a curtain of tears and long, black, islander hair. “Yes, Master.”

  Xiang’s complex squatted at the top of the island’s first rise. The volcano towered behind it, but the town, the wharf, all of his domain lay below, along the waterfront, where he could keep an elevated eye upon it.

  Leilani stepped out of the rickshaw with the parcel hugged tight against her chest. The complex lawns teemed with islanders and Chinese alike. Brown men with twists of fabric around their bottoms slithered up palm trunks to fetch coconuts. Women in muumuus beat taro in the courtyard, their chatter filling the air as much as the banging of the roots. Leilani wandered amongst them, keeping her eyes on the pair of metal guards at either side of the carved wooden doors.

  The outer buildings employed palm, tapa and wicker in traditional island fashion but the central fortress swooped with ceramic tiles and dragon-shaped finials. The automatons clicked and whirred as she passed but made no move to stop her.

  A tiled hallway ringed Xiang’s audience chamber and an advisor met her here, sneering behind a thin string of mustache.

  “You are the apothecary woman?”

  “Yes. I have Master Xiang’s amulets.”

  “Wait here.”

  Leilani sat on a stone bench. Her lip throbbed and she licked it and closed her eyes. Her lacquer belt almost held enough herbs. She could start her own apothecary but it needed to be far away from Mene.

  Something clattered against the tiles. She sat up straight and turned to the left. The empty corner stared back at her but she had heard something. Leilani stood and tiptoed down the hallway. She followed the inner wall and peeked around the corner.

  An automaton lay in pieces a few feet from her. Farther down, she saw the outline of a second. Squinting, she focused on the shadows at the end of the hall. They moved, dark against dark, billowing like twisting silk. The word echoed in her memory, vengeance. Leilani stepped into view.

  The shadow froze. His eyes widened in surprise.

  “Does he deserve it?” Her breath slipped in and out, and her heart pattered.

  “For my sister.” His voice held steel.

  Leilani nodded and watched him vanish. She couldn’t risk any further delay. Her feet scampered back to the bench, and her mind chewed furiously on a plan of action.

  “Flood and Fire?” Xiang poked at the pouches with his cane. “Did he get them all?”

  “They all seem to be here.” The advisor glowered at Leilani.

  “Well, pass them over.”

  Xiang’s throne sat on a raised step and his long cane tapped the pouches until the advisor scooped them up. Leilani knelt on the floor, head down. Her eyes drifted from the huge braziers that burned all around the throne to the corners where shadows danced.

  Xiang looped the amulets around his neck. In the firelight, his tattoos undulated against leathery skin. His fingers curled and uncurled as the advisor passed over her Master’s magic. Demons, hostile magic, seven amulets of protection.

  “Better!” Xiang bellowed, patted the amulets, and waved an arm in her direction. “You may go.”

  She scuffled across the room and up two steps to the exit. She kept her eyes away from the one shadow that moved against the others. Four steps across the hallway and she slunk between the automatons. Two steps into the courtyard and she heard Xiang howl. Metal crashed in the distance and guards raced to the audience chamber.

  Leilani hurried through the outer gates, veered right and scurried around the back. She hid behind a palm trunk by the rear wall of the fortress where, inside, Xiang battled his assassin with six amulets and one empty pouch around his neck.

  A plume of smoke blossomed above the building. Screams floated from the courtyard. Leilani held her breath and witnessed the silk-swathed figure spring over the wall. He landed in a crouch and looked to either side, smiling when he saw her waiting. Her fingers tugged the amulet into view and he laughed.

  “Would it have helped him?” She held her breath.

  “A pinch of dishonesty...”

  “A landslide of sorrow,” she finished for him. He hadn’t said whose sorrow.

  “Your lip is bleeding.” He frowned.

  “You may have trouble getting back to your ship.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “There’s a bigger port in Hilo.” She pointed inland toward the road that wound to the far side of the island. Hilo was far enough from Mene but the journey would be too dangerous by herself.

  “You would travel alone with a strange man?”

  “A man who would dishonor a woman is no man at all.”

  She thought he’d argue. Instead, he nodded and bolted like a dart through the trees. He’d be hard to keep up with, her stranger.

  She tucked the pouch back into her shirt — protection from assassins — and ran after him.

  * * * * *

  Frances Pauli was born and raised in Washington State. She grew up with a love of reading and storytelling, and was introduced to Science Fiction and Fantasy at an early age through the books kept and read by her father.

  Seeds of the Lotus

  Camille Alexa

  I bow low as I can, brow brushing the same floor that kisses Madame One Ming’s embroidered slippers where they dangle limply off the edge of Her mockwood dais. Thinking of this, I lift my forehead the width of a Martian sand-mite’s tentacle off the floor, my cloned skin unworthy of touching the ground where She has walked.

  The gong rings twice and Madame’s housedroid announces my presence with its old-fashioned protocol, as it does every day: “Lotus Blossom Sixty-three.”

  Even by Martian standards the droid is an ancient model, boxy and dull, the heads of its square rivets worn nearly flat, the door to its furnace ill-fitting. Its copper vocalizers are far older than my vat-grown bones, its voice atonal and tinny as steam spurts involuntarily from its vents with the wheeze of tiny bellows. Not raising my head, I sh
uffle forward on my knees toward the polished mockwood dais until the embroidered toes of Madame One’s slippers come into view. The shiver I always feel in Her presence zips along my spine, delicious tremors shaking the tips of my fingers, the ends of my looping braids.

  “Rise, little lotus blossom,” says Madame, beautiful hand extended for my kiss. Careful not to disturb the golden casings on the nails of Her third and fourth fingers, I kiss, then rise. Her face is porcelain-perfect, lines smoothed under thick white powder, lower lip scarlet with the rouge I make from the pulverized ores of our red planet.

  She caresses my cheek with one long nail. Its golden point is sharp and lovely where it creases my skin. “My blossom,” She says, “our minedroids report Jacob Tinker’s wagon approaching from the east.”

  I step back in surprise. “Two days early! And he approaches from the west! Always from the west!” The rhythm of the old trader’s circuit is as central to my understanding of time as is the sun setting each night on our curved dome and Madame One’s cricket automaton chirping each morning in its terracotta pot. I mark my months by the trader’s arrival and departure, all twelve arrivals and departures since the day after I opened my eyes to the world, fully formed from the vat, and Madame One Ming bestowed Her first glorious kiss onto my cheek.

  Madame smiles at me, places a soothing hand on my head. “Well this time, little blossom, he approaches from the east, and today.”

  “Yes, Madame One Ming.” I scrape low and back from the chamber.

  Out in the rocky courtyard, halfway between Madame’s pagoda and the airlock pavilion with its gaping dragon jaw gate, I pause to draw a deep breath of recycled air. Overhead the sky is glorious, shot with threads of deeper red against the familiar orange haze. Light filters through to glance off the curving glassy surface of our dome, the sun a ripe round fruit hanging heavy in the sky, as delicious as the tangerine the trader brought once, shipped all the way from Moon. I love that sun, love that sky, almost as much as I love Madame.

  Dust is thick in the air today. The trader’s wagon is practically at the dragon gate before I see it, even with my gene-modified sight. Our three cylindrical minedroids clunk clumsily in the wagon’s wake, their long metal queues swinging stiffly behind them. Each carries its satchel of ammonium salts, the fuel which feeds their metal bellies and Dome II’s sole trade good of any value.

  The droids escort the wagon through the airlock, and the shimmery portable oxygen field around the conveyance pops like soap bubble from Madame’s bath. I bow perfunctorily to the wagoner before rushing to fondle his clonemule’s ears. The animal huffs gently into my palm, nuzzles my wrist hoping for a treat I do not have to give him.

  “He likes you, Lotus,” says the old man as he unhitches the beast. “I need to talk to the boss lady about a slight … complication. Is Nelumbo around?”

  At Madame One’s sacred name, I drop into an automatic kowtow. “She who Observes the Heavenly Rituals with a Solemn Fate, with Blessed Health, who Initiates Kindness with Extreme Talented Insights, Admires the Arts, with Great Virtue and with a Holy Appearance awaits you in Her pagoda, honored visitor.”

  The old wagoner puts his hand on my head, a gesture reminiscent of Hers. I sneak a peek at his face, see he’s smiling at me. “All right, little Lotus,” he says, speaking around the mockwood matchstick he carries clamped between his teeth. “All right.”

  From the rear of the wagon where the minedroids have begun unloading the foodstuffs Madame and I depend on, the glass tube replacements for our water still, the nourishment powders for our lichen crop, comes a roar: “Ding dong dang-it-all! Keep yer tincan hands to yer dang self! I ain’t no sack of potaters!”

  I go taut with surprise at the sound of another human voice and without conscious thought leap into Listening Crane stance. Genetic programming makes my muscles coil with Tiger strength. My hearing hones to painful acuity and my hands go rigid, a warrior’s weapons, ready to kill with Thousand Deaths precision. The minedroids careen into confusion mode, their dented brass torsos clanking into each other as they stumble back, their pendulum queues of braided silver swinging from their hollow brainpans.

  “Easy, Lotus,” says the trader. “That’s just my complication. Matty, come meet—” he pauses, squints at me, “—Lotus Blossom Sixty … three.” He sucks the matchstick in his mouth as a redheaded girl jumps from the wagon. She has only two braids, worn long rather than looped, each prickled with short blunt lengths of yellow straw. Her clothing is not the occidental bustles and lace petticoats from Madame’s descriptions of Dome City ladies nor the regal embroidered gowns favored by Herself, but like a man’s, loose and rough, with pointed stovepipe boots and pearly snaps for buttons. She’s barely taller than I.

  This is the fifth human I have seen in my year of life, and the only girl. Madame One is as far above me as the stars, and the old wagoner and other men who come from time to time to negotiate business with Her as unlike me as the minedroids or the wheezing housedroid. Only the clonemule has ever struck me as a creature similar to myself — the clonemule, and the dozen lotus seeds in the Walled Pavilion of Bright Symmetry, sleeping in their vats of copper and glass.

  The girl claps straw from her hands and strides to me. When I do not alter my stance, she grabs one of my hard-angled hands from where it is poised for a Strike of the Snake, and pumps my stiff arm up and down, up and down. “Pleased to meet’cha,” she says. Her smile is wide, her teeth many and white.

  The trader nods. “You girls get acquainted while I go talk to the boss lady. Lotus, think your minedroids can show Echo here where to oil up? It’s dusty out there.”

  He does not wait for an answer, but nods as though I’ve spoken and sets out across the courtyard toward Madame’s pagoda. The girl drops my hand and, voice stabbing into my ears like a Hooked Claw of Persimmon Piercing, calls over her shoulder, “Come on, Echo! She ain’t gonna bite you.”

  Distracted by the girl, I have failed to notice the mandroid. He approaches upright on his lower appendages, sleek and beautiful. He is the shiniest object I have ever seen, rounded and silver and perfect. His spherical gold eyes swivel to me.

  “Lotus Sixty-three,” says the girl, “this here’s the Echo 3000 model my daddy done sent with me all the way from Luna Colony.”

  Never before have I been tempted to knock the floor for a droid, but something in the Echo’s gaze pierces deep into my chest. He is a warrior, like me. I sense it.

  I bow to him and he watches with orbs gold as the tips of Madame’s nails. The girl grabs my hand again and swings me toward the main pagoda’s tiled entryway. “Sure is pretty here in Dometown Eye-Eye,” she says, face lit like rare-glimpsed dawn. “Way prettier than Dometown Icks. And don’t even get me started about that nasty old Dometown Eye-Vee. If’n I never see that place again in my life it’ll be too soon. Ain’t that right, Echo?”

  “Yes, Matty Johnson.”

  The Echo 3000’s voice is smooth and modulated, nothing like Madame’s housedroid with its flatulent wheezes and groans through vents predating the first human footfall on Mars. And of course the minedroids have no voice boxes at all, only coded dot-and-dash strikes against their torsos with their spade-like appendages best suited to shoveling ammonium salts into their belly furnaces. I glance over my shoulder as I’m dragged across the courtyard, watch the Echo 3000 stare after the girl who does not look back. The minedroids ring him like barrel-shaped satellites, small by comparison, their riveted appendages clumsy and indelicate as they tap their hammered brass torsos at him with tentative, respectful, mute inquisition.

  The trader emerges from Madame One’s pagoda as we mount the steps. I drop the boyish girl’s hand and bow. “Thank you, honored visitor, for bringing Madame One Ming ground pearls and jade for Her longevity tea. Also, thank you for letting me pet your mule.”

  From beneath my lowered lashes I see kindness in his face, mingled with an elusive sadness. “You take care of yourself, Lotus,” he tells me around the edges of
his matchstick. To the girl he says, “Go easy on her, Matty.”

  I imagine her head popping under my foot with a Fluttering Heron attack, or her jaw rupturing as my fist hit home with a Closed Chrysanthemum blow. “No one need go easy on me, honored one,” I say, watching the girl from the corner of my eye to see if she hears the steel in my voice.

  He seems on the edge of more words, but only nods and pats my head before plodding to the airlock and his sweet little mule. The Matty girl runs after him, hugs him tightly before letting go. The Echo takes a step toward her but she waves him off with a laugh and an admonishment to “make new friends.” She runs back to my side and he watches her with his gold spheres, watches her as she grasps me again and sweeps me into Madame’s pagoda. Even after the hinged spirit wall slides into place behind us I feel him watching still, the flimsy synthetic material no match for the focus of his will.

  The gong sounds and I kowtow to Madame One Ming. “Lotus Sixty-three,” drones the housedroid, “and….” It sputters to a stop, its outmoded program struggling to assimilate new data. The Matty girl does not kowtow, but strides past me to Madame’s dais, hand extended. Before she can touch Madame I launch into One Arrow Flying, tackle her from behind so we both sprawl to the polished tiles. She scrambles to her feet, assuming a fighting stance not recognizable to my genetic encoding, fists raised in clunky mimicry of Closed Chrysanthemum. I ease into Listening Crane pose, balancing on one foot, hands like deadly claws angled to the floor. I will tear this girl’s eyes from her head with Imperial Plum Pluck. I will twist the dusty red braids out at their roots with a three-finger Radish Tug. If she tries to touch Madame again, I will—

  “Enough!” At the displeasure in Her voice, I fall instantly to my knees and knock my head three times to the floor. “Lotus Sixty-three, this girl is our honored guest.”