Emperor of Gondwanaland (27 page)

Even as He Keung parses his options regarding his fellow taikonauts, Wu Yuèhai, squirming in his lap, renders both truthfulness and deceit moot by her next words.

“He Keung, I can sense that your soul is fully invigorated by the immortal solar fluids which I have shared with you, a portion of the aetheric stellar radiation which did not end my life, but caused me to be reborn, along with the ministrations of the Tian Shi Yu. And now that your qi is flowing richly, I need you to terminate your fellows. They are a poisoned cargo you must jettison.”

He Keung feels his heart stop beating, suspending itself for a seeming eternity, then hurl itself against his ribs like one of the oxen on his grandfather’s farm in Honan province, maddened by flies, running full tilt into a barn wall. To kill his comrades, the men with whom he trained so long and hard! He Keung recalls the weeks they lived in simulated Mars quarters in Antarctica, relying on each other for sheer survival. The time the two older men took him on a bawdy drinking binge in Hong Kong. What has either man done to deserve such a cruel end?

As if half cognizant that their fates are being debated, both Huang Shen and Wang Yu stir fitfully on their couches, their respectively cadaverous and infantile cheeks bedewed with sweat. Their hair, though close-cropped, stirs under the ministrations of the personal blowers which prevent the carbon dioxide of their own exhalations from hanging around their faces in zero gravity and smothering them as they sleep. (How easy, simply to shut those fans off. What a reputedly comfortable death.)

Seeking to delay the mortal answer he must make to Wu Yuèhai, recalling the proverb that advises, “When you want to test the depths of a stream, don’t use both feet,” He Keung seeks initially to unravel the mystery of her continued existence. “You claim the solar flux did not kill you, but instead brought new life. How can this be? And who are the Tian Shi Yu?”

Wu Yuèhai rears back from her close proximity to He Keung’s face (is that her breath he feels, or only his own anti-C0
₂
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 place 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.