Well, I told her, that was my aforementioned racket. The kelter from the Lervine operation in northern Utah was not a great pile of dough, not something that could buy me Monongahela forever, except I quickly figured that coin and even paper shinplaster from the 1870s might be worth something in the 1980s, and sure enough it was. The elusive owner of the Death Spa and Resort was something of a collector, and Pete kept an eye out for him, so my cache of cash was an intriguing find. I could always drop off a bit of my take at the resort, get washed-up and fed, leave some on credit for next time, and keep on going in such manner for years. As for the young lady learned in the novels of Jane Austen, it was not something planned. But there she was, waiting for me. She kept the mind steady, if somewhat perpetually repentant. I knew love, after all.
“Do all Roamers need to walk through a physical door? Before they can roam Time? Do they need to walk through a door?”
“No. That’s a crutch of mine. I need to visualize the journey. So I go through a door. There is no scientific need for it, to be honest with you. But I cannot roam without it. One day, I imagine, I will get better at the whole endeavor.”
Hester thought for a moment.
“Blah blah blah,” she said reflectively.
“It’s a little something I made up,” I said, “in a bar called Whitey’s Saloon, a few years back, in a near-dead mining town in Colorado. I kind of liked the way it sounded, and it seemed to get its point across without much explanation. So I’ve been saying it all the time, whenever I see people. I think it could help people express themselves.”
She seemed as amused by this as was probably possible, given everything, and she managed a weak smile.
“Where do you intend to hide out?” she asked. “Until the invasion of Sidonia? Until this revenge that means so much to you? I need to be able to reach you easily as soon as word comes through.”
I said that I figured I’d probably go back to the homestead in the desert and bury the money in the sand.
She shook her head.
“Too dangerous?” I asked.
“I’m worried you’ll get caught and squeal.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Come with me to South America,” she said. “Till the trail goes cold. And the soldiers go over the Sidonian mountains, and Darryl Fawley is in your crosshairs.”
She insisted that there would be good accommodations for me, and absolute security. And it wouldn’t hurt to have someone to discuss military maneuvers, in preparation for the big day.
I said I would give her offer some thought.
“All arrangements have been made,” she said. “To be honest with you, you don’t have a choice in the matter.”
To be honest, I was relieved not to have a choice in the matter. My “choices” in “matters” generally don’t work out particularly well.
The mist had settled, glimmering, in her hair, and on her eyelashes, and suddenly she was beautiful. I stared at her in silence a little too long, and she averted her gaze till I could barely see her face in the darkness.
I smiled a false, nervous smile and thanked her over-politely for her generous offer, but then I said nothing, I am ashamed to admit, because this idea – living with Hester in South America – was an unexpectedly happy thought, and it made me very sad to realize that this thought brought me so very much joy.
The next morning we packed up camp and weaved through the trees to the north, until we came to a little clearing, speckled with the last traces of summer flowers. In the middle of a patch of wild daisies stood a snowy egret, regarding us bemusedly.
“Snowy egret,” I said to Hester.
I stopped walking.
She stopped as well.
“Maybe,” she said, “we should shoo it away.”
I shook my head.
“And keep going,” she suggested.
She turned to me, her eyes quizzical.
“I think,” I said, “that we should sit down, and just see what it does. It looks bemused.”
I sat, and Hester sat beside me.
“Not bemused,” Hester said “It looks to be a stupid bird without a thought in its head.”
The bird didn’t move.
“This snowy egret may be an oracle,” I said.
“It looks to be a bird, a white bird.”
“It could be an oracle in bird disguise,” I said. “I have seen this sort of thing before. So this could be an oracle.”
I watched the bird. It lifted a foot. It fluffed its left wing. It shut one eye.
“Or it could be just a bird,” Hester said.
I said that she was right. It could be just a bird. But years ago, I told her, I knew a woman, someone who had protected and saved me many times. She did not have a high opinion of oracles or the clues that they could give us about our lives and the events in store for us. Everything worked out badly for this woman in the end, and I didn’t know if she were even alive anymore. I was undecided as to whether everything would have been better if she had listened to the oracle. But it couldn’t possibly have been worse, and so it would not hurt to listen, this time. I had long since determined that I would listen to oracles.
“Your friend ignored an oracle and something bad happened to her,” Hester murmured. “That doesn’t mean that ignoring the oracle caused the bad thing, or that being kind to the oracle would have prevented it. You know what they taught me in school, O’Hugh? Temporal proximity is no proof of causation. ‘X then Y’ does not imply ‘If X then Y’. Logic, O’Hugh.”
“Of course I know that,” I said, although I knew no such thing. “Still and all. Let’s wait. Just a few minutes.”
We sat on the cool grass watching the bird, and the bird stood in the little cluster of wild daisies, and it never took its eyes from us.
“Oracle,” I said.
The bird made a funny noise, a little peep, then a little chirp.
“Please,” I said. “Oracle. I believe in your power. I will listen.”
And then the bird changed, and a little girl in a blue robe stood before us. She had green eyes, and no hair on the top of her head. She had no eyebrows, and no eyelashes.
“Watt O’Hugh,” she said, and I saw that she had no teeth.
“Yes,” I said. “Oracle.”
“I am the old woman you saw lo’ these many years ago,” she said, and the “lo” seemed to have some sort of dramatic effect that impressed, although it had not, truthfully, been so many years ago. “I was a wise old woman then,” she continued, “and with each passing year, I grow younger and less wise. If no one solves the problems on our horizon – the problems brought by the Sidonians and their Overlord and their minions – I will grow to be an infant and wander ignorant through the land depending on pity for my life, then shrink to a helpless babe. Then blow away in the wind, and then cease to exist.”
She smiled her sad, toothless, childish smile.
“Maybe most men would not mourn the loss of the oracles,” she said. “Maybe most men do not think the world needs the oracles. Your friend – the one who traveled with you last time we met – this friend did not believe the world needs oracles.”
I said that was true. This sounded like a threat. You don’t want to wind up like your friend, do you?; the one who did not believe the world needs oracles. I considered pointing out what Hester had said about causality and logic, but I hadn’t understood it, and I didn’t think I could repeat it.
The oracle raised a finger.
“But let me tell you, the world needs its oracles. The world does need its oracles.”
She shrugged then, a little hopelessly.
“But that is what I suppose one would expect me to say,” she added. “Because I am, you know, an oracle. So of course I think the world needs its oracles.”
And she sighed.
“I also think the world needs its snowy egrets,” she added.
“Because you’re also a snowy egret,” I suggested.
She sighed ag
ain.
“I suppose,” she said. “We do play an important role in the world’s ecology. But maybe you are right. I imagine that you think the world needs its heroic, drunken shootists.”
I shook my head.
“I do not think the world needs me,” I said. “Or others like me. I wish it did. But I do not think it does.”
“The world needs you to help solve the problems on the horizon,” she said, “so that the oracles will not shrink to the size of babes and disappear, our wisdom lost. So if the world needs its oracles, then the world needs its shootists to save its oracles.”
A little wind blew through the meadow, and the wildflowers bobbed cheerfully.
“A bit of wisdom, oracle?” I asked.
She sat down and crossed her little-girl legs.
“You will meet the Falsturm one day, in a room of gold.”
“More?”
“The Falsturm may be defeated,” she said, “only by the hand of the daughter of a Queen, who was born Nephila.”
“And?”
“When you dig a pit,” she said, “there is never enough dirt to refill it. Do not trust the Princess of Time. It is better to be lost in a forest when riding on a horse, than lost in a forest when walking on foot. Who is the master of a palace lit by fire?”
Now she was exhausted. I tried to commit these to memory, although the riddles and prophesies she’d provided me last time had not yet come in handy. She lay down on her side on the grass, and her eyelids seemed to grow heavy. I wondered who the Falsturm was. I was not eager to find out.
“Oracle?” I asked. “Could I have a bit of wisdom that I might understand?”
“There will be a terrible storm tonight,” she said softly. “But I can give you instructions to a cabin in the woods at the foot of the mountain, long deserted by the old man who built it and once lived in it, and this cabin will keep you dry and safe. It will show you a few other things as well, things you do not expect, and so please keep your eyes open for these things.”
She then proceeded to describe to me in minute, tree-by-tree detail, instructions for arriving at this magical cabin.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“A gold coin?” she asked. “For my trouble?”
I tossed her a gold coin, which she caught in her left hand. She then stood on one foot, and she very gradually turned back into a bird; first she grew some feathers on the top of her head, then her nose and mouth grew into a beak. The feathers continued to spread, from her head down her torso. Her legs grew skinny. Then, at last entirely a bird, she flew into the clear blue sky.
“You see?” Hester said. “Just a bird.”
I said that the bird was an oracle. I said that the bird had turned into a little girl, and that the little girl had known about Sidonia, and that she had uttered words of profound wisdom (or at least words that had sounded profound and wise to me) and that the oracle had then turned back into a bird and had flown away.
Hester said she’d seen naught but a bird.
“The oracle was talking,” I insisted. “Inscrutable words. Beautiful ideas.”
“It squawked a bit,” Hester said. “The bird. Unpleasantly.”
Chapter 5
When Master Yu awoke the next day, he was still submerged in absolute pitch darkness, and he thought that perhaps he had died.
Then he remembered everything.
He crawled to the door at the end of the room, pulled it open, and he wandered up to the street. It was already late afternoon, and the Chinese city was alive.
He left Duncombe alley, and the breathing Chinatown of daytime passed him in a blur, the stalls selling fish so fresh they still flapped about, the fifteen cent barbershops, the herbalist on the corner, the awning that shielded the Tuck Hing meat market from the last wink of the California sun, the tea and opium piled in the wide windows of the bazaar across the avenue, the workers pouring out of the cigar factory, crowding about him and parting like the sea, murmuring in that common tongue that he disliked so much and still would not admit that he understood.
He found the theater on Jackson Street, a great crumbling old-man of a building in this newborn babe of a city, with rotting columns and peeling paint and mythic implications of past greatness.
Master Yu peered into the empty ticket office. He rapped a few times on the glass. At length, a wiry, wrinkled gentleman with an impossible, ropy mustache appeared at the window.
Master Yu introduced himself.
“Is there a package for me? I believe that you may be holding a package for me, which was sent from the Golden Sky Hotel in Denver.”
He didn’t explain how he came to possess that belief.
The little man turned all shades of discomfort, and he quickly vanished. Yu Dai-Yung could hear a hushed conversation in the next room. Finally, an older woman came to the window. She wore a yellow silk robe.
She smiled icily.
“Please come in through the side door, Master Yu,” she said. “I am Mrs. Hong.”
Inside, she walked him through a dusty, winding hallway, up a flight of creaking wooden steps and into another corridor that opened onto a narrow empty balcony, which overlooked the theater’s wooden stage. A Chinese banner draped across the top of the theater proclaimed, “When Ideals Are in Harmony, the Sounds that Ensue Will be Elegant.” The stage was bare and rough. Three musicians – a lute player, a zither player, and a two-stringed fiddle player – sat on wooden chairs at the rear of the stage before a backdrop depicting West Lake, near the city of Hangzhou, and the hilly green countryside beyond. Blooming peach and plum blossoms dotted the painted landscape, pleasure boats drifted lazily and motionlessly through the painted blue water, and the Thunder Peak Pagoda tickled the clouds. Ah, China, he sighed longingly. To smell those peach blossoms! (When had he last smelt those peach blossoms? Ever? No mind; their utter absence in this world of concrete made them precious beyond words, beyond rubies.)
At the front of the theater, a few actors stood about, waiting to rehearse. A woman dressed in a long white gown with long white sleeves began to sing. He knew this story, and he smiled with recognition, then frowned with sadness. A terrible snake goddess – a creature as old as the world itself – transformed herself into a beautiful young woman, who, as the opera began, was in the process of falling hopelessly in love with a mortal man on the shore of the Lake. Ecstasy bloomed; joy resulted; a wedding duet wafted through the empty theater. When her human lover died, terribly, painfully and with a beautiful, tuneful death-cry, the bereft snake goddess rose like a golden Phoenix to heaven and descended like a fiery meteor to Earth, with the antidote in her heart. Before the opera’s villain, an angry monk, had the opportunity to imprison her beneath the Pagoda for all eternity, Master Yu felt a tap on his back, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He could live without tragedy for this evening. Better to watch the reunited lovers embrace and to leave the theater, pretending that the opera was over.
He turned.
Li-Ling beckoned him from the shadows.
He smiled, and she didn’t smile back.
He followed her out of the theater, into the darkening and emptying moonlit city streets.
The establishment to which Li-Ling led the terrible poet bore the name Hang Far Low Restaurant, which I thought was rather unfortunate when I first heard it[12], although I understand that it was in its time a place of unsurpassed elegance in Chinatown, and perhaps in San Fran as well, owned and frequented, as it was, by the district’s leading whoremongers, drug-pushers, slumlords and slave-traders.
Li-Ling brought my friend Master Yu to the third floor, marched him through a great majestic cavern of polished wood and elegantly robed patrons, until she reached a small table in the back behind a set of sliding doors.
“I have brought you her Majesty’s secret agent,” Li-Ling said. “May I introduce, gentlemen, Master Yu.”
She pointed to an old man with gray hair in a purple silk robe embroidered with dragons. “Master Lu.”
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br /> She then pointed to an older man with a bald head and dangling jowls in a blue silk robe embroidered with dragons. “Master Hu.”
She finally pointed to the oldest man in the group, a painfully, grotesquely old toad of a man in a black silk robe embroidered with dragons. “Master Hsu,” Li-Ling said.[13]
She bowed to each of them in turn, and then she left the restaurant.
Master Yu watched her go. He missed her immediately and painfully.
He turned to the trio of old men and smiled uncomfortably.
“Sit down,” Master Hsu said firmly. “We have been waiting a long time to meet you.”
“We were expecting you to arrive in America a bit earlier,” Master Hu remarked, and Master Yu explained that he had suffered a year’s worth of brutal training of the mind and body before the imperial court had deemed him suitable for the trip to America and his hazardous mission, whatever that mission might turn out to be.
“Where did you study?” Master Lu asked, and the poet said that he studied in a little village just north of Taiyuan.
“What did you learn?” said old Master Hsu. “In this little village?”
“Some things that may be useful.”
“Secret things?”
He agreed, nodding.
“Things I could not and would not tell you even if you were to torture me,” Master Yu explained gently.
“Then I will ask no more,” ugly old Master Hsu said.
The waiter appeared with a great platter of fish fins, snails, Chinese turtle, eels, tarot root, fish brains, bamboo shoots and Chinese broccoli. Another waiter refilled the teapots, and they both retreated with small, quick bows.
Master Hsu pushed a little wooden box across the table to the poet. The box was smooth polished wood, with a sliding lid, and some sort of inscription carved into the top in a language he didn’t recognize.
“Your package,” the old man said. “Be very gentle when you open it.”
Master Yu pushed the lid to one side, and a small shining metal sphere floated out of the box. It was about the size of a golf ball, and it hovered just at his eye level, humming gently.
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 9