by Sam Abraham
“You too have been crippled,” Li chanted, letting the image sink in. “Brought low by starvation and tyranny, poverty and shame. But if you wish to be masters of your own fate, simply join me and open your eyes. I am the Jade Prophet, incarnation of Chang’e, and I will teach you the secret to walking again, the same mystery that Chang’e taught Christ. I will show you how to breathe with God.”
Li led those who remained to a square in the center of downtown. Emptied of traffic, the pseudocity around her watched in silence as Jade pilgrims brought cars to the square and set them aflame in a ritual. The holofield from the mountain had been brought to the square to project Li’s image upon the silhouettes of dark occuhives. Surrounded by firelight, Li sat and put her palms together in meditation. Every man and woman who remained in the pseudocity felt her tranquility, for they saw a girl who was unafraid of the chaotic world, and they gathered around her in a wave.
“Taste your breath,” Li said, mediadrones carrying her voice. “Your soul is a door. And as you breathe in, the spirit of God enters you, blesses you, and becomes you. And as you exhale, you breathe this Holy Spirit out into the world, just as God did in the moment of creation.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and listened as thousands around her did the same, and heard the air of their bodies flowing into the wind.
“Feel yourself breathe,” she continued, sensing warm light infuse her body, “for between your breaths is the secret path of Chang’e. In that silent moment, at the peak of your inhale, at the base of your exhale, you are neither here nor there, neither up nor down. Duality is extinguished within you for a fraction of a second. In that moment there is unity, a glimpse of the absolute, the Lady in the Moon. And as you become one with your true self in the space between breaths, you are worthy of Her grace.”
As the crowd meditated, Captain Xie watched Jade priests walk among them, placing longshui wafers upon their tongues, so that every last person saw the light. As he waited for his turn, he remembered the hot breath of the hybrid as it had tried to sink its fangs into him, and the scent of jasmine as Li saved his life. He watched her with awe as she breathed blissfully in the center of the throng. And when he ate of the body of Chang’e and awoke to Her cosmic beauty, all his plans for revenge rang hollow as the world around him melted away.
For her part, Li was too removed to feel pride that so many had followed her path. As those around her transformed, she found the point of light at her center, the singularity from which her power flowed. Only for a moment did she wonder whether this spirit was born of the longshui in her blood, or whether it was the core of all living beings. Then she inhaled and took her trance deeper, immolating herself in a luminous abyss. With each breath she expanded the void of light, subsuming her childhood and memories, burning anything that had ever defined her. Birthday noodles and Kowloon rain, the glee of ribbons in her hair and the toxic chagrin of being brutally mocked. All of it disintegrated in an endless sea. When she finally opened her eyes hours later, the girl she had known was gone.
At dawn, the ritual ended and Li returned to her camp at the foothills of Phoenix Mountain. She found Xie waiting for her.
“The city is ours,” Li said, greeting him.
“It is yours, Lady,” Xie said quietly. “As all will be that touches your wisdom.”
“Are you ready to ask me for your boon?”
Xie shook his head. “It would be too great a favor,” he said. “I doubted you at first, lost in my grief. Now I see that you are the harbinger of miracles.”
Li turned to him and saw Xie as he was, a man caught in shadow. She knew the darkness in him, engorged by the depth of his suffering, his desperation for escape. It was her own. She longed to trust him, to confide in him, to let him into her mind. But Shen had trained her to see something else in him. He was invested in her divinity. She knew that if she chose him, he would proselytize to all around them his conviction that she possessed the power of Heaven. True, she wanted him as a woman. But it was not lust to fill a void, for that had evaporated with the girl. There was only the passion of a prophet.
“Your blindness is lifting, Baotian,” she purred, smiling warmly as she approached him. “You have lost some earthly sight, my One-Eyed Captain, but you have gained clarity of spirit. You see now that I am a goddess, and I wish to give you a blessing in exchange for your sacrifice. Name any favor, and you shall have it.”
Xie smiled sadly. “if you insist, would you allow me a small kiss? To show my gratitude.”
“For your bravery, a kiss would not hurt.”
She heard Xie’s heart racing. He brushed her lips with his, a soft rush of surrender. It tugged her under. She wound her fingers through his coarse hair and pulled him to her, their mouths loving such wet salutations.
Wordlessly she took him deeper into her tent and flung him upon her stolen bed. Breathless, she climbed on him and stripped him of his jacket, boots and fatigues. She put her finger to his lips and slipped it in his mouth, her eyes rolling as he sucked it, relishing the touch. She opened her robes, inviting him into her nakedness. Drowning in lust, she pushed him down and put his fingers between her legs.
Xie was soon overcome as well. He pulled her close. “I’ve never made love to a goddess,” he said, stealing kisses down her neck and breasts. “Would you do me the honor?”
“Shut up and get in me,” she whispered.
And he spread her legs in the warmth of the rising sun, and worshipped her in the name of everything he had lost.
Chapter 23 - Bo (剝)
Split Up To The Skin
The same day that the army of Jade purified Tongling, Eli and Zoe drove east into the Suzhou lake country. Where the lake’s eastern border had once been fields and cities, these days the surrounding land had disappeared into the Pacific. Only the old city of Suzhou was protected by a small seawall that surrounded a few occuhives, hutong and pagodas in manicured gardens. The rest had been submerged as rising seas flooded the lowlands.
Eli drove, veering around hydrocycles, ox-driven carts and tourist busses as the swirl of traffic tumbled east, on the lonely highway above the endless brackish water of the Pacific Floodzone. “Add Anqing to the list of drowned cities,” he mused, looking out at the soft current.
“I hope the professor’s okay,” Zoe said.
Old towers poked up from the waters in the distance, but the Floodzone resembled a barren blue desert. Only a single destination rose from the depths this far to the east. The island of Shanghai stood proudly against the waves, glowing with lights like Atlantis resurrected.
Shanghai was a citadel, the pinnacles of its towers rising above its twenty-meter seawall. Zoe watched it grow closer as the highway rose on stilts, angling up over the lip of the wall. Beyond the elevated road, clinging to the outside of the seawall, was a slum of tin roof hideaways scrambling for purchase. The lowest shacks sat on the earthenworks that supported the wall, half-submerged. From there, hovels perched, roof upon roof, climbing on each other as if gasping for breath.
Eli caught her looking at the favela. “That’s the Caihong Gardens,” he said, “not the city’s poshest district. Hard to get rid of when there are more migrants than migration papers. But don’t worry, there are sensors along the wall and at every gate. Only those with permits can enter Shanghai Island.” Indeed, as they drove towards the wall, a chime rang in the jeep as their permits were scanned. Approved for entry, the jeep’s selfdrive came online. Eli released the steering wheel, letting the jeep autonomously sweep them up the indigo highway.
Looking over the slum dangling from the wall, Zoe could not help but have pity for the squatters struggling at the edge of the world. “I didn’t realize so many people here were so poor. Where does one even start to fix that kind of problem?”
Eli said, “When our deal is done we’ll have lots of money to put to whatever cause you want.”
The jeep passed up over the wall, and Eli pointed out the series of locks that preserved the city’s shippin
g lanes while keeping the rising oceans at bay. Zoe watched the locks bring ships of all sizes, from fishing junks to oil tankers, into massive concrete holding tubs where valves in the seawall drained away water, generating energy in the process like a hydroelectric dam. Once the vessels sank down to ground level, an inner gate opened into the rivers that fed the city.
The locks shrank into the distance as they drove down into a forest of steel and glass reflecting ghostly gray sunlight. “I always forget how big this place is,” Zoe said.
Eli nodded. “And it keeps getting bigger. It’s changed a lot since I was a kid.”
“You grew up here?”
“Born and bred in Puxi,” he said, grinning at her surprise.
Long chains of occuhives sped by as diodes on the road glowed green and the highway swept them east. The superscrapers grew larger and sleeker, their angles catching any light escaping the clouds. As the city blinked in the evening, the steel forest around them became ever more improbably vast.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Eli booted up a holo on the dashboard, expanding it to reveal a satellite view of Shanghai. He pointed to a bulging district on the map to the east of the river. “Pudong,” he said.
“It’s like another world next to where we were yesterday,” Zoe said, lost out the window, marveling at how lights sifted through the endless cityscape, soft pastel gems in neon colors. Crimson lashes traced the edges of rooftop skydecks. Hanging gardens snaked up tower edges, bringing vegetation into the steel canopy. Giant holoviews plastered actresses onto the evening. And above it all, domes rose translucently over the towers, ventilating pockets of the metropolis.
Eli swiped the holo on his dashboard, centering it around the former French Concession, even as the elevated autoway merged them through canyons of shopping malls. “West of the Huangpu River is Puxi,” he said, swiping the holo, centering the digital rendering over the Huangpu, the river bisecting the middle of the city. “East of the river is Pudong. And all of it is under the Mayor’s thumb.”
“What’s this?” Zoe asked of the tallest tower in the holo, dwarfing the surrounding obelisks.
“That’s the Mayor’s office. Look,” he pointed, “you can see it from here.” Sure enough, in the distance, there was the monolith rising two kilometers into thin air, its onyx walls coated with solar panels. It was unmistakable, even through the smog. “The Mayor’s people call it the Tiger’s Den. Others joke that he’s a tiger trying hard to be a phoenix.”
“It must have cost a fortune,” Zoe said, watching the tower through the neon reflections slipping across the jeep’s tinted canopy.
Eli shrugged. “It’s nothing compared to the Spaceline. Ten years ago, the Mayor claimed that his new tower would pay for itself with the solar power it generated, but people say the real reason he had it built was to watch over the construction of the space elevator on the other side of the island.”
“Can’t argue with results, I guess,” she said.
They drove over the bridge, and Zoe turned to watch as the Huangpu River opened the robe of the skyline in an epic vista. On the west bank of the river was the Bund, with colonial facades of the old customs house and consulates on the embarcadero, relics of a bygone age repurposed for epicureans. Lights came on in the soft evening, illuminating the Puxi waterfront in white and gold.
To the east, the teeth of the Pudong skyline bit into the clouds. Oriental pearls bulged from a steel needle that pierced the glass curtain rising behind it. Sparkling superscrapers on the waterfront bled neon holos fifty stories tall, floating pink petals and blinking ideograms. Below these colossi, opulent pleasure barges floated along the river. Towers curved around the east bank, creating a digital panorama under an aura of lavender light pollution. Farther back, behind the corporate obelisks, the Tiger’s Den was like a shadow, negative space in the iridescent district.
Zoe shook her head, troubled. “It’s hard to believe that less than five hundred kilometers west of here, we saw a city drown. I just can’t fathom why the professor would go along with such madness.”
“Sometimes genius is misunderstood,” Eli said, avoiding her eyes. “Anyway, if you want to keep his work alive, we have a job to do, so you may as well put everything else out of your mind.”
The jeep curved off the bridge, took them past more bulging skyscrapers, and pulled up at the Wing, a new hotel on the waterfront. Its top fifteen floors had widows that curved out in bubbles, as if the tower’s crown were covered in beads, so guests could stand on indoor balconies for a better view.
After the valet took the car, Eli and Zoe followed the bellhop past the crystal chandeliers of a glitzy, postcolonial foyer. A woman’s voice came around them, directing them to elevator seventeen. When they floated up past the thirty-second floor, the tower shed an outer layer, exposing the elevator’s glass walls to the open air. As the lift shot higher than the neighboring skyscrapers, Zoe saw the city open under her, and she wondered whether birds took the gift of flight for granted.
Their room was on the eightieth story. As the bellhop unloaded their luggage, Zoe went over to where the edge of their room jutted out under a glass canopy. She sat in a chair that hung from the ceiling, its plush faux leather curving around her body. Responding to her weight, the chair rose, giving her a better view of the blinking towers beyond. The curving view of Pudong fanned out to the occuhives of Three Gun Industry City, rainbows rippling over the surface of ventilation domes. Slender needles rose delicately above the streets, crisscrossed with sky bridges. To her it resembled a fragile ice sculpture, an ivory city for the rich. “But for random chance,” she mused, “it could be us in the slum outside the walls.” Eli joined her, opening a bottle of Swedish glacier water from the liquor cabinet. “You sure you want to do that?” Zoe said. “Those things are probably a hundred kuai each.”
“It’s on the company,” he said, and took a sip. He looked at his watch and scanned the horizon, and pointed at a thin stiletto dipping down from the clouds. “There it is,” he said. “The Spaceline.”
The slender inverted pin drew closer, blinking orange lights. It was the top half of the space elevator, the floor of a floating conveyor that lifted cargo to a space station revolving around earth.
Five times a day, the Spaceline entered the Shanghai sky in low-earth orbit from the northeast, and passed over the bottom half of the elevator, a carbon needle known to locals as the “Mountain,” which jutted five kilometers straight up from the eastern seawall. Cargo from the Spaceline was loaded onto shuttles and carried down to the Mountain’s peak. From there, it descended on freight elevators to a vast industrial park and was sent off to destinations across Asia.
As if reading his thoughts, Zoe said, “It’s for asteroid mining, right?”
“That’s the idea,” Eli said, climbing into another hanging chair next to Zoe and letting it lift him up for a better view of Pudong’s sea of lights.
“Who knew there was anything worth taking from a space rock?”
Eli shrugged. “Rare earth metals are disappearing from the earth’s crust,” he said, watching the Spaceline’s tail of orange lights drift southwest across the night sky. “It used to be that this country processed almost all the world’s supply of these metals. They’re used in everything. Holobeads, tablets, sensors, microdrones, you name it. But supply can’t keep up. Every year nanoelectronics get smaller, and the need for rare metals with strong magnetic fields and low mass increases. The price of neodymium alone has increased fifty times in the last hundred years. The few companies that have mined Roid 5128, where the first off-world monazite deposits were identified, have made a fortune.”
“Bet it cost the miners as much to get out there,” Zoe said. “I can’t imagine the cost of launching a mining rig into orbit, let alone getting it out past Mars, into the asteroid belt.”
“Enter our friend, Mr. Mayor, and his space elevator,” he said. “With the manufacturing base for electronics in this country alon
e, the taxes on using the Spaceline will make Shanghai unimaginably wealthy. Mayor Hu will be a modern King Midas.”
“The Alliance member nations too, right? The more countries build elevator docks, the lower the cost for any one country to keep the elevator in orbit around earth.”
Eli nodded. “Santiago’s elevator dock has been live for a year, and Tokyo’s will be complete by the Spring Festival. The ones in Mumbai and Sao Paulo aren’t far behind.”
“I heard that Kenya is even getting in on the action. So much for the Treaty of Five Nations. Doesn’t that make it six?”
“Funny, right?” Eli said. “As a country on the equator, Kenya could build a geocentric elevator, stretching from the earth’s crust all the way into orbit. So could Brazil, if it wanted.”
Zoe laughed. “I suppose it would give them astronomical power,” she said.
Eli groaned and shook his head. “You and your puns.”
“Makes me irresistible, I know.”
“But you’re right. A space lift would make them rich, but they’ve got their hands full. It’s cheaper to enter the Alliance and let China take the risk, build the first docking station and prove it works.”
“Better for Mayor Hu, I guess,” Zoe said, “If Brazil and Kenya and Japan just pay him rent on his nifty satellite, rather than build their own.”
“Very convenient. And by establishing a network of cities on the same satellite axis around the earth, from the Asian coast in the northern hemisphere, then southwest across Africa and South America, guess who’s not invited to the party?”
