Shine (2 page)

¹
Kansas University and Gallup world poll (http://www.news.ku.edu/2009/may/26/optimism.shtml)

The Earth of Yunhe

Eric Gregory

W
hile Kay Kenyon--see "Castoff World"--was the very first to send me a story for
Shine
, Eric Gregory was one of the first to send me a tweet for @outshine.

The moment I signed the contract for
Shine
with Solaris Books, I immediately tried to figure out ways to promote it ('regeren is vooruitzien' is the Dutch saying, or 'to govern is to look ahead'). One of the things I did for that is set up a Facebook fan site and a Twitter site for the
Shine
anthology.

Then I got the crazy idea--inspired by @thaumatrope, who were the very first genre Twitterzine AFAIK--to start @outshine, a Twitterzine for near-future, optimistic tweets (or 'prose poems,' as I call them).

Eric Gregory's tweet was about Ecclesia, an imaginary near-future society, which I liked enough to publish. Then, months later, he sends me a story based on the tweet (or maybe it was vice-versa: I'm not sure), and "The Earth of Yunhe" eventually--it starts deceptively slow--blew me away.

He's not the only person that I published on @outshine first and here in Shine later on (Jacques Barcia, Eva Maria Chapman, Gareth L. Powell, Ken Edgett, Paula R. Stiles, Mari Ness [who basically didn't stop tweeting] and Jason Stoddard--although I accepted Jason's tweet after I accepted "Overhead"--are the others), and he's not even the first who turned his tweet into a story (or vice-versa, although I had to turn down that person's story for Shine purely for lack of space: I had a lot of hard choices to make), but he is the single person whose tweet on @outshine preceded and was based on his story here in the Shine anthology.

Typically, though, his tweet functions much better as an epilogue rather than as a prologue, so I'm putting it up after the story.

Now prepare for a look at a China as the garden of the world...

Silent, drafted blind worms burrow /
Decomposing, circles closing /
Garbage eating, circles meeting /
Biocrafted Ouroboros.

--Rajan Khanna--

I raised my my arms for inspection, but Old Zhu laughed and waved me past. He was a flushed, avuncular man who had spent his entire life with a book of dirty jokes in his pocket; as far as anyone knew, he'd never once touched a woman, and he didn't upset the tradition for me.

Little Yunhe rarely had need for a jailer, so Zhu was perfect for the job. He sat in his rusted fold-out chair on the deck of the
Patient Whale
and shouted friendly curses to the fishermen who docked nearby. He was thrilled to have a prisoner now--it gave him an excuse to load his pistol--but he treated the entire affair as an excellent joke.

"Boy's crazy," the old man called behind me. "You watch him."

"Oh, I'll watch him, Zhu."

"I tell you. One of these days he'll break down the door."

My brother
was
crazy--no question about that--but I'd known three-legged cats who were more dangerous. Xiaohao was only a hazard to himself. I made my slow way down the
Whale'
s steep stairwell, clutched the rails in case a step fell out beneath me. Most of these old boats were mere breaths from death, and the
Whale
wasn't exactly rigorously maintained.

The jail was lit by a single yellow bulb. I strode down the hall of open doors to the lone locked cell at the end, and my shadow pitched across the walls like a drunk. There was a tripod stool outside Xiaohao's door; I rapped twice on the thick metal and sat down. After an uncertain moment of silence, I heard my brother stir on the other side. He shuffled around for another minute, grunting quietly, then peered at last through his small barred window. He wasn't fat, but his face had filled out during his years with the Ecclesia. His left eye was red, encircled by an ugly bruise that had only gotten uglier since the last time I visited him.

Xiaohao sighed. "Father still won't see me."

"No. Not unless you're twitching on the end of a pike."

Exaggeration, of course, but not so very far from the truth. His face fell, and I regretted the words instantly. Idiot that he was, Xiaohao hadn't expected Papa's anger--or hadn't expected it to be so prodigious, anyway. He'd supposed that Yunhe would welcome him back as a savior, that Papa would forgive him in light of his bright, shining genius. My brother had always been a master fantasist.

He gripped the bars, stared at his feet. "Any word from the Administrators?" The question was quiet, hopeless. He didn't sound like he wanted to know the answer.

"No. But they're going to let you out."

"Are they really, Yuen?" He smiled bitterly. "Are you sure? I think they might put me on a pike. Call it an early birthday gift for our father."

I leaned forward on the stool. "Xiao, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said--"

"Forget about it."

"No, listen. I'm sorry. I'm not the one stuck in here, and I shouldn't joke. But I swear to you, Xiao, no one's going to kill you. You're still a Yunhe boy. They're not going to execute one of their own just because he makes an ass of himself in the square."

His eyes narrowed. "You may not have noticed, but this isn't Yunhe."

"It is now." I tapped my foot on the steel floor. "This is what's left."

"No," he said, "it's not."

He hadn't been in Yunhe when the ash-flood came, but the wound was fresher in Xiaohao's heart than anyone else's. Perhaps
because
he hadn't been there. The rest of us had saved what we could, fished out our dead, and slowly, painfully moved on. Made new lives in this make-do city. But Xiao had congenital difficulties with the concept of
moving on
.

Neither of us spoke. I cracked my fingers. It had been a mistake to come here. I'd only wanted to see that he was still okay. Well-fed. Xiao looked back into the darkness of his cell and raked his fingers through thin, short hair. "You have to get me out of here," he said at last.

"You know I can't do that."

"The fuck you can't. Pull the key off the codger upstairs. He won't even notice."

"Zhu?" I couldn't stop myself: I laughed. "You think they give him a key? Zhu might as well be your
manservant
. He's just here to bring you lunch."

Realization worked across Xiao's face. He hadn't known. He'd honestly believed that Zhu could give him his freedom. I wondered how long he'd spent begging the old man. Xiaohao turned away from the window, rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "Shit," he said. "
Shit
." He kicked something I couldn't see, something large and metallic. It crashed to the floor.

"Xiao--" I started.

"
Sedition
, Yuen." He turned back toward the window. His eyes were wet. "I'm glad you think the Administrators won't carry out the sentence. That's really heartening. But are you going to stake my life on it? These people are savages. This whole shithole city. Jumping at the ghost of the hard fucking state. When was the last time you heard a syllable
from Beijing? When was the last time you got a truck full of vaccines?
There's no such thing as sedition anymore
."

I sat very still. "This is why you're here," I said quietly.

"Because I tell the truth?"

"Because you don't understand your own people. Because
you didn't bother to learn about this place, didn't care enough to ask about our new lives. Just stuck your head in the door and told us to drop everything because what we'd built was worthless. You expect people to trust you, to follow you? You
disappeared
, Xiao. And you waited too long to come back."

I held his gaze for a long moment, then stood and walked back toward the stairs. The
Whale
shifted on the water, and my shadow shuddered across the wall. I reached the first of the dark, creaky steps before Xiaohao called out to me.

"The password," he said, his voice tight. "It's
garden
."

I spent most of the morning in Little Wuxie. Their accumulator was down, and their Administrators were frantic. All five of the gray, yammering men wanted to peer over my shoulder as I checked out the battery, the tanks, the pipes. Their anxiety was as exhausting as it was unnecessary. One accumulator wouldn't make or break the city's weather control. Finally I asked them to leave, told them that their "ambient body heat" might damage the components.

They left me alone.

Slowly, carefully, I extracted the tower's guts. The morning was hot, and I was thankful for the sea breeze that played around me. Many of the central wires had started to rust. Not so badly that the whole accumulator should break down, but it would become more of a problem as time wore on. I'd seen the same thing in some of the other towers; these were old machines.

I wiped the sweat from my face with my forearm, watched the gulls wheel above. The birds were probably waiting for me to leave. They liked to perch on the seaside accumulators and watch the water. The upper halves of the machines' black metal hulls were always spattered with white.

Maybe
, I thought.
Just maybe
.

I hauled out the battery cradle, inspected it from every side. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then, with the steadiest hands I could summon, I pulled the battery
out
of the cradle, and there was the culprit. A layer of birdshit covered the receptor prongs. Either one gull had eaten a catastrophically disagreeable meal, or the entire flock regularly squirted their lunches with vicious precision. I cleaned up the receptor, tucked the various wires back into their racks, and shoved the cradle back into the tower. The accumulator's black skin began to thrum at once.

The Wuxie Administrators were overjoyed. Embarrassingly so. They thrust iced jackfish and rice wine into my hands: overwrought thanks that Little Wuxie could hardly afford. As much as they plainly appreciated my help, I doubted this was the standard engineer's honorarium; these men knew my father's name. I thanked each in turn, accepted the gifts graciously, and made to leave at the earliest opportunity. But the Senior Administrator, a fox-faced man named Hu, raised his hand to stop me.

"One more token of our thanks," he said, and produced a small, foldable wi-mo from his pocket. No more than two or three years old by the look of it; the surface was only gently scratched, and the solar cells seemed to work. Hu powered up the device as tenderly as one might wake a baby. "We've recently had a trader from Chengdu," he said. "I give you this on behalf of all Wuxie."

I unconsciously tongued the month-old unit in the roof of my mouth. It broadcasted at terabytes-per-second to the contacts in my eyes, responded to minute tongue gestures and subvocalized commands. Yunhe had also had the trader from Chengdu. Papa commanded reverence even from outsiders.

"Thank you," I said, and accepted the wi-mo.

The walk back to Little Yunhe was long and hot and awkward. Foolishly, I took the boardwalk, which bustled with fishermen and hungry dockside homeless. Most either knew my name or felt no compulsion to harass me, but more than one boathand trailed his leer with a whistle, or reached out to smack my ass. Jokes and arguments played out around me in a dozen tongues: Korean, Filipino, Mongolian, Thai. Some of the jokes were opaque to me. Others were all too understandable.

The eyes of the homeless flicked up from their decade-old, gray market wi-mos to follow the bundle of treasures in my arms. My cheeks flushed, and the sun bore down, and finally I couldn't bear the stares; I put down the jackfish and walked swiftly away. Papa would be angry if he learned that I'd given away honoraria, but I kept the rice wine and the wi-mo, so he would likely never know--unless the Little Wuxie Administrators asked whether he enjoyed the fish.

I pulled the wi-mo out of my pocket, unfolded it. The translucent sheet overlaid the walk before me with a few simple icons and live feeds: clock, calendar, local temperature. My roof-of-the-mouth unit noticed the new machine and prompted me to link the devices for file transfer and load-share. I declined. I'd gotten the same prompt at home every morning for the past week. There was a new computer somewhere in the flat, one my father didn't want to talk about.

The password
, I thought.
It's
garden
.

He came to us with promises of dirt. I was outside of the city that day, checking up on the outermost ring of accumulators, but I saw the whole mess on the network once it was over. I saw it from every angle, through the beady eyes of two dozen different wi-mo cameras. On some impulse that I didn't quite understand, I brought up the most popular video now.

Xiaohao strode into Little Yunhe Square, right up to the Administrators' Quonset hut offices. He wore the black skinweave favored by the Ecclesia--likely the first of his many mistakes--and waved his arms like an attention-starved child.
"It's time to return to our ancestral home!"
he shouted. Xiao had never been a very good public speaker; he compensated for anxiety with breathtaking pompousness. "The day is today! The hour is this hour! Follow me, and we'll raise Yunhe from new soil!"

With each word, more and more of the square's homeless raised their wi-mos to record the madman's performance. Two security officers outside of the Quonset hut exchanged uncertain glances and advanced cautiously, hands on the butts of their pistols.

"New soil!" Xiaohao cried again. "Smart soil from the Ecclesia, soil to reclaim Yunhe--the
real
Yunhe--from the ash. I'm giving this to you. We will built it together. Look! Explore!" That last bit made no sense; did he carry some of the magic dirt in his hand? Xiao went silent as something approached from offscreen. The camera jerked to one side, zoomed in on the Little Yunhe Administrators as they emerged from their offices. Papa, dressed in his trademark gray suit, took the lead.

"Father," said Xiao, barely audible now, "I've brought--"

Papa moved faster than the wi-mo filmmaker could follow. When the camera found him again, the old man stood over his son, who was crumpled on the ground clutching his face. "
I'm giving this to you
," screamed Xiao, and Papa reared back to kick him in the gut.