Emperor of Gondwanaland (28 page)

“And so I unbalanced the Tao, they claim, and their words have disarmed me. I cannot help myself because I have lost all belief. It is there for you then to change or it cannot be at all.”

Wu Yuèhai as desolate as He Keung? Herself bereft of her comrades’ trust? All her seemingly godlike powers rendered impotent by some breaching of the finer parameters of her arcane assignment, by mission creep that came to include sympathy and empathy and—and affection?—for a young taikonaut who once worshipped her? He Keung would like to believe this, but cannot rid his mind of the suspicion that this confession is merely another strategem to ensure his cooperation. So his response to Wu Yuèhai is rather formal and chilly, tepid as the noodle soup young He Keung would eat upon his midnight return home from his university cram courses.

“And what kind of end do you want?”

“It does not matter to me; what matters is that I be at last permitted to sleep. They promised me sleep; they said that if I made my appeal, if I stayed to mark the truth no matter how painful, I would be permitted to move on to another plane, where life is effortless and uncontested. But they were lying. I have no sleep, I have no peace.”

As if excited by her intensity the satellite Mao begins to shake, the fibrous panels underfoot surge and heave with the volatility of liquid. He Keung finds himself in perilous balance. Space madness! It must be that ultimate discomfiture of which they had been warned throughout all of the arduous training. The madness which cuts like a knife through all the truisms and teachings of the Great Revolution itself!

“Wu Yuèhai, help me!” calls out the young man alone in the seeming face of imminent destruction, just as, centuries past, the brave warrior Han Xi made his desperate plea prior to the descent of the headsman’s ax. And just like Han Xi, who was pardoned at the last moment by a prince eager for brave soldiers, He Keung is saved.

After a complicated fashion.

The surface of Mao blisters upward just a few meters in front of him, the gray tapestry formed by the cilia stretching to cover the new extrusion. It is as if the planet’s elastic skin sprouts an immense boil or sarcoma that swells in speeded-up malignancy. This is an objective phenomenon; He Keung is certain of that. In the face of this enormity, all his self-pity and epistemological uncertainty implode. No delusion or hallucination, hence not space madness, but rather the alien workings of a globe rendered intelligently totipotent by the Jade Angels and their unfathomable technology.

The blister ceases its exponential growth when it is as large as a peasant’s cottage. Then a portion of the curved surface facing He Keung melts away, revealing a cavern, a wetly crimson interior that is a mockingly obscene echo of the dry russet planet hanging above as mute witness.

And inside the hollow blister stand Huang Shen and Wang Yu, his fellow taikonauts. They stand, but not unsupported, instead hanging like puppets. They are wired into the substance of the blister by numerous living tendrils and conduits, neural bundles piercing them like the claws of a sky dragon. Surely this is their unmerited punishment, imposed by Wu Yuèhai for daring to approach Mars, the sanctuary of the Jade Angels.

“Wu Yuèhai!” shouts He Keung. “What have you done? Release my friends!”

The voice of the martyred female taikonaut whispers despondently in He Keung’s ear. “This is not my doing. Rather, it is the end of all hope.”

As if to confirm the woman’s speech, Huang Shen now speaks, his pinched bookkeeper’s face bearing a malicious leer incommensurate with any real suffering.

“Your ghostly bitch is correct, He Keung. Wang Yu and I have assumed control of this construct, the moon you once called Deimos. We found the supervisory ganglia exactly where the Jade Angels always install them. They are such trusting creatures, so intent on making it easy for their subordinate races to adopt and work their puny gifts. But this time their mania for standardization has betrayed them. We have made a long and diligent study of these so-called Angels and their technologies, across a thousand thousand solar systems, until we know them better than they know themselves. For any race that limits itself to only half the spectrum of existence—that which is conventionally called goodness—cannot, by definition, understand as much as another race, one that spans the whole continuum of motivation and desire, from light to dark.”

He Keung is nearly dumbstruck. At last he babbles out, “But, but—what are you? What have you done with my comrades?”

Wang Yu speaks like a jolly demon. “We are still your same comrades in truth, He Keung, but we were always more than you knew. Our kind is called the Shih Chieh Hsien.”

The Bodiless Immortals. Only an ancient myth—or so He Keung has always believed.

“The birth-souls of your fellows,” continues Wang Yu, “were driven out years ago by the force of our superior qi, to perish howling in the aether. We used their bodies as we have used many in the past, as meat machines to accomplish our goals. In this case, we always intended to crush the beachhead established by the Jade Angels in this solar system. We have enjoyed unimpeded rule of your primitive sphere too long to relinquish it now. Therefore, Mars must be destroyed.”

“What do you intend?”

Huang Shen makes an answer, quite forthrightly and unconcernedly, as if He Keung were a child being told the reason why grass is green. “This modified satellite possesses powerful engines. We will drive the whole globe now out of orbit and into the Red Planet, creating a world-shattering cataclysm such as that which, eons ago, wiped ninety-nine percent of life off Earth itself. The colony of the hybrid Martians will be extinguished; all individuals no matter where or how concealed will be destroyed. Including your precious Wu Yuèhai. These mortal containers temporarily housing our essences will of course be evaporated as well, along with yourself. But our essential selves will simply be released back into the Tao.”

The Tao! The Jade Angels! The Bodiless Immortals! Celestial layers upon layers! It is of such enormity to He Keung that he feels the cosmos or at least this small part of it to which he has been sentenced lurch. Meat machines! All of the curses of the Ancients seem to have descended upon him through this sudden and shocking confidence, and He Keung, his legs like his soul seemingly encased in cement, finds himself unable to move. He stands helpless before Huang Shen’s valediction waiting for some awful judgment to descend upon him, to tell him what must come next, but nothing at all happens in this glazed and sudden circumstance.

He Keung realizes he has reached the nadir of his quest. All roads leading either to fulfillment of his original mission or to wholehearted adoption of Wu Yuèhai’s imperatives seem barricaded. Within He Keung’s heart, mind and soul, all the tugging, tensioned polarities that have kept him ajitter and incapable of decision making resolve into one gaping nullity, a black hole compounded of the impossibility of wisdom in a delimited framework of knowledge and the utterly dire necessity of action.

At this moment of He Keung’s inverted satori, Huang Shen and the silent Wang Yu suddenly implode, collapse, as if those hanging puppets had been deflated and with no transition whatsoever they have become are ragged blotches staining the red cavern of the blister with a soup of foul yellow matter.

His nemeses are naught but small, indistinct puddles upon which he glances, and then his perspective shifts, rises toward the ruddy and damaged surface of Mars hanging above, and Wu Yuèhai, returned inexplicably from the exile of her abysmal and despairing silence as He Keung never expected she would or could resurface, says: “Amazing! It is the most ancient, the greatest of powers you have shown! An unflagging warrior’s spirit, like that of Su Wu when sent to face the Huns. You have vanquished them!”

The wavering, exultant exclamation of her voice is so unlike that quiet, insidious tone with which she had so movingly tracked her own orbital expiration that He Keung’s own spirits are comparably lifted.

“Come with me,” she says, “Come with me now before these two perfidious Immortals are reconstituted in some other vessels. On Mars, we shall devise counterschemes that will yet secure this solar system as a bastion of the Jade Angels.”

Reconstituted? He Keung, deep in service to the Great Revolution, deep in his fathoming and dedication to the cultural enlightenment which the space program has brought to his country and his life, has never felt as confused as he does at this moment; it is as if he were not a taikonaut but an innocent, somehow stripped of memory and desire, hanging (hanging like a puppet?) within some deep well excavated in the name of the Ancients. He cannot move; movement is beyond him, and yet he can feel some force, perhaps generated by Wu Yuèhai, which flutters at the rim of sensibility and begins to guide him, stumbling, away from the decaying blister and its slimy contents.

“You must hurry!” she is saying, “you must not let this triumph pass; you must be opportune and take the moment,” and the shuffling He Keung, lashed by a kind of insistence that he cannot comprehend, stumbles forward, stumbles under the guidance of the more-than-human Wu Yuèhai toward some dim conception of the light.

Is he going to Mars? Has he been granted entrance to the community of transfigured souls whose existence Wu Yuèhai has hinted at, a comity of blissful demigods who, under the tutelage of the Jade Angels, all work toward evolving the plenum to some form of transcendental perfection? Will he make his ascent toward the mythic planet that has for so long fascinated mankind? Or he is instead doomed to shuffle like some broken automaton across the gray plains of Deimos? Can this be some monstrous illusion, some hallucination on the Journey of a Thousand Knives patched into his dying sensorium only to torment him?

He does not know. He cannot know.

How he loved Wu Yuèhai in those hours of dictation of her loss; how he loved the Great Leader in all of the years before that; how, dreaming, he loved the skies and stars when even the issue of the Revolution fell away and it was only he and possibility close and alone in the night.

He takes a step. He takes another step. Something systematic, something greater than he, seems to be guiding. Wu Yuèhai laughs in his ear and it is a laugh both gentle and ferocious, laughter of absolute insistence and yet yielding. Mars, the great Red Planet of dreams, hangs ever lower in the distance. If he could but expand his arm by just a little, if he could just reach a little farther, he would be able to touch that great snare, hanging low like fruit in the heavens. All that he must do is stretch a little farther …

Behind the ripe beckoning pomegranate of Mars, misty figures larger than the prominences of the solar flare that killed or metamorphosed Wu Yuèhai now appear, viridian specters whose outlines fluctuate like flames in accordance with some half-sensed cosmic tempo. Are these the Jade Angels, come to assist He Keung in his transition, or only artifacts of his derangement?

Wu Yuèhai says, “And soon, believe me, He Keung, as it did for me as I lay dying all alone, the Earth so near, yet so far, in this darkness everything will appear,” and he reaches adamant to embrace her.

Soon.

Soon all will be revealed.

Soon he will be a Martian, too.

IV

Children of André Breton

Surrealism and its offshoots are surely some of the most significant literary inventions of the twentieth century. And science fiction has adapted these narrative strategies to its own goals. Just consider, as one example, how seminal the surreal works of Philip K. Dick or J. G. Ballard are to the development of the genre. But as with any technique, it’s easy to overdose on such a dramatically in-your-melting-watchface style. That’s why the best such work is generally short.

I hope the following stories hew to that standard of amusing brevity.

As someone raised on the songs of Bob Dylan, I always wanted to title a story “[Yadda Yadda Yadda] 1 & 2” Or maybe it was the Isley Brothers’ influence. Who is that lady?!? In any case, the title came first in this instance. Then I had to imagine two blasphemous anecdotes to accompany it. Religious blasphemy is easy, but politically incorrect blasphemy was more fun.

Time-Travel Blasphemies I and II

I

Joe Carpenter had undergone a strict Catholic upbringing: weekly confession; Sunday School till age thirteen; nuns as teachers right through twelfth grade; and then straight to Notre Dame.

It was only natural then that his favorite sexual fantasy should be to imagine himself fucking the Virgin Mary.

Ever since his first wet dream, the original Madonna had been the focus of his sexual longings. As the nuns of Joe’s youth frequently referred to themselves as “the brides of Christ,” it was an easy step for him to imagine himself “the husband of Mary.”

Seeing the
Pietà
, Joe would imagine himself in Christ’s place and get a hard-on. Russian icons substituted in the bottom of his underwear drawer for the more traditional copies of Penthouse. He made a shameless pastiche of the “Hail Mary,” which he would recite mentally whenever he was called on to perform the prayer. It began, “Hail, Mary, full of cum,” and went downhill from there.