There was a period of silence, and then the receiver went dead. I pictured in my mind, Corrine, exiting a phone booth and walking away down the street in the rain. She was right, I had been too wrapped up in myself and rarely showed her that I cared. Oh yes, there were my fatuous transmissions of wonder, my little verbal essays of politics and philosophy and never love, but the real purpose of those was to prove my intellectual superiority. It came to me softly, like a bubble bursting, that I had been responsible for my own loneliness. I removed the yellow glasses and folded them back into their box.
The next evening, I went to Secmatte’s as usual, but this time with the determination to tell him I was through with the sublimation business. When I knocked at the door, he did not answer. It was open, though, as it often was, so I entered and called out his name. There was no reply. I searched all of the rooms for him, including my office, but he was nowhere to be found. Returning to the printing room, I looked around and saw laid out on one of the counters the new flyers Albert had done for VanGeist. They were political in nature, announcing his candidacy for the state senate in large, bold headlines. Below the headline, on each of the different types, was a different paragraph-long message of the usual good-guy blather from the candidate. At the bottom of these writings was his name and beneath that a reminder to vote on Election Day.
“Top Secret,” I said, and was about to return to my office when a thought surfaced. Looking once over my shoulder to make sure Secmatte was not there, I reached into my pocket and took out the box containing the glasses. I carefully laid it down on the counter, opened it, and took them out. Once the arms were fitted over my ears and the lenses positioned upon my nose, I turned my attention back to the flyers for VanGeist.
My hunch paid off, even though I wished that it hadn’t. The cellophane lenses somehow cancelled the sublimation effect, and I saw what no one was meant to. Inserted into the paragraphs of trite self-boostering were some other, very pointed messages. If one assembled the secret words in one set of the flyers, they disparaged VanGeist’s opponent, a fellow by the name of Benttel, as being a communist, a child molester, a thief. The other set’s hidden theme was racial epithets, directed mostly at blacks and disclosing VanGeist’s true feelings about the Civil Rights Act being promulgated by Eisenhower, which would soon come up for a vote in the legislature. My mind raced back to that article in the paper about the assault in Weston, and I could not help but wonder.
I backed away from the counter, truly aghast at what I had been party to. This was far worse than unobtrusively coaxing people to eat Hasty bacon—or was it? When I turned away from the flyers, I saw on the edge of another table that week’s note for Corrine printed up and drying. Turning my gaze upon it, I discovered that there were no sublimated words in it at all. It was exactly as I had composed it, only set in type and printed. I was paralyzed, and would most likely not have moved for an hour had not Secmatte entered the printing room then.
“Is Rachel here?” he asked, seeing the glasses on me.
“Rachel is not here,” I said.
“I asked her to bring them so that you could see,” he said.
“Secmatte,” I said, my anger building. “Do you have any idea what you are doing here?”
“At this moment?” he asked.
“No,” I shouted, “with these flyers?”
“Printing them,” he said.
“You’re spreading hatred, Albert, ignorance and hatred,” I said.
He shook his head and I noticed his hands begin to tremble.
“You’re spreading fear.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m printing flyers.”
“The words,” I said, “the words. Do you have any idea what in God’s name you are doing?”
“It’s only words,” he said. “A job to do. Rachel told me I needed a job to make money.”
“This is wrong,” I told him. “This is very wrong.”
He was going to speak but didn’t. Instead he stared down at the floor.
“These words mean things,” I said.
“They have definitions,” he murmured.
“These flyers will hurt people out there in the world,” I said. “There is a world of people out there, Albert.”
He nodded and smiled and then turned and left the room.
I tore up as many of the flyers as I could get my hands on, throwing them in the air so that the pieces fell like snow. The words that were sublimated to the naked eye now were all I could see. I finally took the glasses off and laid them back in their box. After searching the building for a half hour for Secmatte, I realized where he must be. When I was yelling at him he had the look of a crestfallen child, and I knew he must have gone to serve out his punishment in the closet. I went to my office and opened the door that led to the bathroom. That distant bulb had been extinguished and the great, cold expanse was completely dark.
“Albert?” I called from the door. I thought I could hear him breathing.
“Yes,” he answered, but I could not see him.
“Did you really not know it was wrong?” I asked.
“I can fix it,” he said.
“No more work for Mulligan and VanGeist,” I told him.
“I can fix it with one word,” he said.
“Just burn the flyers and have nothing more to do with them.”
“It will be fine,” he said.
“And what about my letters? Did you ever add any secret words to them?”
“No.”
“That was our deal,” I said.
“But I don’t know anything about Love,” he said. “I needed you so that you could see what I could do. I thought you believed it was good.”
There was nothing more I could say. I closed the door and left him there in the dark.
VI
In the months that followed I often contemplated, at times with anguish, at times delight, that my own words, wrought with true emotion, had reached Corrine and caused her to change her mind. Nothing came of it, though. I heard from a mutual friend that she had left town without Walthus to pursue a life in the city in which she had been born. We were never officially divorced, and I never saw her again.
There were also two other interesting developments. The first came soon after Secmatte fell out of sight. I read in the newspaper that VanGeist, just prior to the election, dropped dead one morning in his office, and in the same week, Mulligan developed some strange disease that caused him to go blind. Here was a baffling synchronicity that stretched the possibility of coincidence to its very limit.
The other surprising event was a postcard from Secmatte a year after his disappearance from Jameson. In it he asked that I contact Rachel and tell her he was well. He told me that he and Legion had taken up a new pursuit, something else concerning language. “My calculations were remiss,” he wrote, “for there is something in words, some unnameable spirit born of an author’s intent that defies measurement. I was previously unaware of it, but this phenomenon is what I now work to understand.”
I searched the local phone book and those of the surrounding area to locate Rachel Secmatte. When I finally found her living over in Weston, I called and we chatted for some time. We made an appointment to have dinner so that I could share with her the postcard from her brother. That dinner went well, and in the course of it, she informed me that she had gone to the old oil company building to find Albert when she hadn’t heard from him. She had found it abandoned, but he had left behind his notebooks and the cellophane glasses.
In the years that have followed, I have seen quite a bit of Rachel Secmatte. My experience with her brother, with dabbling and being snared in that web of deceit, made me an honest man. That honesty banished my fear of women in that I was no longer working so hard to hide myself. It brought home to me that old saw that actions speak louder
than words. In ’62 we moved in together and have lived side by side ever since. One day in the mid-sixties, at the height of that new era of humanism I had so longed for, I came upon the box of Albert’s notebooks and the glasses in our basement and set about trying to decipher his system in an attempt to free people from the constraints of language. That was nearly forty years ago, and in the passage of time I have learned much, not the least of which was the folly of my initial mission. I did discover that there is a single word, I will not divulge it, that, when sublimated, used in conjunction with a person’s name and printed in a perfectly calculated sentence in the right typeface, can cause the individual mentioned, if he should view the text that contains it, to suffer severe physical side effects, even death.
I prefer to concentrate on the positive possibilities of the sublimation technique. For this reason, I have hidden in the text of the preceding tale a selection of words that, even without your having been able to consciously register them, will leave you with a beautiful image. Don’t try to force yourself to know it; that will make it shy. In a half hour to forty-five minutes, it will present itself to you. When it does, you can thank Albert Secmatte, undoubtedly an old man like myself now, out there somewhere in the world, still searching for a spark of light in a dark closet, his only companion whispering in his ear the wonderful burden of words.
Han Song (1965– ) is a Chinese writer and journalist whose work has often gotten into trouble with Chinese censors because of its apparent pessimism, causing much of his writing to be published first outside China. Primarily regarded as a science fiction writer, Han has also spoken of the influence of Kafka and Japanese literature on his work. He has won China’s Yinhe (“Galaxy”) Award multiple times, and his stories have been included in The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation (2019). “All the Water in the World” was first published in Science Fiction World in 2002.
ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD
Han Song
Translated by Anna Holmwood
1. LONELY WANDERER OF THE WATERWAYS
“THAT WHICH IS ABUNDANT in this world is water.”
Thus the northerner Li Daoyuan, sighed to himself one day.
In his day, the north was wetter and richer in vegetation than it is now. Yet it took another thousand years after Li’s death before humanity came to understand the immensity of the world’s water. Scientific research has shown that seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water, mainly seas and oceans; this just happens to be the same proportion of the human body that is made up of water.
Can we deduce from this that the world is itself a kind of organism? This is an interesting question, one that demands protracted investigation.
Whatever the case, as China has long been a country that turns its back to the sea and looks to the land, for someone in those days to say “that which is abundant in this world is water” would be as outlandish as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.
Furthermore, Li Daoyuan’s “Commentary on the Classic of the Waterways” made very little reference to the sea. Almost without fail, when the subject of the oceans is mentioned the commentary comes to an abrupt halt, or else Li passes over the subject with a stroke of the brush; for example, “The Great Liao River runs into the sea at the city of An,” or “The east of Zhejiang pours into the sea.”
This was because in those days the sea was considered the edge of the world.
The Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–589), when Li Daoyuan lived, were ravaged by war and fragmentation. But the water that flowed from his pen, the rivers, lakes, streams, waterfalls, wells, and springs, surged unchecked, bursting forth through the borders set by fighting men.
In that war-torn landscape, Li Daoyuan used the maps and registries of the united Western Han imperial court (206 BCE—8 CE) to paint his world of water, but not even he knew why. He was only ever dimly aware that he might be doing so as a sort of remedy, but that this remedy would perhaps, in the end, prove futile.
Let’s say that it was futile; that he was determined to do something patently impossible. Was he not, in so doing, merely striving to play out his destiny?
And so he hoped to clarify the meaning of a man’s actions, because he was acutely aware that his obsession with water was a mystery that most men could not fathom. He knew so much of water, but what of his own soul?
Accompanying Emperor Xiaowei on his tours of inspection, when he wanted to rest he would steal off to one side, slowly smooth down his gown, and stare fixedly at the pulsing of the metaled veins on his bronzed arms; excitement would surge up inside him.
He had seen many civilians destroyed by war, he had seen the spiderweb tracery of their veins through their skin, still throbbing as they took their last breaths, the blood seething, never again to nourish their bodies. Is there really any difference between the balance of water in the world, and water in the body? Can they attain a state of perfect symbiosis? All these thoughts confused him.
But the obstinate Emperor does not see the world thus, nor do the generals preparing for war or the ministers busy with court intrigues. So Li Daoyuan became a lonely wanderer of the waterways.
It was around this time that, one night, he dreamt of red water.
At first he thought it was the blood that flowed everywhere in rivers—the rivers that often foiled his attempts to draw a pure and perfect map of the waterways. But he discovered that this was not so.
It was so dazzling in color that it lost nearly all resemblance to water, and just like morning mist or lightning, it lingered only an instant before he awoke with a shout and sat up, dumbstruck.
The cold light from the stars poured like water down his broad, soft collar, and streamed down the hard line of his spine. After waking he recalled the image of the red water, the limitless expanse of deep red, creeping, decorous and silent. It was oppressive.
But was it a true memory? There was most likely no such body of water on earth, so perhaps the dream was an augury of something that Li Daoyuan had not yet encountered?
Over the following days the image reappeared several times in his dreams. The red water was expanding, until one day all the water in the world had turned red.
It was as if one type of water had come to rule over all other waters.
The water in the dream had become a sexual fantasy.
Suddenly, Li Daoyuan was gripped by the desire to see the waterfalls at Mengmen on the Yellow River; only their crashing waves and breathtaking heights could stir within him the doubts that no still heart should possess, and satisfy the excitement, the hunger, long stored inside him.
But as he made his way there, he became aware of a worry growing in his subconscious, that it was from the Mengmen falls that the red water spewed forth. But why did this worry him? Why the Mengmen falls on the Yellow River? Yellow and red were not complementary colors, after all.
Whatever the case, overflowing with love for, and fear of, this river of red, Li Daoyuan arrived at Mengmen. This was around the twenty-first year of the reign of Emperor Xiaowen (497 ACE), when Li Daoyuan was thirty-two years of age.
2. “MIRROR TAO”
Li Daoyuan was disappointed to find that the waterfall at Mengmen was not red as he’d anticipated. But the sight of the Yellow River, a witch flying wildly with tangled hair, seemed to suggest the possibility of many different types of water, including those of which Li Daoyuan as yet knew nothing.
Li Daoyuan’s spirit was moved. He turned, and saw a verdant bamboo grove some hundred metres beyond the waterfall, an odd sight. As far as he was aware, bamboo grew only further south, so this must be an unusual species.
The delicacy of the bamboo contrasted intensely with the violence of the Yellow River.
This swathe of emerald green was the color of clear, fast-moving water, and provo
ked an intense sense of pleasure in Li Daoyuan. A path wound its way deep into the grove, around rocks of varying sizes, over ground daubed with light and shadow. After a short while he heard the gentle sound of running water; it had none of the ferocity of the Yellow River but sounded rather like a young woman singing under her breath. Li Daoyuan was even more overjoyed.
The sound of the water rose and fell, advancing and receding, like a crystal clear stream speeding and jumping through the glossy black mountain cliffs. Li Daoyuan stilled his emotions, and began to grope his way toward the sound in a game of hide-and-seek. Left then right, forward then backward, his joy knew no bounds.
Suddenly the sound erupted, and it became clear he was close. He walked slowly toward it but the sound grew quieter again. Then, in an instant, it was there before him, not a galloping stream but a deep pool the size of a human face, a deep reddish brown. Long, slender bamboo encircled it on all sides, and despite the stillness of the air the surface of the pool rose and fell, as if there were fish churning the water from below.
Perplexed, he glimpsed a thatched hut through the flickering bamboo, its door, made from branches, was open. On entering he saw an old man sound asleep on a bamboo mat. At that very moment the sound of water exploded outside.
Li Daoyuan stood respectfully, with his hands by his side, waiting. Presently, the sleeping man awoke, and on seeing his guest, offered him a seat and some tea. Li Daoyuan examined the old man carefully, taking in the eyebrows that fell to his shoulders, and the arms that hung below his knees; Li Daoyuan knew that he was a hermit and he was filled with veneration.
The tea was a cool, green color, with no trace of red in it, and therefore couldn’t have been made with the water from the pool outside. Just then, the water in the pool exploded again.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 141