by Yoon Ha Lee
“I’m not lying!” Dr. Marx snapped, goggle-eyed with feigned innocence.
Keel knew what was going on. He wanted to give her the slip and find a v-hovel where he could swap good feelings with his old angel buddies. Keel knew.
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she said.
The Slash was a squalid mining town with every vice a disenfranchised population could buy. It had meaner toys than New Vegas, and no semblance of law.
Keel couldn’t just ask around for a treatment house. You could get hurt that way.
But luck was with her. She spied the symbol of a triangle inside a circle on the side of what looked like an abandoned office. She watched a man descend a flight of stairs directly beneath the painted triangle. She followed him.
“Where are we going?” Dr. Marx said. He was still a bundle of tics from angel-deprivation.
Keel didn’t answer, just dragged him along. Inside, she saw the “Easy Does It” sign and knew everything was going to be okay.
An old man saw her and waved. Incredibly, he knew her, even knew her name. “Keel,” he shouted. “I’m delighted to see you.”
,It’s a small world, Solly.”
“It’s that. But you get around some too. You cover some ground, you know. I figured ground might be covering you by now.”
Keel laughed. “Yeah.” She reached out and touched the old man’s arm. “I’m looking for a house,” she said.
In Group they couldn’t get over it. Dr. Max Marx was a fizzing client. This amazed everyone, but two identical twins, Sere and Shona, were so dazed by this event that they insisted on dogging the wilson’s every move. They’d flank him, peering into his eyes, trying to fathom this mystery by an act of unrelenting scrutiny.
Brake Madders thought it was a narc thing and wanted to hurt Marx.
“No, he’s one of us,” Keel said.
And so, Keel thought, am I.
When Dr. Max Marx was an old man, one of his favorite occupations was to reminisce. One of his favorite topics was Keel Benning. He gave her credit for saving his life, not only in the jungles of Pit Finitum but during the rocky days that followed when he wanted to flee the halfway house and find, again, virtual nirvana.
She had recognized every denial system and thwarted it with logic. When logic was not enough, she had simply shared his sadness and pain and doubt.
“I’ve been there,” she had said.
The young wilsons and addiction activists knew Keel Benning only as the woman who had fought Virtvana and MindSlip and the vast lobby of Right to Flight, the woman who had secured a resounding victory for addicts’ rights and challenged the spurious thinking that suggested a drowning person was drowning by choice. She was a hero, but, like many heroes, she was not, to a newer generation, entirely real.
“I was preoccupied at the time,” Dr. Marx would tell young listeners. “I kept making plans to slip out and find some Apes and Angels. You weren’t hard pressed then—and you aren’t now—to find some mind-flaming vee in the Slash. My thoughts would go that way a lot.
“So I didn’t stop and think, ‘Here’s a woman who’s been rehabbed six times; it’s not likely she’ll stop on the seventh. She’s just endured some genuine nasty events, and she’s probably feeling the need for some quality downtime.’
“What I saw was a woman who spent every waking moment working on her recovery. And when she wasn’t doing mental, spiritual, or physical push-ups she was helping those around her, all us shaking, vision-hungry, fizz-headed needers.
“I didn’t think, ‘What the hell is this?’ back then. But I thought it later. I thought it when I saw her graduate from medical school.”
“When she went back and got a law degree, so she could fight the bastards who wouldn’t let her practice addiction medicine properly, I thought it again. That time, I asked her. I asked her what had wrought the change.”
Dr. Marx would wait as long as it took for someone to ask, “What did she say?”
“It unsettled me some,” he would say, then wait again to be prompted.
They’d prompt.
“‘Helping people,’ she’d said. She’d found it was a thing she could do, she had a gift for it. All those no-counts and dead-enders in a halfway house in the Slack. She found she could help them all.”
Dr. Marx saw it then, and saw it every time after that, every time he’d seen her speaking on some monolith grid at some rally, some hearing, some whatever. Once he’d seen it, he saw it every time: that glint in her eye, the incorrigible, unsinkable addict.
“People,” she had said. “What a rush.”
First published in Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, 1998.
About the Author
William Browning Spencer was born in Washington, D.C. and now lives in Austin, Texas. His first novel, Maybe I’ll Call Anna, was published in 1990 and won a New American Writing Award, and he has subsequently made quite a reputation for himself with quirky, eccentric, eclectic novels that dance on the borderlines between horror, fantasy, and black comedy, novels such as Resume with Monsters, Zod Wallop, and Irrational Fears. His short work has been collected in The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories and The Ocean and All of Its Devices.
Gold Mountain
Chris Roberson
Johnston Lien stood at the open door of the tram, one elbow crooked around a guardrail, her blue eyes squinting in the morning glare at the sky-piercing needle of the orbital elevator to the south. The sun was in the Cold Dew position, early in the dog-month, when the temperature began to soar and the sunlight burned brighter in the southern sky. Summer was not long off, and Lien hoped to be far from here before it came. As the tram rumbled across the city of Nine Dragons, she turned her attention back to her notes, checking the address of her last interviewee and reviewing the pertinent bits of data from their brief earlier meeting.
Lien had been in Nine Dragons for well over three months, and was eager to return home to the north. She didn’t care for the climate this far south, the constant humidity of the sea air, the heat of the southern sun. Nor did she have much patience for the laconic character of Guangdong, the endless farms stretching out in every direction, the slow and simple country wisdom of the southern farmers. Lien was a daughter of Beijing, the Northern Capital, and was accustomed to the hustle of crowded city streets, of nights at the Royal Opera and afternoons in ornamental gardens, of dashing officers of the Eight Banners Army and witty court scholars in their ruby-tipped hats. Nine Dragons, and the port city of Fragrant Harbor across the bay, was filled with nothing but rustics, fishermen, district bureaucrats, and workmen. The only people of culture who came through were travelers on their way to Gold Mountain, but they passed through the city and to the base of the orbital elevator while scarcely looking left or right, and before they’d had time to draw a breath of southern air into their lungs were onboard a gondola, rising up along the electromagnetic rails of Gold Mountain, up the orbital tether of the Bridge of Heaven to the orbiting city of Diamond Summit, thirty-six thousand kilometers overhead.
Johnston Lien was a researcher with the Historical Bureau of the Ministry of Celestial Excursion, and today she’d make her final site visit and collect the last of the data needed for her project. She was part of a group of scholars and researchers given the task of compiling a complete history of the early days of space exploration, beginning with the inception of the Ministry of Celestial Excursion under the aegis of the Xuantong Emperor in the previous century, and continuing straight through to the launch of the Treasure Fleet to the red planet Fire Star, which began just weeks before. The history was to be presented to the emperor in the Northern Capital when the final ship of the Treasure Fleet, a humble water-tender christened Night Shining White, departed on its months’ long voyage to the red planet.
The tram approached the eastern quarter of Nine Dragons, where the buildings of Ghost Town huddled together over cramped streets, before the city gave way to dockl
ands, and then to the open sea. Lien returned her notes and disposable brush to her satchel, and chanced a slight smile. She’d already made initial contact with this, her final interview subject, and once she’d finished with him, her work would be complete. She could return straight away to the Inn of the White Lotus, pack up her things, and board a Cloud Flyer back to the Northern Capital. Once she’d filed her findings with the chief of her bureau, she’d be able to return to her regular duties—and more, she’d be able to return to her own life.
The tram reached the easternmost point of its circuit, the driver ringing a bell to announce the last stop. Lien released her hold on the guardrail and hopped to the cobbled street, a few sad-faced old white men making their careful way down the tram’s steps behind her. As the tram reversed course and made its way back toward the west, Lien walked up the narrow street, under an archway crested by a massive carved eagle, through the gates of Ghost Town.
Most of Lien’s days, these last months, had been spent within the wall of Ghost Town, among the old Vinlanders, the “white ghosts.” This was a bachelor society, with only one woman for every ten men. She’d gotten to know more than a few of them, over the long months, as nearly all of them had been involved in the construction of Gold Mountain, the three thousand kilometer-tall tower which rose to meet the orbital elevator, the Bridge of Heaven. Some of the old men had been more helpful than others. Some of them had reached such an advanced age that they couldn’t even remember the year in which they were born, nor their own mothers’ names. When asked, they would simply mutter, “It was too long, too long ago,” in their guttural English. They were hollow men, these old Vinlanders, leaning against cold walls or sitting on empty fruit crates, patiently waiting for death to claim them. They were used up, discarded, and they made Lien uncomfortable in her own skin.
Lien had worked her whole life to overcome the stereotypes and misconceptions most Chinese had about Vinlanders, even those like her who had never set eyes on the homeland of their forefathers. Lien’s grandfathers and one grandmother all arrived in China in the middle of the last century, and her father had been born in China. Ghost Town, full of men and women who fit every preconceived notion of the “white ghost,” was a reminder to her of how far her people had come in China, and how far they had yet to go.
Lien had only been sent to Guangdong province because she spoke English, the native dialect of the Vinlanders. Her parents had insisted she learn the language, as her maternal grandparents had never learned Mandarin, nor Cantonese, nor any other Chinese dialect. She resented her grandparents for this, embarrassed by their refusal to acclimate. She seldom spoke to them when she and her sister were children, and even less as an adult. When her grandfather passed away, just the previous summer, she had not talked to him in nearly ten years. Lien didn’t even attend the funeral ceremony, claiming that her duties at the Historical Bureau prevented her attendance. Her mother had yet to forgive her for this breech of etiquette.
Her last discussion with McAllister James had been brief, but he seemed more lucid and communicative than most of the old-timers she’d interviewed over the previous months. She anticipated a short discussion with him this morning, and with any luck she’d be back in Beijing by the week’s end.
At the northern end of Ghost Town, Lien came to the building where her subject lived. To reach his small room on the top floor, Lien had to climb the rickety stairway, up passed the foul smelling Vinlander restaurant on the ground floor, from which the odor of grits, hominy and meatloaves constantly poured, and a small clinic on the second floor where a medicine man still tended to the injuries and ills of Ghost Town with his strange western remedies. At the top floor landing, she found herself at the end of a long, dimly lit hallway, with doorways crowded on either side. Lien checked her notes one final time, confirming the address, and made her way to the correct door.
The old man who answered the door looked at her with barely disguised suspicion, as though he didn’t recognize her.
“Mister McAllister?” Lien said, speaking in English for the old man’s benefit. “McAllister James? I am Johnston Lien, if you recall. We spoke last week at the market, and you agreed to speak with me for a brief while?”
The old man narrowed his watery eyes, and nodded slowly. Opening the door wide, he stepped out of the way, and motioned Lien inside. When she was through the door, he shut and locked it behind her, and then returned to a threadbare sofa in the far corner of the room. Lien crossed the dusty floorboards to a dining table and chair, the only other furniture in the room.
“May I be seated?”
The old man nodded, and Lien arranged herself on the chair, spreading her notes on the table in front of her.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” Lien said, bowing slightly from the waist. The old man just watched her, his expression wary.
McAllister James, in his early eighties, matched the name of “ghost.” He seemed spectral, intangible. The few hairs that remained on his liver-spotted scalp were wispy and white, his ears and nostrils grown enormous with the advancing years. He had only a few yellowed teeth left, stained by years of whisky and tobacco—the white man’s vices. The skin of his face, neck, and arms was covered with the scars of the flowering-out disease, smallpox.
“You’re going to pay, yes?” the old man said brusquely, the first words he’d spoken since she arrived. “To hear me talk?”
Lien nodded.
“Yes, there is a small honorarium, a few copper coins as fee for your trouble.”
“Show me,” he said.
With a sigh, Lien reached into her satchel, and withdrew a half dozen coppers, stamped with ideograms indicating good fortune, with a square hole bore through the middle. She arranged them in a neat tower at the corner of the table.
“There,” Lien said. “Is that sufficient?”
The old man sat up slightly, peering over the edge of the table at the coins. He caught his lower lip between his gums, thinking it over for a moment.
“Alright,” he grunted. “I’ll talk.”
“Very well, Mister McAllister. When we spoke at the market, last week, you mentioned that you were one of the first Vinlanders to come to China, and that you worked on Gold Mountain straight through to its completion. Is that correct?”
The old man leaned back, and arranged his skeletal hands in his lap.
“Well, I don’t know that we were the first, but we must have been pretty damned near.”
“We?”
The old man got a far away look in his eyes. A shadow passed briefly across his face, and then was gone.
“My brother and me,” he explained. “We came here together, when we were young. And now there’s just me, and I’m long past young.”
My father was a sharecropper on a Tennessee cotton plantation, McAllister said, in Shelby County, just north and east of Memphis. The year the Chinaman came to town, we’d lost more than half of the crop to boll weevils, and we stood ready to starve. The Chinaman told us about work on the Gold Mountain, across the seas. Steady work and high pay for anyone who had a strong back and was willing. You didn’t have to ask us twice. Michael—my brother—and I signed up on the spot, got a few pieces of copper for traveling expenses, and we were on our way.
Now, it wasn’t that Michael and I were all hot on the notion of China. We liked things just fine in Tennessee, if there was money or work to be had. But there wasn’t. In China, at least, we’d be fed three squares a day, and would make enough coin to send home to feed the rest of the family. Michael and I left our parents and two sisters behind, and went with the Chinaman down to the river, along with a dozen or so other young men from Shelby County. I never heard from my parents again, but a few years back my youngest sister’s son wrote to me in Nine Dragons, inviting me to come back to Tennessee to live with them. By that time, though, Vinland was leaning a bit too close to the Aztec Empire for my taste, not under their rule but near enough as made no difference, and I didn’t have any i
nterest in living under the bloody shadow of the Mexica. No, I stayed right here in Ghost Town, where the only shadow that falls on me is that goddamned tower—Gold Mountain—and that line going up to heaven. We helped build that tower, my brother and me. It cost Michael his life, and cost me damn near everything else.
I was just eighteen when we rode that paddle steamer down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexica, where a China-bound freighter was waiting for us. Michael wasn’t yet sixteen, and celebrated a birthday somewhere on the long sea voyage from the eastern shores of Vinland to the dock in Fragrant Harbor.
A lot of men died on the way over, though its not something a lot of us like to talk about. We were packed in the holds below deck cheek-to-jowl, and were lucky to get slop and water once a day. More often than not, though, the water had gone bad, or there were bugs in the slop, and what with the waves and the motion of the boat the food would either come back up or else rush too fast out the other end. When we rounded the tip of Fusang, down there in those cold reaches of the southern sea, the boat got to rocking so badly that our hold was near ankle deep in the spew and offal from the men. One man whose name I never knew shat himself to death, after swallowing amoebas or some such in the tainted water, but the ship’s crew left his soiled corpse in the hold with us for nearly a week. When, years later, we finished construction on Gold Mountain, and work was scarce, a lot of men talked about going back to Vinland in one of those ships, taking their savings with them. I couldn’t credit it, why anyone who’d been through an ocean voyage like that would willingly make another. I suppose that’s one reason I stayed here in China, even after all that happened. I don’t think the smell of those weeks has ever left my nostrils, not even these long decades later.
In any event, Michael and I made it to Guangdong more or less intact, where work was already underway on Gold Mountain. It was 1962 by our calendar, the 54th year of the Xuantong Emperor by the reckoning of the Chinese, and though Vinland had been a satellite state of China for just over a century, there’d been only a handful of Vinlanders who’d emigrated to China in all that time. I know Michael and I weren’t the first to come, but we weren’t too far behind.