by Sam Abraham
One of the cops moved to strike her, but Shen stopped him. “Your mother’s given name is Hua.”
Li smothered her fury. “Where is she? Quit licking my ass and tell me.”
Shen smiled. “If you can behave, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” He took a drag of a Zhonghua, favoring the old-fashioned cigarette as a mark of loyalty, and looked at her with fierce, discerning eyes. “Can you behave?”
She seethed. “Yes, Laoshi,” she said.
“Bring her,” Shen grunted.
He led the cops out of the main entrance. Normal people heading to the train stared at her, in her torn smock and stolen shoes, her arms pressed painfully behind her. She thought of the girl Zhu, with no one to help her. Then she was shoved into a black selfdrive idling at the curb. Shen got in across from her and focused his eyes on a holo that slid the car door shut, leaving them in private.
“Where is my mother?” Li said as she rubbed her wrists, tired of games.
“With your father, near Nanjing,” her teacher said, smiling sharply. “You may go to them, of course. On the way, I hope you will first go visit the scientist who invented the technology enabling your enhancements. We want you to talk to him.”
“And if I refuse?” Li said.
Shen shrugged. “Walk away if you want. But my offer to you was clear: reunification with your mother in exchange for your service. Her location is a state secret. If I trust you with these details and you betray that trust, you would probably need to be lobotomized. Forgotten.”
“You would do that to me?”
“It is not up to me. You and I, Xuesheng, are just stones in a much larger game of go.”
Li was quiet for long moments. She thought about her dream and looked down at her filth, and said, “And I suppose that kidnapping me and shipping me off as a slave was just part of your game?”
“That quarry gang has been on our target list for years,” Shen said, ignoring her anger. “The Complex thanks you for dispatching them as part of your training.”
Unable to believe her ears, she hissed, “How can you call that training?”
“A strike team was being queued, with the assumption of at least fifty percent collateral damage. As an undercover agent, you saved lives.” He gave her a patronizing sigh. “And I needed you to learn how to kill. Now that you are a killer, you can help us in ways few others can. You can do what it takes to fight forces threatening the stability of our society.”
“Something impossible happened, Laoshi,” Li said, slowly. “An electrical storm. Inside, as I was escaping. Did I really cause it? When you told me in the Complex, I’m not sure I believed you.”
“You come from a special family,” Shen said. “There is so much more I can teach you. So, will we work together? Can I trust you?”
Li saw her teacher consider her as if everything depended on her next move. She nodded.
“A wise decision, Xuesheng. Your contact is in the town of Jingdezhen. He is working with this engineer I spoke about, Dr. Yang. Yang has discovered how to use longshui as an energy source. You must help Yang conduct an important experiment.”
“Why not just send in the Army to watch him?” Li said.
Shen shook his head. “There are few others we can trust.”
“What about Yang?” she said. Her teacher’s silence confirmed her suspicion. “Why not?”
“I feel terrible,” Shen said, “sending my best student into a den of jackals. But for the sake of national security, you must help Yang. When his work is complete I will take you to see your mother.” Shen handed Li her old holobeads. “I’ve loaded sensitive data onto these,” he said as his student took them. “Don’t lose them again.”
Li put the beads in her ears and lit them up, projecting a digital display across her face. The cursor followed her eyes to the bottom of the screen, to a folder named Project Longshui, and her eyes swam in digital images. She found details of the meet point, a tent emblazoned with horses. As she de-ionized the air in front of her eyes and pulled the holobeads into her palm, Li looked at Shen apprehensively. “If you can’t even trust the Army to keep him safe,” she said, “where is Yang, anyway?”
“In the Ghost Lands,” Shen said.
Chapter 12 – Pi (否)
In Accordance With Heaven
Li stared out the window of the sonic train as the walls of the Pearl River Delta grew distant behind her. The blisters on her feet had healed, but the nightmare of the quarry was fresh in her mind. As she sped north into the abandoned waste, she told herself she wasn’t doing her teacher’s bidding because she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, or because she had nowhere else to go.
Beyond her window, Li watched dying trees open into a cavity cutting through the countryside. Jiangxi Province used to be all pine forests and paddies, Li knew. In the old days, the mountains were wild, places of legend hiding demons in mists. But that was back when waterfalls poured into lush valleys, when green terraces brought forth sugarcane and persimmons and tea. Back when life grew from the earth.
These days in the interior, where mountains blocked rising seas from infecting the land with saltwater, the breadbasket was in its seventh drought in twenty years. The skies had dried in the last century, the usual summer thunderstorms mysteriously absent. When the train left Old Guangzhou on elevated rails, Li watched locals row around in boats through canals cutting through the metropolis, though they were miles from the ancient coastline. Yet where the seas ended, sulfate resin leeched nutrients from the soil, climate shift eviscerating the land into dry cracked clay.
As the train sped north, Li saw hulking agribots planting what rice they could. Each of the white lumbering machines did the work of twenty men, leaving the paddies empty except for thin brown mud. With makers feeding all the people in cities and the land producing little food, it was no wonder the Centrists had pivoted to the megalopolis and leased the interior to mercenaries. No wonder people called these the Ghost Lands. The agribots looked like troubled spirits to Li, haunting a house that had burned down around them.
The maglev pulled into the psuedocity of Nanchang five hours later, a rotten holdover of broken pagodas and occuhives on the shores of a swamp that used to be Poyang Lake. As the water level declined, the city had decayed, millions leaving until it was a carcass for drone gangs and migrant squatters. Only the train station was still held by Centrist loyalists, in a fortified bunker on the west riverbank. There, Li transferred to another maglev that flew farther into the highlands.
It was afternoon when she arrived in the town of Jingdezhen. Leaving the station bunker there, she exited one-way gates with warnings that the Centrist rule of law was not enforced beyond. Li stood there on the other side, taking in the Ghost Lands so disparaged on metropolitan holoviews.
It was quiet. Li could see that the occuhives nestled between rolling hills had once been quaint before redistribution of Centrist rights to the big cities had led to mass migration away from these ancient towns. Now it was nearly abandoned. Crows flocked under a gutted building that half-collapsed in an earthquake and had never been repaired. A mediadrone sailed overhead, squawking about a new tax imposed by the River Syndicate. A tank rolled through, followed by a paramilitary squad with gray uniforms and pulse rifles.
Following Shen’s instructions, Li hiked into the artisan’s district, where remnants of society still thrived. Workshops in narrow hutong alleyways held great kilns smoldering with ceramics. Squat plaster houses with curled tile roofs were abuzz with the old ways, spinning clay, baking and painting pottery, all of it revolving around the porcelain market.
As a center of pottery making for centuries, the ceramic parks of Jingdezhen poured forth delicate earthenware painted with secret gardens and flying dragons, temptresses and flower petals. As the Ghost Lands grew wild, they stoked the artistic essence that thrived here, as if the retreat of luxury made way for more traditional instincts, blossoming in crafts that had once decorated dynasties. Ancient ways
came alive in clay with glazes matching the colors of the land, new leaf green and sunlight yellow, tiger orange and chrysanthemum purple, a collage of the blooming mountain spring.
Li came to a sprawling bazaar and wandered the aisles, her eyes lingering over the rows of porcelain, hewn stone and pressed silver. She had thought she had seen everything in the Kowloon arcades, she had thought the Ghost Lands were nothing but a hell on earth. But here she found wonder, felt lifted into an incanted past. Rice paper scrolls with ink fluttered in the wind. Caged birds preened vermilion feathers. Kiosks sold potions, tortoise shells, healing herbs and artifacts, Buddha statues crafted from alabaster. In the hills, Li saw shrines visited by worshipers burning incense. At the far end of the marketplace, she found a lonely preacher shouting about sin and the worship of idols. Around him, a band of men plucked stringed instruments and sang of the new dawn.
Li was drinking in the exotic throwback of the Ghost Lands when she passed an elaborate tent. Flanked by men in robes, the tent was hung with tapestries of horse warriors. She recalled the file from her holobeads, and recognized the sigil of the stallion as the meet point for her contact. The tent’s flaps were drawn wide, revealing a man inside with long black hair. He wore loose robes, which ran down to the rug he sat upon. Strands of beads flowed from his sleeves.
Li entered the tent, and said, “Are you the man called Sun?”
“I am,” the man said, and picked up one of four bronze coins. He held the coin between his thumb and ring finger for Li to see. “Do you know what this is, girl?” he said.
She craned closer to examine the copper coin. It had a square hole punched out of the center, and was inscribed with protocharacters that had not been used as writing in thousands of years.
When she shook her head, the man grunted, and palmed the coin with the others in his grungy hands. “Since ancient days,” he said, “coins like these foretold the Oracle of the I Ching, the Book of Changes. It is the divine tool of sages, a map to the ever-changing world.”
Li had no patience for his patronizing tone. “Those were dark days before the Internet, no doubt,” she said. “Not sure there’s much use for oracles these days, though.”
The fortune teller laughed. “Your toys are made by the hands of men, but men grow old and die. Those of us who live in the hills, who must resort to banditry to feed our starving bellies, know the truth of men. I worked for the River Syndicate until I started asking questions about agricultural shortages. Then I was deported to the Ghost Lands.” His eyes grew distant. “I was lost, unable to understand why I deserved such cruelty. But then,” he said, regaining focus, “I found the I Ching. And in it I learned that prejudice against men like me is not new, but rather one small arc in the great wheel of history. All people are corruptible and hollow, all empires die and are reborn. Your Internet, your holobeads, and all the shiny cities are sand in the ocean. Only the Oracle is beyond impermanence.”
Li scoffed. What purpose could Shen have leading her to this creature? A verse came to her, though it made her feel dirty. As if compelled, she said, “‘There shall not be found among you anyone who… tells fortunes or interprets omens…for whoever does these is an abomination to the Lord.’”
The fortune teller looked at her strangely. “No more so than a Chinese girl who quotes the priests of foreigners,” he said. “The magic of the broken line is in your blood. For thousands of years, the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching answered the questions of emperors. Even now, at the end of days, the Oracle’s wisdom will still guide the lost, if we but listen.”
The man dropped the coins to his mat with a flourish, where they clinked around, flipping and tumbling until they came to a stop. He examined each, ticking off his fingers, and drew a solid line in the dirty ground. Again he threw them, and drew two small dashes - a broken line - beneath the first. Li watched the man repeat the process, until six lines were sketched in the dust. He bent down and contemplated the hexagram. Then his eyes grew wide as he whispered, “When ribbon grass is pulled up, the sod comes with it.” He glared at Li for a long moment and said, “Be careful, little girl. Your fates are calling.”
Li was about to retort when another man entered the tent. He was the last person she’d expected to find in the Ghost Lands. An inch over six feet, he wore a polysheath around his shoulders, blue jeans and boots. Blond hair curled around his ears, and a thin golden beard peppered his jaw. A white guy. “Not much to look at, is it?” he said.
When she tried to ignore him, he spoke to her again in flawless Mandarin. “Jingdezhen, I mean. It’s pretty, don’t get me wrong, but there isn’t much to do at night.” He smiled at her like a stupid pony. “Are you Li Aizhu? I’m Eli Warner. Shen sent me to meet you.”
She raised an eyebrow. Was this really her contact? Li looked around at the rows of pottery makers, hawking their ceramics to anyone who might have money. No one else noticed her.
Eli shrugged. “If you’re not Li, sorry to waste your time,” he said, and turned to leave.
“Aya,” she hissed. “Take me to Dr. Yang.”
Eli smiled. “Come along then,” he said. “We should get to safety before dark.”
As the sun sank behind the hills, Eli drove his jeep through the mountains, to a small psuedocity near the mountain of Huangshan. It was evening when they reached the encampment spreading in the valley below, clustered around old occuhives along the riverbank. They were stopped at a checkpoint, where two armored robots girdled with rockets blocked the road.
“Not to worry,” Eli said to reassure Li. “The battledrones are here for our protection.”
A third, smaller drone floated over the car and scanned a series of decals on the front bumper. When the license had been confirmed, the battledrones rotated apart, and Eli coaxed his jeep down the road and into the camp.
They drove through rows of tents and shelters until they came to the largest occuhive along the river. The elevators had long since failed, so Eli led Li up five flights of stairs to a hall where mold was slowly conquering the whitewash. A middle-aged man was waiting at one of the doors, his eyes hidden behind glasses, his wispy hair springing around his head, refusing to be tamed. He offered a paternalistic smile that made Li instantly distrust him.
“Aizhu,” Eli said, “Please meet Dr. Yang Congdao.”
“Come in,” Yang said, welcoming them.
Yang had a modest home, Li saw, his living room little more than some cushioned pallets around a faded rug. Li turned to the balcony, and saw how the camp below rambled along a spiderweb of rivers. She wasn’t sure which were louder, the howling dogs, the shouts of drunks, or the buzz of cicadas. Sparse lights blinked in the dark.
“Would you join my family for supper?” Yang said. “We have a room made up for you, so you can get some rest. Tomorrow you can come to see our demonstration.”
“Of what?” Li said curtly.
“Longshui,” said a tan woman with her hair cut short. She had come from the back room to stand next to Eli. Her tank top exposed her chiseled shoulders and wiry frame.
Yang grinned broadly. “Please meet my postdoc, Zoe Chou, on exchange from the University of Texas. Zoe, please meet Li Aizhu. She is a student who has come to write an essay on our work,” Yang said, using the cover story that Shen had devised. “Zoe,” the Professor chuckled, “why am I so lucky?”
“Well, I suppose that along with longshui, you now have two sources of li,” Zoe said, smiling at the pun.
Li laughed politely despite the stale humor, since the ideogram for her surname was a near-homophone with the character for power. But her ears pricked up. This was the man who invented the substance that Shen claimed had enhanced her. “What you call longshui – dragon water? – this is the energy source?”
“It is the Elixir of Life,” Yang said. “It is the reason we live out in the bounty of the affiliated territories,” he said, using the official Centrist term for the abandoned wasteland. “But forgive an old professor’s jokes
.” He turned to Zoe. “Are we ready for tomorrow?”
Zoe nodded. “We’re expecting an output of almost two gigawatts.”
Li paused. “What is that - enough to light up a building?”
“A small pseudocity,” said Eli.
Li was about to ask more questions when Yang’s wife called them to supper. A quiet boy helped his mother bring out rice and a stew of meat and greens. Yang sat at one end of the rug and cleaned his eyeglasses as his wife poured tea. Eli and Zoe pulled bottles of beer from an icebox on the wall.
As they ate, Yang watched Li as she barely touched her food. “Xiao Li, you’ve traveled a long way,” Yang said. “Can we bring you anything?”
Li smiled and said, “I am here to learn how longshui works, Professor. Let’s begin there.”
Yang smiled, unsurprised, and placed a holoview on the rug between them. “It’s a synthetic, broad-spectrum electron transport chain,” he told Li as he called up a lightframe that distilled into what appeared to be an emerald cucumber with intricate tattoos.
Seeing her confusion, he cleared his throat and said, “Let’s take a step back. All multicellular life forms have little factories called mitochondria in their cells, long membranes with molecular gates that curl back and forth in microscopic tubes. This,” he pointed to the cucumber, “is a nanograph of a fruit fly mitochondrion.” He traced his fingers along what appeared to be the tattoos, the maze of pathways winding back and forth within the tubular organelle. “It looks similar to what is in every human cell.” With a swipe of his hands, he magnified the mitochondrion, diving their view into the maze within. “And this is a natural electron transport chain.”
“This spongy stuff,” he said, pointing to the membrane undulating between the five clusters, “is a thin layer of fat that creates a voltage gradient. Our cells store energy by stripping electrons off sugar and forcing the electrons to pass through these protein gates.” His hands gesticulated at the five clusters as they gulped and spewed ions to each other. “The energy of this process is used to synthesize special high-energy molecules, which in turn drive many other chemical reactions in our muscles, our brains, our guts, you name it. The electron transport chain fuels life as we know it.”
