Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Once he was through customs with his two suitcases, he spotted his name on a placard as agreed. The man holding it looked like a wrestler, tall and broad-shouldered, and when Hiroshi introduced himself, he saw the man’s face wore a forbidding, even fearsome expression.

  “My name is Ku Zhong,” the man said in flawless English with just a hint of a Chinese accent. “I am Mr. Gu’s personal assistant. I am required to ask you whether you would like to go to your hotel first to rest, or whether you want to speak to Mr. Gu straightaway.”

  Although Hiroshi had a twenty-five-hour flight under his belt, he was still burning with eagerness to talk to Larry Gu, the mysterious Chinese billionaire Rasmussen had told him about. Gu was eighty-one years old, and his personal physicians had no idea how he was still alive. “If it is convenient for Mr. Gu, I would like to speak to him straightaway.”

  Ku nodded, his face a mask. “Mr. Gu had very much hoped this might be the case. I will take you straight to his office.” He gestured curtly toward what had to be the exit. “If you would be so good as to follow me to the car.”

  The car was a stretch limo with tinted windows, just like in the movies. Hiroshi had assumed Ku would drive, but in fact there was a chauffeur waiting, who opened the trunk, stowed Hiroshi’s luggage, and drove them away. They left the airport across a six-lane bridge, headed into the ranks of Hong Kong’s high-rises. Other than them, there was very little traffic; he only saw taxis, delivery trucks, and buses. Ku asked conscientiously how his flight had been, and Hiroshi answered that it had been fine. Then Ku took a call and spent the rest of the journey castigating whoever was on the other end in rapid Cantonese. Hiroshi couldn’t understand a word.

  At last, the limousine pulled up to one of the countless steel-and-glass skyscrapers and glided down into the most luxurious underground parking garage Hiroshi had ever seen. An elevator was waiting, its doors already open.

  “Please,” said Ku.

  They got out of the car and into the elevator, which shot upward. They emerged into a series of brightly lit rooms divided by black marble screens and chrome pillars. Men and women bowed as they passed, and beyond it all was a double door large enough for an elephant to pass through.

  “Mr. Gu’s office,” Ku declared, holding a swipe card up to a reader. “I will wait for you out here.”

  Hiroshi stood on the threshold. This wasn’t an office, it was a cathedral. The room’s ceiling was invisible in the gloom. The wall across from where he stood was made entirely of glass, an enormous window that offered a breathtaking view of central Hong Kong as evening drew in. In front of the window stood a desk, deep black and polished to an unearthly sheen. It was almost bare and about the size of a tennis court. Behind the desk sat a wizened little man in a huge armchair upholstered in red-gold leather. He was completely bald, with a long white beard, ancient, and seemingly unimpressive, but he gave off an energy that filled the entire room.

  “Hello, Mr. Kato,” he said in a thin but somehow resonant voice. “Please don’t be shy. Come closer.”

  Hiroshi took a deep breath and crossed the threshold. The doors swung shut behind him.

  TRAVELS

  Boston appeared below her. Seen from up here, the city didn’t seem to have changed at all. How long had it been now? Three years. More. The fall colors blanketed New England; these would be the last few days of fine weather.

  Suddenly, Charlotte was consumed with impatience. She pressed her forehead against the window and tried to make out Somerville and the house she had once lived in, though she knew it was pointless. That chaotic little student apartment—who might be living there now? Would they be able to cope with the plants on the balcony? Was the hibiscus still alive? She would have liked to know. Since she had fled—from James and his insinuations, from all those memories, from her studies, which had suddenly seemed so pointless—she had been living in Paris in her parents’ apartment, crammed with dusty heirloom furniture. It was oppressive, but there would have been no sense in getting a place of her own, not with rents costing what they did in Paris.

  They were both waiting for her, Brenda beaming with joy and Thomas smiling and cheerful.

  “And the little one?” Charlotte asked as Brenda embraced her.

  “My mom’s looking after him. She can cast some kind of spell—he cries a whole lot less with her than when I’m around.”

  Brenda looked good. She had blossomed. She had done something with her hair that made her look all grown-up, and she seemed to have put her taste for bright baggy clothes behind her. Thomas hugged her, shy and awkward as always. He had put on weight. Not that he was fat exactly; there was just a little more flesh on his bones. Probably Brenda’s good home cooking. And his hair was beginning to turn gray—what there still was of it—while the bald patch had climbed steadily higher up his forehead. The combined effect made him look older than he was.

  “Thanks for the invitation,” Charlotte said.

  “You were our maid of honor,” he said, smiling. “I think it’s only fair we ask you to come see what happened next.”

  They were still living in Brenda’s blue clapboard house, where the smell of the Atlantic wafted in some days. As she stepped into the orchard, she felt as though she had left Boston only yesterday. No, wait: the garden had changed a little, the trees had grown, and the lawns and beds were tidier than she remembered. It was a little patch of paradise. And soon she would meet its cherub.…Instinctively, Charlotte put her hand on her tummy. Children. So far she had managed to dodge the question of whether she wanted any herself. She had always said that she would think about it later. These days she understood all that talk of the biological clock ticking away, where once she had merely scoffed at the idea. But even now she could hardly imagine becoming pregnant. The thought had always been more frightening than anything else. Pregnancy would mean the end of freedom, she felt. That was how it had been for her mother.

  Mrs. Gilliam opened the front door, a happy, grandmotherly smile on her face. “He’s asleep,” she whispered, as though even saying the words out loud would wake him.

  Brenda took Charlotte by the arm and took her through to the bright, airy nursery that had once been her own room. The baby lay in a darling little crib, looking like an angel, a cherub indeed. Charlotte bent over to admire him properly. Her heart melted as the little man pursed his lips in his sleep and waved his little fists, puffing and snorting as though hard at work somewhere in dreamland.

  Charlotte looked up. “And why Jason?”

  “It had to be,” Brenda explained. “We spent weeks looking at baby-name books, making lists, I don’t know what else, and then we both had the same idea on the very same day. If that’s not fate, then what is it?”

  Fate. The word still gave Charlotte a pang. “And what if he’d been a girl?”

  “That would have meant trouble.” Brenda snorted indignantly. “Do you know what Tom suggested? In all seriousness? Olivia! I mean, puh-lease!”

  “Olivia Wickersham?” Charlotte said the name aloud to test it out. “What’s wrong with that? I don’t think it’s so bad.”

  That earned her a punch on the arm. “Hey! What kind of friend are you?”

  Maybe it was because they had been talking, but whatever the reason, Jason woke up, gulped in a few angry breaths, and began to wail. Brenda picked him up out of the crib. “He’s hungry, I guess.” She looked at him lovingly. “Wasn’t that a long time, eh? Did Mommy have to go all that way to the airport?”

  Baby talk. Charlotte had to grin. The things a baby could make grown men and women do. As Brenda nestled down with her son in an old basket chair by the window to feed him, Charlotte left the two of them alone and went into the kitchen. Mrs. Gilliam was just making coffee. She asked how the flight had been.

  “Good,” said Charlotte. On the table was an English fruitcake, a Gilliam family recipe that suited fall like nothing else. “So
me bumps and thumps at takeoff, but then it was all calm. The seat next to me was free, which was nice.”

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Gilliam, putting a cup in front of her. “There’s so little room on the planes these days, isn’t there?”

  As Charlotte sat down, she spotted a little pile of Spanish textbooks on the windowsill. She asked who was learning Spanish.

  “Those are mine,” Thomas said as he came through the door, back from loading baby gear into the car. “I’ve been invited to give a short series of lectures at the University of Buenos Aires. Next year, in May.”

  “In Spanish?” Charlotte asked.

  “Oh no, I’ll be lecturing in English. I’m not that crazy. But I want to see a little of the city, understand what people are saying.” He shrugged. “It can’t do any harm, I don’t think.”

  Charlotte opened one of the books. It was full of notes in the margins and underlinings. He was obviously working hard at it. Well, why not? He spoke Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi; he would probably have no trouble with Spanish.

  “What will you be lecturing on?” she asked. “Paleoanthropology?”

  He grinned. “Of course not. There wouldn’t be much to say about that in South America.” The classical theory was that mankind had not reached the continent until about fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. “No, they want to take a closer look at the ancient Indian cultures thereabouts. I’ll be lecturing on modern excavation techniques.”

  “That sounds exciting,” Charlotte said, turning her attention to her coffee. She stirred the sugar in carefully.

  He looked askance at her. “Would I be wrong to think that you no longer take an interest in such things? Have you given up on prehistory?”

  She didn’t look up. “For the time being at least.”

  “And what are you doing instead?”

  “Nothing.” That was the truth. The fact was she did nothing. She spent her days wandering through museums and antiques shops, ignoring the way men looked at her and rebuffing their advances, getting through the days. Shopping, cooking, eating, and sleeping. She sat around in the parks when the weather was fine, or drove out of town deep into the countryside. And somehow the time passed. Three years seemed like nothing at all. From time to time she considered looking for work. But what? A job? More study? “I’m trying to enjoy life.”

  “It doesn’t really sound like that’s working.”

  “It may still happen.”

  Brenda came in with Jason on her shoulder, wide awake and beaming. “And?” she asked. “Has Tom picked your brains about Buenos Aires yet? He wants to leave us sitting here without him for six weeks, can you believe it?”

  Charlotte gave a strained smile. Was that the truth of it? Was Thomas using this lecture tour as a way to escape from his family, the way her father had escaped into his work? “Buenos Aires…that was a long time ago. I don’t know whether anything I could tell you might still be true.”

  At dinner she found herself talking about Buenos Aires all the same. How the melancholy strains of the tango floated through the whole city; how crowds of people often danced in the public squares. How unbearably hot and sticky the summer could be, and how something was always going wrong in their house—the refrigerator or the air conditioning or the boiler or the telephone. How the Argentineans were such friendly people but often couldn’t resist playing dirty tricks on foreigners. How her own pocket had been picked three times, once by a boy scarcely any older than herself.

  At some point she gave such a huge yawn that Brenda declared, “Okay, we’ve gotten all we need out of you today. Charley, you’re taking your jet lag off to bed. How long were you up in the air? Seven hours? Eight?”

  “I have no idea,” Charlotte had to admit.

  She followed Brenda upstairs to the guest room. This was the first time she had been in this part of the house. The last time she had visited the Wickershams here, the programmer had still been living on the top floor, a taciturn woman who only ever said “Hello” when you met her on the stairs. It was a pretty room, neatly decorated in green and white. A tree standing directly in front of the window scratched at the pane with its branches. Brenda wished her good night. Charlotte pulled her pajamas and toothbrush out of her suitcase, which was already in the room—who had brought it up for her?—and then remembered nothing more until she woke up the next morning.

  The window was open and she could hear birdsong. It wasn’t quite dawn outside yet. The house was completely quiet. What time was it? She looked for her watch but couldn’t find it anywhere. Early, at any rate. That was the jet lag. She was wide awake and knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. She sat up and looked around. Just to try it, she put her hand on the wood panels on the wall behind her bed. The panels looked old and must have been here forever. She shut her eyes and tried to feel the history stored up in them. She had to sit still for a long time before the first images swam to the surface. The memories, the feelings. She felt loneliness, yearning for someone waiting back in Chicago. A boyfriend? A husband? No, another woman Charlotte realized with a shock. The programmer had been in love with another woman. A secret affair? Unrequited love? She couldn’t quite tell.

  Sighing, she took her hand away. The images vanished. When she was younger, it had been like listening to a concert, but these days she caught only faint strains, tangled snatches of voices and feelings she could hardly make out. When she was a child, she would have been able to read the silent woman’s whole life story from these walls, but she would not have understood most of it. Now she knew more about life, her mysterious gift had grown weaker. Perhaps, Charlotte thought as she opened her suitcase and put everything she would need into drawers and onto shelves, it was some kind of defense mechanism she had developed over the course of her life. When she was a child, the flood of strange feelings, memories, and images had often been too much for her. She was open to impressions, too open; indeed, she had often felt vulnerable. How keen she had always been to visit museums and old monuments. For her, it had been the equivalent of riding a ghost train. But perhaps it hadn’t just been about the kicks. It must have been her way of trying instinctively to learn how to deal with her gift.

  She sat down on the bed and passed her hand over the quilt, feeling the love Brenda had put into stitching it. Brenda, who had a baby now. Charlotte tried to remember when she had been a baby, a toddler. She had almost no memory of the time. Her mother used to say she had been a strange child, and nobody in the family contradicted that. Charlotte herself could only remember isolated moments, out of context, that seemed strangely timeless. The living and the dead had been around her, all mingled together, and often she had not been able to tell which thoughts were her own and which came from other minds.

  That was another reason she had left Boston three years ago: the place held painful memories for her. Such things were harder for her than for most people. She couldn’t have coped if she’d stayed. But she couldn’t spend her whole life running away every time something unpleasant happened. Eventually, there would be nowhere left on earth to go, and then what? Perhaps it was a blessing that her gift was slowly ebbing away.

  The days until Jason’s baptism on Sunday passed in a blur. Charlotte helped in the kitchen, helped decorate the dining room, helped do laundry. She enjoyed the bustle and hard work. New guests were constantly stopping by. Some simply said hello, admired the baby, and went back to their hotels, while others spent hours sitting on the porch, talking. The coffee machine never stopped.

  It was out on the porch that Charlotte met Adrian Cazar, who had studied with Brenda at Boston University. His major had been climatology, and he and Brenda had met in a web-design class; together they had developed a website on global warming. She handled the design, and he provided the content.

  “Well, it was incredibly cold in Paris last winter,” Charlotte said. She felt an overpowering need to tease someone. “We thought
the snow would never stop. And then even this past summer, I was freezing all the time. I’m not sure this whole global-warming thing isn’t just a myth.”

  Adrian wouldn’t let himself be provoked. “Its effects are rather different over in Europe because of the Gulf Stream. While the rest of the world is baking hot, you’ll get an ice age.”

  He was a good-looking guy, the dark type. He reminded her of the lead actor in one of those pirate movies, the one who had played a crazy captain. She couldn’t recall the name.

  “Ice age?” She still wanted to provoke him. “I think you’re just making excuses.”

  Adrian grinned and looked at her with his big, dark eyes. “No, really. One cold winter or one hot summer means nothing. There have always been variations in the climate, and there always will be. The problem is that average temperatures are rising. Slowly but surely, and we can’t stop it. For the time being it’s only really been evident in areas where the climate is already extreme—by the poles, in the deserts, and in regions that are sensitive to drought. Nature is changing irreversibly there.” A sudden gust of wind pelted them with yellow-brown leaves as though to prove Adrian’s point.

  “And we’re causing it? With exhaust emissions and all of that?”

  “Possibly,” Adrian said. “Our emissions of climate-active substances could explain the rise in temperatures. What they can’t explain, however, is why there were warm periods in the past as well, long before human civilization. Which is why there is still debate about whether we are really having an influence on global climate, or whether we’re just kidding ourselves.”

  Charlotte remembered the knife on the altar, remembered falling into the abyss of time, remembered the strange certainty she had felt ever since that there had been another human race before now, maybe more than one. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like teasing Adrian anymore. She listened carefully, seriously, as he explained he wanted to organize an expedition to an island near one of the poles to study the effects of rising temperatures.