Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  Wu Yuèhai rears back from her close proximity to He Keung’s face (is that her breath he feels, or only his own anti-C02 fan?) and assumes a serious yet still somehow flirtatious mien. “The radiation triggered ancient programming buried in my cells, in the human genome. When I fell silent, it was because I was encysted in a cocoon. My nascent transformation sent FTL impulses along the Tao, and summoned my new mentors, the Tian Shi Yu, the Jade Angels. They were waiting to receive me into their loving arms when I hatched into my superior form, and to teach me the true meaning of the cosmos. They brought me to Mars, where I found a community of endless bliss and perfection. A community I wish to share with you. But only if you reach me alone.”

  He Keung would like to believe this fairy tale. Wu Yuèhai alive, and desirous of him. And Mars, a world thought to be forbidding and sterile, instead hosting some kind of pan-galactic Utopian outpost. It resonates with his fondest hopes and dreams. But the sticking point is Wu Yuèhai’s insistence that he murder his fellow taikonauts.

  “Why cannot Huang Shen and Wang Yu also enter into this lotus land? Are they not as human as you or I, just as susceptible to the beneficial influences of your Jade Angels?”

  “No, they are not. Human, I mean. Earth has always hosted two species, true humans and a parasitic mimic race. It is the mimics who are responsible for the endless litany of human suffering down the ages. You are human, holding within you the potential to become as I am. Your false mates are not. In fact, they and their ilk know of the existence of the Jade Angels and the Martian redoubt. They are ancient enemies. And their intention is to destroy it utterly. Have you never wondered why the habitable space of the Radiant Crane is so small, why it represents such a slight improvement upon the ancient Shenzhou-5?”

  Sensing the answer will not please him, He Keung asks, “Why?”

  “It is because the bulk of this vessel is given over to weapons of mass destruction, bombs of surpassing ferocity which your fellows intend to rain down from orbit upon the heads of all we Martians.”

  We Martians. This is a startling statement, and He Keung feels his sensibility tilt at its outrageousness, but before he can contemplate further (Wu Yuèhai a Martian? but was that before or after her soliloquy of mourning and farewell?), Wu Yuèhai speaks in a dramatic new tone, a voice of imperiousness and certitude.

  “The amplitude and oscillations of your qi indicate you are loath to rid the ship of these two parasites, even though they are like camels standing amidst a flock of sheep. But how can you expect to put out a cartload of wood on fire with only a single cup of water? Yet even this contingency has been foreseen. In different circumstances, you will find the strength perhaps to do what needs to be done. Remember, He Keung: Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.”

  The ship, subjectively stationary until then, seems to tilt, lurching and bucking improbably like a fragile life raft in the wake of a robot supertanker. At the same time, the yawning, gleaming haze which has surrounded the apparitional Wu Yuèhai seems to bloom and exfoliate, filling the small cabin. An odor of dusty poppies infiltrates He Keung’s space-dulled nostrils.

  Their restraints suddenly rotting like the Yellow Emperor’s ancient silk robes, the three taikonauts are propelled into that gaping, devouring haze with enormous force, and before He Keung can access the stabilizers, which might possibly arrest the situation, he is instead pressed with enormous force against the bulkhead. He tries to struggle against the alien gravities pinning him in place but cannot, and from the others come strange, bleating cries as they emerge from their drugged state into some kind of transitive half-life in which they neither achieve consciousness nor lose it.

  The Radiant Crane is shaking now; shaking in the vacuum of space as was never supposed to be possible, and, caught in some approximation of fetality, He Keung is shaking too, in sympathetic and terrible vibration. If the other two are in a half-state of ascension toward consciousness, He Keung is now otherwise—he seems to be descending toward some dark star which will envelop him. Wu Yuèhai, invisible in the dominant cold nebulosities contained in the cabin, is giggling; the embrace that locks him is not hers but some aspect of descent and yet he has never felt as close to her as he has at this moment.

  “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still,” Wu Yuèhai’s voice whispers close to him. He cannot touch her but she is there. “You are embarked fully now upon your journey. We greet you, we raise the flag of liberation. Soon you will join us on the surface of the Red Planet and we shall together celebrate the will of the people. And remember: Even a single ant may well destroy a dike.” He feels invisible lips against his ear, hears another harsh giggle, and then space itself in its full and irreversible emptiness seems to swaddle him, not the illusory haze which the Radiant Crane has furnished its three voyagers but the vast and abandoned tableland of the heavens themselves. Breathing seems an outmoded luxury. His companions appear to be flickering before him. He wants to speak but cannot. He wishes to confer or, failing that, at least make their new condition known to Grand Mao Station back in Earth orbit, but he is beyond speech.

  “Thus ends the first part of your journey,” Wu Yuèhai whispers. “Now the true testing can begin.”

  Mars hangs in the sky like the mass of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot scooped from the mother planet and given independent existence, or like the promise of a placid uterine existence, all artery-filtered light and dear protective enclosure. He Keung feels resilient solidity beneath his back. His limbs are free of the encumbering space suit for the first time in months, protected from whatever environment surrounds him only by the skintight green undersuit he donned before departure from Grand Mao Station.

  Shakily, He Keung rises to his feet and gazes about.

  He is evidently standing on a smallish world, for the very curvature of the globe is half perceivable, the horizon oddly close. The ground beneath his booted feet is irregular in a natural manner, but covered with a kind of uncanny springy mouse-gray turf composed of long interlocking cilia finer than the downy hairs of a woman’s back. The sky above his head is a cloudless violet, with the brighter stars of the Milky Way shining through, where the Mars light permits. The air he breathes is redolent of novel proteins and pheromones.

  Incredible as it may seem, He Keung can draw but one conclusion. He is standing on one of the satellites of Mars, either Phobos or Deimos. He takes a tentative step, and the bounciness of his stride supplies another confirming datum. But how came the airless, barren moon known to science for centuries to host an entire ecology and atmosphere, however primitive? Is the change so recent that terrestrial telescopes have not yet detected it? Or if they have done so, why were He Keung and his comrades not informed of this miracle? Can it be that their masters do not want them to know of such a crucial change in their destination? Would the taikonauts hesitate to deliver their putative cargo of WMDs if they knew in advance they were bombing a living world?

  He Keung can only assume that this enlivening of the formerly dead satellite is a result of cosmic machinations by Wu Yuèhai and her unseen peers in the Martian community, and possibly by their mentors, the Tian Shi Yu, the Jade Angels. This satellite must have been set up as an anteroom to the glories of the Red Planet, a kind of quarantine chamber for imperfect visitors. Realizing this, he regards the hovering bulk of Mars with altered sensibilities. Now the planet looks like a monitoring eyeball or the working end of a telescope, sucking in data to be processed by the no-longer-human minds that dwell there.

  Have He Keung’s cabin mates also been deposited here? If so, why were they not all three dumped side by side? Is it intended that He Keung rest alone for a moment to muster his energies and willpower for some upcoming competition? These must be the “different circumstances” into which Wu Yuèhai promised to transplant him, the arena in which he must decide whether to slaughter Huang Shen and Wang Yu, according to her instructions, to earn celestial merit and her undying love.

  Or his pl
ace in hell.

  He Keung realizes that he can advance no further in his destiny until he reunites with his two comrades, whether they be fellow humans or an antagonistic species. Since every direction appears identical, He Keung sets off on an arbitrary vector.

  It is his own Long March, his trudge toward some kind of goal shrouded now but only by his ignorance. All he can hope is that his ignorance will dissipate as he trudges and so He Keung stumbles across the slick panels of the Moon (Deimos or Phobos? he cannot know; very well, he will call it Mao and claim it in the name of the People’s Army) feeling all of the elements of his life to this moment impelling him, dragging him through this strange, expressionless landscape.

  The repetitive muted squelch of his boots upon the living carpet of Mao falls into a metronomic rhythm, lulling He Keung slightly, despite the toxic, the absolute, strangeness of it all. At one moment in the capsule his companions on either side of him, at the next the strange and intimate discourse with Wu Yuèhai, the breath of her confession, her shocking revelation, as shocking as the landscape of Formosa must have been for the evil and exiled Chiang Kai-shek in those early, frantic, wonderful days of the Revolution, and then to the asteroid itself, no transition: truly the Little Red Book was filled with alerts of a world gone suddenly incomprehensible and threatening … but still the experience is overwhelming.

  And then also there is He Keung’s sense of shame and failure, his betrayal of his glorious mission. He feels like Su Qin, the “crisscross philosopher” of the Warring States Era, returning in defeat to his native Luoyang, going back home in despair and rags, having spent all his resources fruidessly. Is it possible he can ever atone for his moment of doubt and indecision in the Radiant Crane, can somehow salvage his mission?

  The lonely man pushes forward across the unvaryingly desolate landscape for hours. His mind begins to drift back to his childhood, his early manhood, the time spent on his grandfather’s farm, when everything seemed so certain and straightforward. Half dreaming, He Keung continues to lift and plant one foot after another, until he is brought to an abrupt halt by a voice at once anticipated and dreaded.

  “He Keung,” Wu Yuèhai says out of the empyrean. Her voice is intimate, confidential, as if she were resting her chin on his shoulder, and yet there is that iciness as well; that glaze of distance that has always surrounded her, even in life. “You are not doing well. You are set upon a course of betrayal, betrayal of the true cause of all humanity. You must cease your impetuousness, you must think.”

  “Think?” he says, speaking the word into the violet atmosphere, and, in sudden, lurching panic, “What is there to think? I am here because of what you have done to me. I was in the Radiant Crane dreaming, then you spoke to me, then I was dislodged. What do you want?”

  Wu Yuèhai says something so shocking that He Keung feels his frail senses waver, the small lamp of his sensibility, of his struggling intellect, which once seemed able to cast some light on this wretched moon, seeming to gutter and die.

  “I want nothing,” she says. “I failed in my mission, don’t you understand? Now I am reduced to searching here, searching there, looking for you to bring this to an end. The Martians, my Martians, cannot help me. They say that I have been corrupted, that I have chosen the path of an exile, allowing my memories of mere flesh and blood existence to contaminate my proper relationship with you. What I should have done, by their ethical standards, was to assume control of your neural structures in the Radiant Crane and forced you to carry out my wishes. But I could not bring myself to damage in such a fashion one whom I … respected.

  “And so I unbalanced the Tao, they claim, and their words have disarmed me. I cannot help myself because I have lost all belief. It is there for you then to change or it cannot be at all.”

  Wu Yuèhai as desolate as He Keung? Herself bereft of her comrades’ trust? All her seemingly godlike powers rendered impotent by some breaching of the finer parameters of her arcane assignment, by mission creep that came to include sympathy and empathy and—and affection?—for a young taikonaut who once worshipped her? He Keung would like to believe this, but cannot rid his mind of the suspicion that this confession is merely another strategem to ensure his cooperation. So his response to Wu Yuèhai is rather formal and chilly, tepid as the noodle soup young He Keung would eat upon his midnight return home from his university cram courses.

  “And what kind of end do you want?”

  “It does not matter to me; what matters is that I be at last permitted to sleep. They promised me sleep; they said that if I made my appeal, if I stayed to mark the truth no matter how painful, I would be permitted to move on to another plane, where life is effortless and uncontested. But they were lying. I have no sleep, I have no peace.”

  As if excited by her intensity the satellite Mao begins to shake, the fibrous panels underfoot surge and heave with the volatility of liquid. He Keung finds himself in perilous balance. Space madness! It must be that ultimate discomfiture of which they had been warned throughout all of the arduous training. The madness which cuts like a knife through all the truisms and teachings of the Great Revolution itself!

  “Wu Yuèhai, help me!” calls out the young man alone in the seeming face of imminent destruction, just as, centuries past, the brave warrior Han Xi made his desperate plea prior to the descent of the headsman’s ax. And just like Han Xi, who was pardoned at the last moment by a prince eager for brave soldiers, He Keung is saved.

  After a complicated fashion.

  The surface of Mao blisters upward just a few meters in front of him, the gray tapestry formed by the cilia stretching to cover the new extrusion. It is as if the planet’s elastic skin sprouts an immense boil or sarcoma that swells in speeded-up malignancy. This is an objective phenomenon; He Keung is certain of that. In the face of this enormity, all his self-pity and epistemological uncertainty implode. No delusion or hallucination, hence not space madness, but rather the alien workings of a globe rendered intelligently totipotent by the Jade Angels and their unfathomable technology.

  The blister ceases its exponential growth when it is as large as a peasant’s cottage. Then a portion of the curved surface facing He Keung melts away, revealing a cavern, a wetly crimson interior that is a mockingly obscene echo of the dry russet planet hanging above as mute witness.

  And inside the hollow blister stand Huang Shen and Wang Yu, his fellow taikonauts. They stand, but not unsupported, instead hanging like puppets. They are wired into the substance of the blister by numerous living tendrils and conduits, neural bundles piercing them like the claws of a sky dragon. Surely this is their unmerited punishment, imposed by Wu Yuèhai for daring to approach Mars, the sanctuary of the Jade Angels.

  “Wu Yuèhai!” shouts He Keung. “What have you done? Release my friends!”

  The voice of the martyred female taikonaut whispers despondently in He Keung’s ear. “This is not my doing. Rather, it is the end of all hope.”

  As if to confirm the woman’s speech, Huang Shen now speaks, his pinched bookkeeper’s face bearing a malicious leer incommensurate with any real suffering.

  “Your ghostly bitch is correct, He Keung. Wang Yu and I have assumed control of this construct, the moon you once called Deimos. We found the supervisory ganglia exactly where the Jade Angels always install them. They are such trusting creatures, so intent on making it easy for their subordinate races to adopt and work their puny gifts. But this time their mania for standardization has betrayed them. We have made a long and diligent study of these so-called Angels and their technologies, across a thousand thousand solar systems, until we know them better than they know themselves. For any race that limits itself to only half the spectrum of existence—that which is conventionally called goodness—cannot, by definition, understand as much as another race, one that spans the whole continuum of motivation and desire, from light to dark.”

  He Keung is nearly dumbstruck. At last he babbles out, “But, but—what are you? What have you done with my
comrades?”

  Wang Yu speaks like a jolly demon. “We are still your same comrades in truth, He Keung, but we were always more than you knew. Our kind is called the Shih Chieh Hsien.”

  The Bodiless Immortals. Only an ancient myth—or so He Keung has always believed.

  “The birth-souls of your fellows,” continues Wang Yu, “were driven out years ago by the force of our superior qi, to perish howling in the aether. We used their bodies as we have used many in the past, as meat machines to accomplish our goals. In this case, we always intended to crush the beachhead established by the Jade Angels in this solar system. We have enjoyed unimpeded rule of your primitive sphere too long to relinquish it now. Therefore, Mars must be destroyed.”

  “What do you intend?”

  Huang Shen makes an answer, quite forthrightly and unconcernedly, as if He Keung were a child being told the reason why grass is green. “This modified satellite possesses powerful engines. We will drive the whole globe now out of orbit and into the Red Planet, creating a world-shattering cataclysm such as that which, eons ago, wiped ninety-nine percent of life off Earth itself. The colony of the hybrid Martians will be extinguished; all individuals no matter where or how concealed will be destroyed. Including your precious Wu Yuèhai. These mortal containers temporarily housing our essences will of course be evaporated as well, along with yourself. But our essential selves will simply be released back into the Tao.”

  The Tao! The Jade Angels! The Bodiless Immortals! Celestial layers upon layers! It is of such enormity to He Keung that he feels the cosmos or at least this small part of it to which he has been sentenced lurch. Meat machines! All of the curses of the Ancients seem to have descended upon him through this sudden and shocking confidence, and He Keung, his legs like his soul seemingly encased in cement, finds himself unable to move. He stands helpless before Huang Shen’s valediction waiting for some awful judgment to descend upon him, to tell him what must come next, but nothing at all happens in this glazed and sudden circumstance.