Shanghai Steam

by Calvin D. Jim

  Everything fades and flashes. The caravan lurches around a bend.

  On the other side of town, opposite the direction of where the train is heading, a man in a cramped room bends over a feverish woman and places a wet towel on her forehead.

  Much of the beige paint on the man’s face had been scraped off, revealing patches of startling, translucent white underneath. The colors made him look like a ravaged doll. His queue had been shorn off — in defiance of the emperor? An accident? — and he wore his ragged hair down to his shoulders. His infantryman’s uniform had been reduced to green tatters and did a very bad job of concealing the willowleaf sword sheathed below his belt.

  One of the servant’s sons brought him to the yard in the center of the courtyard. The master sat in front of a small table, painting the clothes of a fisherman chiseled on sandalwood. A few rough figurines were on the table. The master gave a small, unpainted sparrow to the boy, who clutched it and grinned up and down the soldier’s sword until the master told the boy to return to his mother.

  “You looked for me,” said the master.

  “I looked for everyone,” answered the guest. “Am I interrupting your work?”

  “I don’t make these to sell anymore.” The master removed his glasses. “We should move to the study.” He collected the brushes, putting them tips first into a little jar of water. Colors bloomed like a swarm of jellyfish.

  “You shouldn’t let them soak too much,” said the guest.

  “We won’t be long,” said the master. “Anyway they won’t be much use to me when we finish.”

  The guest followed the master through moon gates and verandahs to the northernmost, most private side of the complex. The sounds of vendors and children from the street receded, muffled by the layers of neat, private gardens in the courtyard. The master opened the wooden lattice doors to the study.

  “You’ve done well for yourself,” said the guest as the master lit the lamps.

  The study was clean and tidy. On one wall hung a small portrait of a young woman with a high forehead. Writing instruments were arranged by function on the desk and finished figurines lined a shelf against the wall. Opera characters carved in wood and ivory — the clown, the concubine, the arrogant monkey, the general, the fire-spitting prince. All thirty pieces had a small mask painted in bright colors.

  “Northern and southern varieties,” said the guest, looking at the green-faced prince holding butterfly knives and spitting fire from his mouth. “You travel often?”

  “I did. Not so much now.” The master sat on the chair behind the desk. There was no other chair. The guest indicated with his hand that he preferred to stand anyway. “How have you been?” asked the master.

  The guest told him of his own travels. A trip to the closest barracks in the province for preliminary training, then a convoy to the capital for more training, examinations, and his formal induction into the imperial army. Then a long trek past the sand dunes of the Gobi, across Mongolia where he spent some years in campaigns to quell local uprisings, and finally the outpost at the nebulous border in Siberia.

  “Mr. Ying traveled a great deal too,” said the guest.

  “The sign of a successful merchant.”

  “You went with him?”

  “No, I never saw him again. Well, that’s not true, I went to his funeral two weeks ago. I left early, it was too crowded.” The master adjusted his tone to keep it light. “But between that and the last time you and I saw each other, never again.”

  “I was at the funeral as well. I saw you and followed you home.”

  The master didn’t answer.

  “You look well,” said the guest. “I heard that you used to live in a small room above a teahouse, next to a family of nightsoil collectors. You had a girl too.” He pointed at the portrait. “I’m envious. Some rebels in Ulanhot, they didn’t understand us. They thought they could buy time with their women and threw a bunch of whores our way. We had to slaughter everyone. This woman is your wife?”

  “She was never my wife. Not the marrying kind.”

  “How is she?”

  “She died of malaria close to when you left.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The master could tell he didn’t mean it.

  “That was before,” said the guest. “Now you have the biggest courtyard in town, you say you carve only for pleasure, and you’re getting round in the waist.”

  The master allowed a difficult smile. “I was younger then. I could work without eating or sleeping.”

  “Or without a conscience.” The guest unrolled the remains of his left sleeve up to his shoulder. “You only have small pieces on display here. Where do you put the big ones? Aside from the army barracks, I mean.”

  The master stared at his own surname etched on the steel ball of the guest’s shoulder. The tail of the right sign of the ideogram was jagged, a groove improperly done.

  The master remembered which one this particular guest was now. Ten years ago, under the bad light of Mr. Ying’s lanterns, the master had been pushing a graver against a steel ball to create the last curve of his own name when Mr. Liu had finished the energy transfer. The moment Mr. Liu lifted his hands from the corpse and the wooden doll, the doll had woken up. A scream crackled in his voice box and the doll had wrenched himself away.

  It had been the first time the master had seen a doll animated. He had dropped the graver.

  The guest saw that he recognized him. “Mr. Liu had to withdraw some of my energy to keep me down. You were looking at me the whole time. I remember you looking as lean and as rabid as a gurkha. You were terrified of me. You started blithering like an idiot, about how you were doing it for her.” The guest pointed at the portrait of the young woman.

  “I couldn’t afford her doctors then. The money I got paid with after was solely for that,” the master said. “To not have taken advantage of everything I was capable of to save her life would’ve been to have no conscience.”

  “When you told me earlier that she had died, you sounded like you were telling someone else’s story. As though it had meant nothing to you or that she wasn’t worth remembering.” The guest’s face was a wooden impasse. “That’s not very convincing.”

  “I remember her every day. That’s all I’ve done for the past ten years.”

  “You look too well-adjusted for that.”

  “Don’t lecture me about sorrow. It’s a terrible thing but one must learn to let it pass.”

  “Because you think I know nothing about it. Because the next thing I knew when I woke up, I was on a caravan on its way to the barracks, remembering how I begged you to save me and all you said was that you had to save her, this girl I couldn’t even see. I could see my human body turned inside out and this girl whom you had coerced me to save I couldn’t even see.”

  The guest had gone absolutely still. In the study, he looked like the master’s most lifelike sculpture. “Explain to me, please,” he said, “how it’s possible that you did nothing. That you continued what Mr. Ying told you to do.”

  “She was dying.”

  “You think we didn’t die? They couldn’t kill us in the battlefield because we were already dead. We were thirty boys that Mr. Ying’s men had smoked out from the opera troupe house so you and Mr. Liu could turn us into this. So Mr. Ying could sell us to the emperor and put his sons in the mandarin hall.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Explain to me and I will.” The guest waved at the shelf of thirty opera figurines. “Because it’s not enough. A tribute to the dead isn’t enough. The townspeople say you’re a philanthropist. They love you, though they don’t know where you got the money and they don’t know why you put so much effort to open orphanages. I know the answers to that and it’s not enough.”

  “I couldn’t turn back once we had started,” the master said. “I didn’t want to do it. It was just a job.”

  “I said the same to each Mongolian who had time to plead for his life but it n
ever made a difference to the widows and children they had left behind. It’s only fitting that at the end of the day, you couldn’t save your woman. Your sin had killed her.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You’ve thought the same for the past ten years.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You had a chance and you chose wrongly. You left me on that table, you left all of us there, and because of that she’s dead.”

  “I want you to leave now.”

  “That’s why you try to atone yourself with these little figurines and your little orphanages, thinking if you could make us come to life again, somehow she’ll come to life too.”

  The master was silent.

  “If you had to live your life one more time, would you do it again?”

  The guest carefully moved the brushes and the inkstones from one side of the table and perched on it.

  “You would,” said the guest, “and I’d ask why and you’d say I know nothing about love. I wonder whose fault that is.”

  The master looks at the jade pieces inset above the guest’s nose, eyes that would never rest behind closed eyelids. He had known it earlier, but now with the fullness of understanding, he thought: I will be killed in my own house, surrounded by ghosts.

  The guest was hunched over, studying the blue face of a small concubine.

  The master wanted to talk to him about fear, not for one’s life but for someone else’s. He wanted him to hear the internal scream in a person watching someone he loved being carried away by the tide inches away from his face while his hands were tied behind his back. The blindness that blacked out everything else. In those lean days, there was only the room above the teahouse, her body convulsing under the blanket, the walls letting the cold air in like an open window, the vomit on the floor. How could thirty opera troupe boys who were given the chance to never die compare? But after the money came, it was the same thing, only with nightmares. He had dreamed that she had turned into wood after a fit and he was scorching his name on her shoulder.

  The guest was talking about the other men he had visited before coming to the master’s courtyard. Mr. Liu. Mr. Ying. Mr. Liu’s son was good with a halberd and had chopped his hair off. Mr. Liu’s son had tried hard.

  The master was not listening. He was thinking of the time Mr. Liu offered to transfer what was left of her spirit into another wooden doll if he wanted and he had refused. He had remembered how the newly-awakened soldiers had reacted, as though they knew there would never be peace in a wooden body, and after all that fighting perhaps she deserved that peace. He could not give a name to what he had felt when she died. It was not grief. It was the floating sensation between losing your footing and falling into an infinite darkness. He had hung in the air for years.

  “You’re crying,” said the guest. “We can use some music. Maybe I can show you some of the things I used to do before.”

  The guest went to the door and went outside. The master heard him calling loudly for the servants to bring someone who could play something cheerful for the master.

  When the guest returned, he pulled the willowleaf sword out of its sheath. The master knew there was nothing else to understand about each other. But despite the calm in his mind, he wet himself under his robes as he watched the blade draw nearer.

  “You know this is right,” the guest said. “The world plays many tricks on us. For all of us who can’t fulfill our own plans for greatness, to be able to do the right thing is more than enough. This sword is for you.”

  “Please.”

  “Listen to me. Don’t cry. I’m being fair. I won’t have you defend yourself without a weapon.”

  The master sagged against his seat. The ammoniac odor of urine rose in the room. The guest took the sword, his hand closing over the blade unscathed, and handed it to the master, hilt first.

  The master refused it.

  “If it pleases you.” The guest placed the sword on the table and grasped the master’s neck. His fingers were cold and he began squeezing the master’s neck with a precise, mechanical gradation of strength.

  A knock on the door, timid and quavering, almost as if someone had been peeking through the lattice and had seen what was happening.

  The guest let go and the master fell from the chair, sobbing. The guest opened the door. A servant girl held a lute in her arms and she stared at him, lips pale.

  For a moment they stood in a triangle, the master on the floor, the guest by the door, and the servant girl on the verandah, all knowing that the roles had now been switched: the servant on the floor, the master by the door, and the guest on the verandah.

  “Your master would like some music,” said the guest as the master struggled to return to the chair. “Please.”

  The girl caught the urine smell and gasped. She began crying when she saw the sword on the table and the purple bruise marks around the master’s neck.

  “Play,” said the guest.

  The girl did, with trembling fingers, and did it very badly. The guest listened intently. The girl stared at the floor as her fingers played more wrong notes on the lute.

  The guest knew the folksong she was playing. He hummed along; his voice box made a sound like the rasping of a metal grate. Then he drew the sword from the table.

  He twisted his wrist, pantomiming the movements of the opera. He brandished the sword in slow, large arcs and lifted his legs with the music, dancing with the cruel innocence of a boy pretending to be a soldier. He sang about a young man climbing up a tree to pick nuts and a woman below with the basket calling him to come home. The mountain is beautiful, the river long, the sun is setting, and the birds have returned, come home, come home.

  The lute slipped from the girl’s hands. The master looked at the portrait.

  Ten minutes later, the guest left the study, the sword swinging by his hip. He returned to the yard where the master’s brushes were soaking in the jar of water. The guest took them out, smoothing the rabbit hair the best he could with his wooden fingers, and hung them on the cherry-colored brush rack to dry.

  * * * * *

  Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila and is working in Hong Kong. Her latest publications are or are forthcoming in venues such as Abyss & Apex, Lauriat, Philippine Speculative Fiction 7, and The World SF Blog. She is currently writing a script for a graphic novel.

  Ming Jie and the Coffee Maker of Doom

  Brent Nichols

  Meng Jie stepped into the kitchen of Gearfalcon Manor, heart thumping, fighting for calm. He had endured the harsh training of the Granite Palm Brotherhood and fought the assassins of the Black Dragon Gang, but he had not known true fear until he faced a modern coffee machine.

  He stared up at the gleaming mass of copper and steel. What eight hundred pounds of spinning gears and surging steam did that a hand-cranked grinder and a coffee pot couldn’t do was beyond Meng, but working for the world’s greatest inventor meant that life contained certain challenges.

  The machine had no fewer than seventeen brass levers on the front, none of them labelled. A mistake could mean far more than a bad cup of coffee. Carter never did anything on a small scale. This machine had enough power to destroy the house.

  Meng scowled and pulled the master pressure lever. Instead of sending their finest assassins after Carter, the Black Dragon Gang should drop by for a chat and ask for a cup of coffee. Sooner or later that would do the trick.

  The machine rumbled and Meng pulled several levers, bleeding off pressure into the secondary systems. The rumbling subsided, gears whirred, and Meng stepped back. The mechanical monstrosity deserved his unwavering attention, but he had other, equally pressing duties.

  He stepped into the corridor, closed the kitchen door, and listened. He heard the faint murmur of voices from Carter and his guests in the library. Beyond that, silence.

  Was that the hint of a breeze on his skin? Meng crept down the hall and peered into the drawing room. A window was open, a figure in black just wriggling u
nder the sash. Meng sprang forward, snatched up an ashtray, and clipped the intruder smartly under the ear. The black-clad body went limp.

  Meng left the assassin snoring and locked in a closet and headed back toward the kitchen, then paused outside the library door, listening.

  The smug, plummy voice of Lord Havisham said, “Two million pounds. My final offer absolutely.”

  Carter, his Canadian accent contrasting with the clipped British diction of his guests, said, “That’s very generous, but—”

  “What are the Chinese paying you?” Sir Henry interrupted. “Something in the range of a hundred thousand dollars, I hear. You can’t pass up two million pounds for that.”

  “Well, you see, I—”

  “I don’t think you’re seeing the big picture,” said Havisham. “Do you have any idea how important the opium trade is to the empire? Your airships are sailing right over our naval blockade. You’re making a joke of the Royal Navy! Come now, sir! If you won’t act from personal interest, think of your patriotic duty!”

  “I would love to help you,” Carter said. “But I can’t break my agreement with Peking. You see, we shook hands.”

  Meng trotted back to the kitchen, smiling. Carter could be incredibly exasperating, and he seemed to have less common sense than a rock lobster. Meng had thwarted five different assassination attempts, and Carter still thought he was nothing more than a butler. But Carter would keep his word in the face of massive bribes and mortal peril, and Meng loved him for it.