The Geomancer's Compass (7 page)

“Of course, there's other stuff besides the toilet lids,” he said. “Stuff about mirror placement and the orientation of your bedroom and where you should have plants and where you shouldn't.… You do know there's a
feng shui
network on WorldBoard?”

“I didn't.”

Well, it made sense. The last few years had seen an explosion of WebTV channels. There were cooking channels and sports channels and craft channels and cartoon channels. You name it. The difference between cable TV and WebTV channels had to do with the experience, of course – people turned on Window Walls to watch programs, while they logged onto WebTV to take part in activities through virtual reality.

“Yep. We launched it a few months ago,” Thierry replied. “Just dial into the New Age portal and key in ‘feng shui' if you want to check it out.” He handed me back the compass. “Quite the artifact, Miranda. You'll let me know if you ever want to sell it? Present for the wife. Can't be too many of these around.”

I laughed. “No chance of that. It's been in my family for a zillion years. You know how people say, ‘If I did that, my grandmother would turn over in her grave'? Well, Chinese don't just turn over in their graves. According to my grandmother, they turn into horrible monsters and come after you.”

“Well, if you ever change your mind,” he said. “You've got a little chocolate …” He pointed to the right corner of his mouth.

Hurriedly I dabbed at my face with a crumpled party napkin.

“Got it,” he said. “I'm off now. Best of luck. I won't say good-bye. I have a feeling you'll be back here before too long.”

I beamed. “I hope so.” Then my heart sank. First I had to go to Moose Jaw.

A
fter Thierry left, I swiveled back to face the window. I was about to put the
lo p'an
back in its box when it occurred to me that I'd never actually stopped and taken a good long look at the compass. Whatever I might think of its usefulness as a tool, it was, at the very least, beautiful and exotic. I counted the ivory rings surrounding the
yin-yang
symbol at the compass's center – one, two, three … eighteen in all. Whatever that signified. And it had to signify something. For old-school Chinese, it's all about the numbers – two means this and six means that. Then there are the lucky numbers and the unlucky numbers, and the
really
unlucky numbers … don't get me started. As for what those Chinese characters inscribed on the rings meant … not a clue. They looked like so many chicken scratches to me.

I closed my eyes, leaned back in my chair, and let my
fingers drift over the bumpy surface of the compass. A pop-up of Sebastian's face as I had last seen it appeared in my mind's eye. Summoned home from blind kids' camp for A-Ma's funeral, he had described to me how he was trying to master Braille before his eyesight completely failed. Blind by age thirteen. How would it be to have sight and to lose it, to know what you were missing? It made me sad. It pissed me off.

Feeling grim, I replaced the
lo p'an
in its case but didn't close the lid. Instead I picked up my enviro-mote and used it to close the miniblinds and power up my computer. I logged onto the New Age portal and keyed in “feng shui.” When the screen popped up, I did a search for “geomancer's compass.” Listed among the options was a virtual tour. I clicked on it, ticked the payment box – which let my bank access my account to pay the provider – and downloaded the tour onto a card, which I inserted in my I-spex. (One of the perks of interning for CanBoard was that WorldBoard was in the middle of beta testing I-spex. You wear them like eyeglasses instead of having a big clunky head-mounted display, or HMD, wrapped around your noggin – much lighter than HMDs and they don't make you look like an alien, which is always a plus. Eventually everyone will have a brain implant, of course, but that's a ways off.)

I put on the spectacles and pressed the power button on the right earpiece.

Whoa, I thought. Pass me a barf bag.

There was the usual sense of dislocation and head spin you always experience when being bumped into a virtual environment, and then there I was, all gnarly and queased out, standing in what appeared to be a cavernous room at the center of a large 3-D circular structure. The only illumination came from a spotlight that dangled high over my head. The pale, silvery light it cast extended just beyond the edge of the structure, then pixilated out into blackness. I looked down to find myself standing on a medallion consisting of a black-and-white
yin-yang
symbol. It appeared far down, farther than it should have, given my small size – that's typical of VR, the impression that you've suddenly shot up a foot in height. I pirouetted slowly – no point in moving quickly; that would only make me dizzier and contribute to the not great feeling that I was going to spew any second. Why had I eaten all those cupcakes? The
yin-yang
symbol was composed of tiny black and white squares, like the tiles in a mosaic. It was about four feet across. Around this central medallion spun concentric circles made of some kind of metal, possibly brass, one after the other. I squatted carefully and ran my hand over the surface of the circle closest to the center. Like the compass, it was densely covered with writing; thankfully, this writing was in English. I dropped to my hands and knees and peered closer. “Fire, earth, lake, heaven …” I read haltingly, crawling in a clockwise direction.

“South, southwest, west, northwest …” A voice from beyond the circle of light.

I stiffened and glanced sharply up. Too sharply: head-spin. “What?” I croaked, my gorge wobbling about in my midsection in a way I didn't trust.

“That is the Later Heaven Circle you are reading,” the voice continued. “It is the vehicle of divination and represents change and movement.” The voice sounded like it belonged to an old man who spoke fluent English, but with a definite Chinese accent.

I pressed my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes, trying to slow the tilted ring-around-the-rosy going on in my brain. “What are you?” I managed to say. “Are you a disembodied voice or an avatar?”

“An avatar,” replied the voice. “In the original sense of the word.”

I sat back on my haunches and opened my eyes slowly. Easy does it – that was the trick. “What?”

“A variant version of a continuing basic entity,” replied the voice. “
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
.” And with that the avatar floated forward from the blackness. Like most such animations, it was featureless, but its creator had taken the time to characterize it with an old man's stoop and shuffle. It held a cane in its right hand. The handle was a glowing green globe.

I frowned. “You look familiar somehow. Do I know you?”

“You do!” The avatar chuckled. It placed the tip of the cane on the first concentric circle, which was about the same
height as a stair riser, and hoisted itself onto the compass. Folding its hands over its stomach, it rocked tentatively back and forth on its heels, humming softly.

I recognized the posture instantly. “The Grandfather?”

“Indeed,” it replied. “I've been expecting you.”

I stared, unable to believe my eyes.

“Aren't you going to say something?” it asked. “After all, it's been three years.”

“Three years since you
died
.”

“Yes, and …?”

“Well, that's the point, isn't it?” I asked. “You're dead. That means you're no longer real.”

“That depends on what reality you inhabit,” replied The Grandfather. “Where do you think people go when they die, Miranda?”

“Heaven … hell,” I said. “To tell the truth, I never thought cyberspace was an option.”

“There are worlds between worlds. This right now … where we are now … happens to be one of those worlds.”

“But don't you belong in … I don't know … some Buddhist heaven or other? I mean, you were such a big deal. In life, that is.”

“There is no Buddhist heaven,” it replied. “There are the Six Realms. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I am stuck between realms at present, and will be until we can solve the problem of my brother's disappearance.”

I was so not satisfied. “Right. Stuck. Yet you somehow managed to get yourself encoded into a virtual reality tour?”

The avatar nodded. “So I could communicate with you.”

That sounded pretty out there. “How do I know you're not some artificial intelligence entity modeled on The Grandfather?”

“Why would you think that?”

“The way you talk, for one. Your English. The Grandfather sounded like he'd just got off the boat from Shanghai.”

The avatar shrugged. “An upgrade. Just a matter of installing a dictionary. But let's get on with it. We really don't have much time. Did you know that your cousin Aubrey is due for a massive heart attack in two weeks? It seems that her potassium levels are dangerously low.”

It was like it had reached into my body and squeezed my heart in its hand, like my heart was caught in some kind of vise; for a moment I could barely breathe. Poor Aubrey. I could only dimly remember the cute, bouncy teenager she had been, a little plump maybe, but never fat. “Stop it. How can you joke about something like that?”

“Oh, I'm not joking, Miranda,” the avatar replied. “This will most certainly happen if we have not rectified the situation in two weeks' time.”

“But how do you know? How can you possibly know?”

“We have our ways.”

“We? Who's ‘we'?”

“The
feng shui
channel, of course. It's more than just a way to distribute content, you know. Much more. Oh, and did you know you are scheduled to be eaten by a shark within the next twenty-four months?”

“
What?
”

“Off the coast of Bermuda.”

“I didn't know I was going to Bermuda.”

“Surprise.”

“Oh, man.” I was starting to quease again – all those cupcakes doing their cupcake dance in my stomach. Eaten by a shark? “What you're talking about is in the future,” I protested. “How can you possibly know what's going to happen in the future?”

“There is no future, Miranda. There is no past. Now is all there is. The present moment.”

“Maybe for you … because you're
dead
!”

The avatar sighed. “For you too. For all sentient beings. You just don't realize it.” It shook its head. “I'd forgotten how contrary you can be.”

“I have an inquiring mind.”

“All well and good, but we need to focus. Can you focus?”

A shark?
Really?
“I can focus.”

“Well, do. Now, what do you know about our problem? What did your grandmother tell you?”

“She told me that I was in charge of the
lo p'an
, but she didn't tell me how to use it and, honestly, I don't read Chinese –”

The avatar interrupted me mid-sentence. Its tone was withering. “Mastering an instrument as complex as the
lo p'an
requires much more than the ability to read Chinese. A good geomancer will have some innate talent, but he must also apprentice himself to a master and study for many years before his readings will be accurate. Of course your grandmother did not
tell
you how to use it. She did not know how to use it, and neither will you. It is
I
who will use it.”

“So how come I have it?”

“Isn't it obvious?” asked the avatar. “Because I am a digital entity. The
lo p'an
is real. Digital entities cannot carry actual objects.”

“So I'm a
lo p'an
mule?”

“Essentially.”

This came as both a relief and an affront. I snorted. So much for my big important mission, so much for me being The Chosen One.

“And a Seeker.”

“Pardon?”

“A Seeker,” the avatar repeated. “That's you.”

I should have known. Classic avatar speak. You're not a player; you're a Seeker. It's not a game; it's a Quest. You don't win or lose; you Triumph or are Utterly Destroyed. That sort of thing. It was just something about being an avatar; if they had DNA, which they don't, the impulse to indulge in avatar speak would be in their DNA. “What do you mean, Seeker?”

“One who seeks Qianfu.”

I sighed. “I hate to break this to you, but this is not going to be as easy as you and A-Ma seem to think. Over a hundred years have gone by. Anyone who knew anything about what happened to Qianfu's bones is long dead.”

“There are records,” the avatar said. “Databases –”

“Hello,” I interrupted. “Which databases?”

“All relevant ones.”

“Databases are only as useful as their data,” I countered, “and in case you didn't know, unmarked graves tend not to be in databases. That's why they call them unmarked.”