"Self does not ... Do not..."
Yin Xi took pity on it. “Come with me,” he said, standing.
The shi-ren tucked up its arms and drove, tank-like, up the side of the pool. It followed Yin Xi down to the seaward edge of the gardens, where he sat.
"Sit beside me,” he said.
The shi-ren shuffled over and lowered itself onto the base of its stump beside him, toes splayed around it, arms tucked against its sides. Yin Xi swept his hand across the breadth of the horizon. The sails of distant junks dotted the ocean, beating their slow paths against the tide.
Yin Xi said, “Give your attention to the sea. Do not tell me what you perceive, but focus on it with your whole being."
He waited in silence while the shi-ren's eyestalks wandered about, scanning the ocean from the surf below all the way to the horizon and back, then out again and up to the rising planet beyond. It raised two pairs of arms, fingers splayed, to examine its environment with senses that Yin Xi could only guess at. Tension radiated through the shi-ren's body as it concentrated.
Yin Xi's own gaze drifted upward, to Hai's lesser siblings in the sky: Bailian the white face, old Gui the tortoise and the luminous brothers, Big and Little Ming. Between the moons and the greater arc of the planet, the sun pierced the sky, its fierce blue-white light shattering into a rainbow where it touched the edge of Liyuan's corona.
Twenty times brighter, that star, than the dim red sun under which Yin Xi had been born. But Liyuan and its brood of supplicants orbited at a far greater distance than the close embrace in which Wangwei danced with its slowly dying parent.
After a few minutes, the shi-ren's eyestalks drooped. It gave out a hiss of static that to Yin Xi sounded uncannily like a sigh.
"Self not understand,” it said, adopting a posture that cried mournfulness in every line.
"Do not be discouraged,” said Yin Xi. “Tell me, rock: is your whole life ruled by intellect? Are you but a thinking machine, or do you feel as well?"
The shi-ren twisted its eyestalks to look at his face. Yin Xi noted the significance of the action. Its species did not have ‘faces'. This shi-ren clearly had spent an enormous amount of time in human company.
"One-self feels."
"What things do you feel?"
The shi-ren shrugged its fingers. An arm waved randomly as it struggled for a translatable answer. When it did finally respond, the translator patch had just as much difficulty, offering: “Hurt-feeling, fright-feeling, warm-feeling, joy-feeling, well-feeling..."
Yin Xi interrupted, “When you choose companions, do you do so purely on the basis of reason?"
"It depends upon purpose for company,” the shi-ren answered, uncertainly.
"And if the company is not brought together for an intellectual purpose?"
"Then for joy-feeling and well-feeling,” it said, more confidently.
"When you tend your gardens, what do you feel?"
"Well-feeling."
"And with what part of you do you feel it?"
It hesitated. A couple of its eyestalks wandered to the garden pools. Eventually, arms rustling to make its answer half a question, it said, “All parts."
Yin Xi nodded. “And when you tend your gardens, do you have concern for anything else but the females you tend?"
The eyestalks examined his face again. Clearly it was wondering where this line of questioning was headed. It replied, “Sometimes consciousness strays to matters of idleness or theory. But for most times: no. Is an absorbing task."
Yin Xi asked, “Why is it so absorbing?"
That got a blink. “Because ... because females are important. Because are wombs of self's species."
"And does that knowledge explain your feelings when you tend to your gardens?"
The shi-ren stuttered for a moment and fell silent.
Yin Xi stood, gathering up his tally book and brushing down his robes. “I will leave you with that question. Come to me when you know your answer."
* * * *
4
The final time the shi-ren spoke to Yin Xi, it found him on the observation deck at the top of the main dome.
He was polishing the dome's upper viewports, a task for which he often volunteered. It allowed him to watch the rising tide beat against the dome walls, and to stand as long as possible in the breeze before the high vents were sealed. The smell of the sea mixed with the fragrance of fruit trees wafting up from inside the dome. The laughter of children playing cut across the hiss of the waves.
Yin Xi found he wasn't surprised to see the shi-ren, even though its kind typically avoided the higher gantries. The anthropologist hugged the dome wall as closely as its rigid body allowed, eyestalks resolutely averted from the drop on the other side of the deck. Yin Xi stopped what he was doing.
"So, rock, does the knowledge that the females are the wombs of your species explain your feelings when you tend to your gardens?"
It gave a sharp double-click. “No."
Yin Xi nodded. “When one is wholly absorbed in the present, when one's actions are passionate and spontaneous, then one is in harmony with one's true nature, and one flows in the current of the Way."
The shi-ren shuffled its toes noncommittally.
Yin Xi said, “Shi-ren and humans have similar understandings of physics, yes?"
Its eyestalks twitched in evident surprise at his apparent change of topic. “Yes."
"It is a truth of physics that mass is merely a form of energy and that all forms of energy are convertible into other forms of energy. Therefore, all phenomena are part of a single, dynamic continuum. Correct?"
"Is sustainable interpretation, yes."
"So tell me, rock: are you any less intrinsically connected to the rest of the universe than you are to the rest of your species?"
Yin Xi watched it closely as it teetered on the brink of epiphany.
"Come,” he said. “We will seek our paths to the Way together."
He led the way up a short ramp to a nearby maintenance hatch. The shi-ren followed him onto the external gantry, holding the side rails tightly. Yin Xi left the hatch open, so that the breach alarm would trip before the water came too high. Knees complaining, he lowered himself cross-legged onto the metal grating. The shi-ren planted itself beside him.
Yin Xi said, “Hear the beating of the waves against the dome. Feel the attraction of great Liyuan. Feel the world and its fellow moons in their eternal dance. Feel the wind, the warmth of the sun. Smell the ocean. Turn your passion to it all as you would turn it to your garden."
He fell silent, and saw calmness descend over the shi-ren. Its grip on the railings relaxed somewhat. He broadened the focus of his attention and opened his consciousness to the world around him.
He breathed in time with the sea, taking its briny respirations into his core and giving back the moisture of his body with every outward breath—made one with the ocean, the wind and the world by that simple conspiracy.
He felt the pull of Liyuan, drawing him upward. He was filled with the ocean's yearning, his frail vessel overwhelmed and destroyed by its ceaseless pursuit of Liyuan's grace. In turn, he absorbed the sea and rendered it to nothingness. The deck upon which he sat and the shi-ren beside him were erased. Even great Liyuan was swept into oblivion.
Yin Xi flowed, undifferentiated, in the current of the universe.
After an unmeasured time he returned, gently, to himself. He allowed his mind to drift freely for a while and recalled old fantasies of sailing ships and storms at sea. Dreams from a boyhood trapped on a world of rocky crags and crater-scapes, oceanless and only half terraformed.
The flood alarm on the access hatch rang its first warning: ten minutes until it automatically shut and sealed itself.
With a sigh, Yin Xi dragged himself back to the present and opened his eyes. The water was nearly up to the gantry. Liyuan hung balefully overhead, streaked with storms and impossibly heavy in the sky. Yin Xi gazed up at it, awestruck as always.
Co
oking smells drifted out of the hatchway with the smell of fruit blossoms. His stomach grumbled.
He turned to his companion. The shi-ren was still absorbed in its meditation. It had raised two pairs of hands to feel the wind and sun.
Yin Xi said, softly, “Enlightenment is not intellectual, it is felt. It is a state in which all action is spontaneous and every gesture is filled with passion. In it, the self is extinguished in the continuum of all things. Of course, these are but poor words: they explain and do not enlighten. Enlightenment cannot be spoken. It is like a dream that, upon awakening, one remembers but cannot tell."
After a pause, the shi-ren said, “Self haven't word other than ‘understand'."
"That, my friend,” said Yin Xi, with a slow grin, “is because your language is inadequate."
The shi-ren blinked, then clapped its forearms together to show its appreciation. Yin Xi laughed as well, delighted that his slight witticism had bridged the culture gap.
He stood and rubbed his knees, gesturing for his companion to precede him through the hatch.
* * * *
Author's Acknowledgement
* * * *
The quotations are Tang-era (8th-9th century), obtained with permission from www.chinese-poems.com.
* * * *
Ian McHugh is a graduate of the 2006 Clarion West writers’ workshop. His fiction has appeared in the anthology All Star Stories: Twenty Epics, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM), and AntipodeanSF. Shortly before getting the good news from Challenging Destiny, he sold a story to the anthology Blood & Devotion, and appeared destined to conquer the fiction world alphabetically. ‘The Dao of Stones’ is one of the stories that won Ian a place at Clarion West.
* * * *
Fantasy tales are today's parables. They present problems and issues of today in a manner that is enjoyable and therefore is often dismissed. Fantasy tales are not less powerful simply because they are entertaining. Sometimes we see so much evil around us that we become hardened, inured. Move the problems into a different setting and we suddenly see them more clearly.
—Margaret Weis, Introduction to Treasures of Fantasy
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The Little Cat in the Attic Window, the Blue House on the Corner by Jennifer Rachel Baumer
There's a big house on the corner lot, the kind of house that looks like it should be broken up into apartments. Three stories plus a basement, kitchen in the back, trees crowding the front porch and, in one instance, shoving it upward. The house is blue and white, but an old, faded, teal-ish blue, turquoise almost, something that looks dead and flat at night. The oak in the front yard drops acorns all around the porch and the upper branches strain for the roof, one of those smushed-point roofs, kind of an Amityville Horror house look to it and in the attic there are a couple of round windows and one of those arched top, flat bottomed ones.
That's where the little cat sits. Jess sees him in the mornings when she's walking to work. He sits on the southeast side, morning sunlight picking out his fine long springy whiskers; at night when she walks home he's lying in the southwest sun, content and squinty-eyed. Little brown cat with stripes and she doesn't know why she assumes he's a boy, she just does.
Lately Jess finds she's anticipating the cat. Like he's a friend of hers. Like she'll stop and they'll chat and he'll ask her what she has planned for the day when she passes by in the morning and in the evening he'll ask how her day went.
He's someone else's cat, she reminds herself, but she still looks forward to seeing him and he hasn't let her down yet.
When Jess gets home in the evenings she checks messages and mail and voice mail and email accounts and there's never anything there. Well, there is, of course—there's email from the lists she's on and snail mail from her various pen pals across the country and usually there's even a call or two, reminders of appointments or offers of merchandise or even her own voice, reminding her of some task, some necessity. But there's never anything from anyone she really cares about. It's like her first onion circle is empty. Onions peel out from the core in layers, layer upon layer, each one out that much farther from the center. That's how Jess feels about relationships. Everyone has that first onion circle, that immediate circle of people who mean more than anything, the ones most near and dear, the ones to do anything for, the ones to die without.
Hers is empty. No one there. No one home. Just Jess and the feeling that something is missing. Just Jess and the thought of someone else's cat.
She daydreams about it, dreams about it. At night she dreams she lives in a big gray house (or blue?) with a man who loves her so much he'd do anything for her, anything at all if she'd just tell him. A man who loves her so much she can almost hear him say her name and she wakes trembling on the edge of something, some knowledge or discovery or truth, but she wakes alone to another day.
She came here because it's a big California city, temperate and sprawling, big enough to get lost in, with enough people, places and things she was sure she could start a new life.
I have, she thinks fiercely, but it's meant leaving everyone and everything else behind. And sometimes she can't remember who she's left behind and sometimes she's not sure there's anyone left behind at all, or that there was ever anyone there to begin with.
* * * *
In the summer Jess walked every day to work with no one and nothing and she watched couples and families and even single people on the streets and everyone looked content or purposeful or fulfilled or at least alive and Jess had to dodge out of their way when they came towards her. Even when there were people and traffic near her the hot morning air felt sullen and secretive, excluding her somehow, as if she were not a part of the city. Every morning she walked to work in a quiet bookstore where the owner rarely spoke or even emerged from behind his stack of books. With the coming of winter she took a second job on her days off, this one in a children's bookstore, loud voices and kinetic motion and mothers brimming with love and umbrage, but none of it coming Jess's way. She tried to talk to the mothers but they constantly interrupted her with prohibitions to the children and when they looked courteously back at her she'd try again until this time the mother would interrupt Jess herself or be interrupted by her offspring and sometimes the mothers would tell their children to go to the play area and wait, but then Jess would lose track of her conversational gambit and stutter to a halt, or forget what she'd meant to say at all, or just feel too intimidated to try again.
She tried talking to the children, sometimes, but that made the mothers nervous.
In the evenings she took a job waiting tables in a small, trendy hangout actually within walking distance of her apartment and there she found loud and vibrant conversations and jokes and insults and laughter but all of it swirled around her and left her on her own little island, untouched, and she learned for the first time that no one actually sees the server. Even when she was somehow part of a joke, when someone included her in a tease or invited her in by rolling his eyes or asking her opinion, still by the time the check was paid and the coats were collected, those people had moved on and they no longer saw her as anything but their way out.
* * * *
Jess sometimes took to walking home on an alternate route to avoid the blue house and the little cat because they made her more lonely than ever and the house was more faded and farther back from the road every day and everything seemed gray. But in the morning there was only one sensible way to go to work, and that took her directly by the house.
When Jess walks to work in the morning the little cat meows at her from the upstairs window in the corner house. She can see his mouth opening and closing and imagines his squeaky little voice. She thinks what it would feel like to have him come running up to greet her at the door, soft winding around her legs and enthusiastic purring as she picks him up. At least one person would know she was alive.
In the evening Jess walks home from the bookstore, or maybe from the restaurant, her days are star
ting to blur a bit. But she's tired and so takes the direct route home and when she passes the blue house on the corner she notices it looks ramshackle and unkempt, the grass needs cutting, the paint is flaking, the windows are cloudy. In the upstairs window the little cat meows at her and paws at the window as she goes by, dark little paw pads pressed against the glass. He's insistent and Jess feels the first thrill of fear that something is wrong. She stops and stands and watches him but in the end she walks away. He's a cat, after all. Just being a cat. Maybe there was a fly in the window or something.
* * * *
In the morning the little cat is even more insistent and Jess, now afraid, stops moving and stares up at him. The house seems sad to her, shut down, in mourning or lost. Maybe something has happened to the people in the house. Maybe they've fallen ill or gone off on a short trip and failed to return or the cat sitter forgot to come. Maybe they've gone off and forgotten they live there.
That's crazy, she tells herself, but in the attic window the cat is in fits trying to get to her and Jess looks around furtively as if she's about to commit a heinous crime and lets herself in through the front gate.
No one answers her nervous knocking, no one responds when she calls out and Jess falls silent, watching the front door, partly as if she expects something is about to happen she didn't cause, partly knowing what she's about to do.
The door is unlocked. The knob feels cool and smooth and familiar under her hand. She holds her breath as she steps inside, no longer calling. Her heart trembles and she tells herself it's just anticipation. She tells herself she's just checking on the welfare of the cat. In the state where she used to live there was a statute that people could do just about anything to rescue an animal. She doesn't know if that's the case where she is now.
She steps into the entrance and closes the door.
Inside the house is sun warm and light and airy. Hardwood floors, deep green walls leading lighter and lighter into the house, and she knows where every room is, every stick of furniture. She knows the smell of breakfast cooking and the sound her shoes make on the floor.
Challenging Destiny #24: August 2007 Page 3