Jade Prophet

by Sam Abraham

“We’re so close!” the cabby said. Suddenly possessed by civic pride, he changed course and headed for People’s Park. It was, after all, only a few blocks from the old man’s destination. The roads swelled with people from all walks of life, from all over the island, carting debris away, hauling water from the river, lifting survivors to their feet. Curling smoke turned to steam, and the skeletons of charred buildings begrudgingly reappeared.

  The taxi driver pulled over unexpectedly and leapt from his car, running towards the crowd as a voice boomed from an improvised stage and a massive holo buzzed to life. Han’s father followed slowly, disoriented, numb to everything except a name in his mind. He barely saw the holo of the Tiger preach in his deep mayoral voice that the effort of so many was a message of hope, that Shanghai would not be drowned by the sea while its people felt pride for their home.

  “What do you want?” the cabby said, shrugging off the old man. “The Mayor is speaking!”

  “You were supposed to take me to St. Theresa’s,” said the old man. “Can you at least tell me where it is?”

  The cabby consulted a holo. “Over that way three blocks. Don’t you have beads?”

  “Lost…” the old man said, trailing off as he wandered away from the crowd.

  Han’s father walked on to where the fires had raged terribly, gutting many occuhives and turning thousands of homes to ashes. The driver’s directions led him through the burnt remains of what used to be a vegetable market, through a red brick archway and into an interior courtyard.

  A church stood at the far end, its circular window melted from the heat. One wall of St. Theresa’s had completely collapsed, exposing blackened pews and curving balustrades. Outside the church, rows of painted white hexagrams covered the courtyard. They had been connected in an intricate matrix, with characters that told the story of Noah, and the Flood, and God’s promise to deliver the earth from the hands of the wicked.

  Han’s father bent to trace the white lines of calligraphy, and remembered his son’s tales of angels and demons. Each hexagram and character seemed to hint at his journey, at the secret cravings that had driven him to bow to false idols. But though he recognized the characters, the meaning was in a language he would never learn to speak.

  The father found himself scratching at the ground, digging at the white paint until his fingernails bled. Enraged at the futility, he swore that he would punish whoever was responsible. He ran from the courtyard, screaming for someone to call the police. Normally his appeals might have been ignored, but not tonight. Not in the husk of Puxi. Soon he heard sirens whirl around him.

  “Over here!” he shouted at the cops, who followed him back into the courtyard. He stood over the hexagrams and ideograms painted on the ground, old legends resurrected for a new age.

  “What is all this?” one cop said. “You called us over a little graffiti?”

  “My son and I were attacked by the Jade,” Han’s father said, torn by sadness. “He is gone now, because of them. But as he was so—“ the old man struggled for words, “—brutally stolen from this world, we learned this is where the cult was hiding before today’s attack.”

  That threw the cops into action. Soon there were forensic teams taking prints and examining burn marks and snapping holographs, capturing the white markings from every angle. Han’s father watched with great anxiety, hoping foolishly that someone would find some clue that his son left behind. Maybe his son would be marked a traitor, but maybe he was actually alive somewhere, shamed but alive, and maybe it was only a matter of money to see him again. Yet in all the flashes and genescans and pyrolysis detection, no one told the old man anything. The police made him stand outside the courtyard, as if it was not his tragedy that had unveiled this trove of evidence. A few hours later the forensics teams packed up, scurrying elsewhere to help resurrect Puxi.

  At the same time, men in overalls came with pressure hoses and paint rollers. Quickly, methodically, they sprayed down the courtyard, washing away the soot and ash. Then they painted over what would not be washed away, and in a few short minutes the hexagrams and the story of Noah were hidden under a fresh coat of gray paint.

  “Move along,” an officer said to the old man. “There’s nothing more to see here.”

  At first the old man was glad that the obscenity had been erased. But almost immediately he began to long for the hexagram saga again, as the last tie to his lost son. So he simply stood there, unable to look away from the gray ground, grasping for memories that were already fading.

  Chapter 63 – Ji Ji (既濟)

  Loses The Curtain Of Her Carriage

  “Well, Ms. Jia, my people say you are the one to thank for alerting the authorities about the Jade. It is unfortunate that they were not discovered sooner, before they could terrorize my city.”

  Jia Anmei watched the holo of the Tiger and hoped her lies would be enough. “When I learned of the disgraced Centrist Shen,” she said, “I had no choice but to turn to leaders of your stature.”

  “You are too humble,” the Tiger said. “My people say you know about the girl Li Aizhu and her pedigree. Surely, if you had other knowledge that could help bring about justice, you would share it.”

  “Of course,” Anmei said. “But how could Wuhu have something that Shanghai did not? Such a silly tale would make the proper order of things seem to stand on its head.”

  “Well, these are strange days. We would not want your friends at Guoanbu to think that you are not putting your country first, that your allegiance to the Church clouds your priorities. As we search for missing files from the factory in Anqing, I trust you will inform my people if you learn anything?”

  “Of course,” she said, looking out her office veranda over a Yangzi River once again packed with watercraft, as if it had never been under the fist of the Jade. As an afterthought she added, “As we did when we learned where Lao Jinglai was hosting his private servers. Did you find anything on them?”

  “Nothing of substance,” the Tiger said after a heavy silence. “Large data packets were uploaded to the cloud recently, the remainder of the servers wiped clean. Anyway, it does not matter now that we have Dr. Yang. What is one loaf of bread next to the baker?”

  Anmei forced a little laugh. “You are so clever, Mayor Hu. Your island will be the jewel of the Pacific for many years to come.”

  The holo gave her a slim smile and said, “You also know Aizhu had a daughter, don’t you? We have images of the two of you together in that factory in Anqing before it was destroyed. My people say you were a guest of the Jade, that you might know of the girl’s whereabouts.”

  “I was their enemy,” Anmei corrected, “imprisoned for defending my ancestral home, my country and my faith, so that the riverlands may thrive long after I am gone.”

  The Tiger smiled again. “Country and faith is a lot for one breath,” he said. “Do let me know if you learn anything of the missing files from the longshui factory. We will be watching.”

  As the image of the Mayor dissipated, Anmei breathed a sigh of relief. She booted up a new holo, with strings of characters floating under a 3D model. She found the geometric model in the holo to be spiderlike, with its spindly legs. But the longshui virus had no head above these legs, no eyes or fangs, only a polygon shell converging in a sharp point. It looked to her as if this shell was pregnant, for in its belly lay a twisted, undulating helix, a genetic vector hungry to infect and transform.

  Strange as it looked, she wondered whether the virus might be an answer to the famines ravaging her home province of Anhui. After all, Yang’s files revealed that this was the original purpose to which Lao Jinglai had commissioned Project Longshui.

  Anmei closed the holo and looked out at the Yangzi River, floating ever by from the mountains to the Pacific, as it had since the days of her ancestors. She wondered how something smaller than a single cell could be the envy of so many. But if longshui could allow a ragtag cult to threaten the Tiger, how much more dominant would it make the Three Self Churc
h? Perhaps, she thought, here was a way for the true Church to regain the faith of farmers and win the souls of people away from heathen gods. If she could keep it secret, she knew, longshui would bring a new day to Wuhu and the west.

  Chapter 64 – Wei Ji (未濟)

  Light Of The Superior

  “I hope you know how lucky you are,” a man in a white coat said to a mediadrone. Journalists mobbed him, scribing notes on their holos. “You’re about to get the last sight of a national traitor.”

  The man pushed his finger into a slot by a door. A sensor sequenced his epithelials, matched his genome, and the steel vault slid open. Behind it, long rows of metal panels stretched from the concrete floor up three stories until they were lost in bright floodlights. Robotic lifts crouched in the corners.

  “Sir, kindly introduce yourself to the viewers back home,” a sweet voice came from a host behind the drone. The slender reporter wore a yellow blouse in some futile attempt to repel the mephitic finality of the cold hall, and worked hard to mask her unease.

  The man in the white coat straightened his tie. “I am the chief coroner of Shanghai. And this,” he said with a melodramatic wave, “is the city morgue. Wanted criminals, heroic cops, rich bankers, it’s all the same. All who meet their end, well, end up here.”

  The chief coroner walked to the far side, where other coroners and a line of police waited at an unmarked panel. “Now, I warn you,” he said, fondling the panel handle with his pale hand, “the sight of the recently departed can be a shock. Those of you squeamish or superstitious at home may want to look away. I don’t have to remind you that the traitor died a violent death.”

  “Let that be a reassurance to all good people,” the reporter said, trying to look strong as the camera panned over her painted face. “We feel safer knowing that criminals like this meet justice.”

  The coroner waved a finger through a holo. The panel hissed open and a carbon coffin slid out. “And now,” he said, relishing his moment, “I give you the remains of the traitor Li Aizhu.”

  The top of the coffin pulled back, reflected in the camera lenses. And almost as one, the reporters, coroners and viewers tuning in all over the globe gasped, unable to believe their eyes.

  The coffin was empty.

  Cameras flashed and the police swarmed forward, tackling the drones and blocking their lenses with waving arms. The chief coroner was yelling at his techs, gesticulating as he desperately groped to save face, blaming them colorfully. They scrambled to attention, but it was no use. Documents showed the coffin delivered, untouched, with protocol followed like a delicate surgery. The reporters jabbered into their holos, and in minutes the story was banging up against firewalls, invisible censors working overtime to contain the truth. But every wall has doors, and in minutes microbloggers were joking that locks on morgues are meant to keep people from getting in, not from getting out.

  Official sources claimed that the body had been carrying a deadly virus, and had secretly been incinerated to prevent contagion. But buzzing mediaphiles churned in delighted skepticism, ever more convinced of conspiracies. It became the best kind of guessing game, in which every kind of quick-tongued noodlehead wondered what had become of the leader of the Jade.

  That same evening, a slender woman wearing rags pulled herself up onto the edge of a floating camp. She sat on a throne of polyfoam, and leaned against the broken wall of an old inn that ascended from the waters of the Pacific Floodzone. Rebar spines rose above the wall like a crown around her head.

  She rested on the pile of trash and remembered.

  Waking in splitting pain, gasping for breath, she touched her arms and legs and remembered what it was to be alive. She remembered her creator lifting her from a canister and wrapping her in clothes, bringing her a canteen of bitter sulphuric water to replenish her strength. She remembered leaning on his arm as he led her to a black selfdrive. She remembered his thick glasses and unruly hair. She remembered hanging onto fragments of whom she had been. Some girl in some past world, lost at sea. She remembered asking him how.

  We archived your panomics profile as part of longshui extraction. Your genome, proteome, metabolome, neural net signature, and everything else about you was quantified into your own individual recipe. Of course, this was easy to justify so that we can clone new hosts. But I had been thinking, you see, and began tinkering with makers. Your organs and tissues took some finesse to rebuild, but they should last for a while. Your mind was trickier. I believe I’ve remodeled the tracks of your nervous system, but the deep cortex is tough to measure. Still, the job is probably close enough that even you might not notice the difference.

  In a daze, she did not ask him why he bred her daughters like cattle, reincarnating them only to be sacrificed. She asked only why he had brought her back, why he was letting her go. Surely his master would want to keep her, if only as tribute to his greatness.

  Without you, he might imagine that he does not need me, the man in glasses said, sadly. For he has all my code, knows all my secrets. But with you at large, he will sleep in fear. He will know that it was I whom you sought, I who was with you when you decided to save the city. He will be told that you survived longshui retrieval, that you escaped in transit. And he will keep me close in case you return. The records of your reformation have been deleted. You will be hunted, I suppose. But you need not come back. Your life is your own.

  She grasped at memories of this man. He was some scientist who knew her mother. He seemed to want to say more as the mist gathered on his spectacles, his collar drawn up to ward off the cold. But he closed the door on her and the driverless car pulled away in the predawn gloom.

  She felt her face gently. She remembered deep scars, but now her cheeks felt smooth.

  She was on the highway when the autonomous vehicle suddenly slammed on its brakes, skidding across lanes. The door swung open. Fear clutched at her, and her mind was lacerated by images of a chemical junkyard, rivers of debris, gray skies above metal dunes. But then a wave of clarity washed over her, fragments of memory reglued into mosaics of her past. She had suffered, yes, but the pain had liberated her. Human cages could not hold her now. She had led armies to victory, hadn’t she? Yes, she remembered, she had shattered the cage of ignominy. Her father’s ghost and her mother’s corpse had destroyed the cage of family. And a man who had once been her very breath had betrayed her, evaporating the cage of love. Now too had the cage of death vanished, broken by miracles.

  She was, after all, the Lady in the Moon, the youngest daughter of Chang’e, imbued with the Holy Spirit. And she was free.

  Bright lights and blaring horns brought her back just in time. She darted from the driverless car, dodging selfdrives and hydrocycles by inches. She took a running leap, curving her spine to get extra height just as a truck smashed headlong into the autonomous vehicle. Another handspring and she vaulted over the side of the highway, barely grabbing the edge, almost ripping her shoulders from their sockets. Breathing hard, hanging off the rim of the road, she saw the faint pink whirl of police lights, and heard wailing sirens converging.

  Looking down, far beneath her dangling legs, a trash heap leaked out from a construction site. The world went wavy and she almost fainted. But she swung forward, pointed her toes and let go. Later, drones combed the area with searchlights. But she was gone.

  She blinked, and remembered the rough concrete wall against her back, the flood waters flowing out to the edge of the world. She heard soft, mad laughter leak from her lips. She looked out at lost souls in a floating city, praying for deliverance. And she remembered her name.

  A trail of pilgrims passed by her, carrying candles. Wearing hues of blue, they looked like a slowly marching sea. White masks etched with broken and unbroken lines covered their faces. They gathered around some upstart preacher who Li did not know. She listened as the preacher claimed to speak for the Jade Prophet, the Elder Sister of Jesus Christ and Right Hand of Heaven.

  A little girl at the rear of the bl
ue host saw her. The child’s bright eyes knew Li instantly, for all who lived in the Floodzone worshipped old holos of the Holy Lake, and the battle for the City of Heaven on Earth. The girl tugged at her mother’s hand, and she looked as well and knew the golden face that stared at them from piles of garbage.

  And the girl’s mother whispered to her fellow pilgrims, and before Li could stop them, a circle of wandering blue souls surrounded her. So Li took them in, blessing their water as it passed her parched lips. And when they found that she had returned from the grave, still more gathered and kissed her feet and hands and touched her hair as boons from the Lady in the Moon and her Younger Brother.

  It was the little girl, of all of them, who asked for a story.

  Li looked up at the sky and wondered what words could contain the bliss she had come to hold. In the cloudy dawn she saw the Spaceline drift over a distant island, and as its synthetic tail faded over the horizon, she relished a strange feeling that her daughter was still alive. It was not exactly knowledge, for she had no proof. Yet in her heart she felt the footsteps of a girl she barely knew, and saw her walk fearlessly on distant soil in a way she could only describe as faith.

  She looked back at the pilgrims, who were waiting with sad eyes. As if seeing them for the first time, she smiled warmly and assured them of God’s love. Then she took the little girl upon her knee, brushed back her dirty bangs, and asked if she would like to hear the story of how the Lady in the Moon lost the greatest treasure in the land.