Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Law, Lucas K.

  Hitomi blinked and found herself in a small warm room with a beige-carpeted floor. She was leaning against a wall that smelled faintly of peaches. An old Japanese woman stood beside her and patted her hand. “The baby’s feet are coming first, but we can do this together.”

  Hitomi didn’t ask any questions, her body screamed to get the baby out, and she didn’t care how. The old woman’s voice sounded familiar, and she followed her instructions for when to push and stop. All that mattered was having this baby. Finally, she felt a huge rush of relief as the baby left her body. The old woman caught the baby and carefully took the umbilical cord from around its neck. She gently patted it on the back until it cried like an angry kitten. The old woman beamed with pride and placed the child in Hitomi’s arms.

  Hitomi wept as she took in her baby’s thin body, fuzzy golden hair, and brown eyes. “Momotaru, I love you.”

  The lights floated in the corners of her vision again, and they whispered to Hitomi of timeline rules and their limits of bending them. The room went dark again as Hitomi kissed her baby. The old woman pressed a buzzer on the wall and screamed for help—and then in a blink, she disappeared and only a tiny bright light remained. Darkness completely took over Hitomi’s surroundings, and the lights encircled her. “Remember you are not alone, and you are always loved.”

  Journal Entry: Today is the day

  Aya,

  Thank you for everything. You and Melody will make wonderful parents.

  With eternal gratitude and love,

  Hitomi

  My Left Hand

  Ruhan Zhao

  I never believed in Fate, yet on my way to the Beijing Institute of High Energy Physics this morning, I couldn’t help but go straight to the old fortune teller sitting at roadside.

  The old man had chosen an unexpected place to set up his stall. He was surrounded by several of the most advanced research institutes of science and technology in the world. How dare he hawk his cheap tricks to those scientists? Yet strangely enough, he seemed to be doing good business just about every day. In fact, several of my colleagues said that his predictions were amazingly accurate.

  Of course, I didn’t buy any of this nonsense. I didn’t believe the future could be told, and I never bothered to speak to him.

  But today was different: a precarious task awaited me at my institute. Maybe he was for real, maybe he wasn’t. I didn’t know, but I knew I needed some comfort, and I hoped he could ease my nervousness.

  I stood in front of the stall. The beautiful beams of morning sunlight were just touching the treetops, and I could hear birds singing in the distance. There was no one around except me. It was still early. I might be his first customer.

  The stall was simple. A large piece of white cloth spread out on the ground in front of the seated old man. In the middle of the cloth was a Tai Chi symbol. A Chinese antithetical couplet was painted along two sides of the cloth:

  Knowing the heaven and the earth;

  Telling the past and the future.

  The old man looked like a typical fortune teller (if there is such a thing): very thin, white hair, and a long silver beard under his chin.

  “You want to know your fortune?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He studied my face. After a while, he nodded slowly and said, “You have a square face with a wide mouth and broad forehead. This is a noble face bestowed with a good fortune. Your whole life must be smooth and well.”

  Every fortune teller had the same approach. If someone worked in a famous institute in the nation, he must have a “smooth and well” life. I knew that.

  “You are reaching a crisis in your work,” he continued. That was surprising. We were performing a crucial experiment today, one that might change my life, no matter whether it was successful or not. But how could he possibly know it?

  I thought about it for a while and then started to understand. I had never gone to this fortune teller before. Why should I come today? Obviously because I was in the middle of a crisis. I was on my way to my institute. It was logical for him to guess that the crisis was about my work. He was clearly very perceptive and skilled at observing people. No wonder people told me he was good.

  “Let me look at your palm,” the old man said.

  I stretched out my hand.

  “Not this one. The left hand, please.”

  Left hand. Of course. Man left, woman right. A man’s fate could only be told from his palm-prints on the left hand. Every Chinese person knew the rule of palm-print reading. How could I have forgotten? Embarrassed by my blunder, I offered him my left hand.

  The old man pulled my hand closer with his emaciated hands, and read my palm-prints carefully. He concentrated so intently that he looked like a scholar studying a reference book. His eyes were so close to my palm that I wondered if he had a vision problem and had left his glasses at home.

  Suddenly, his expression changed. He raised his head and looked straight into my eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “There will be a disaster at your workplace today,” he said, staring at me and pronouncing each word carefully. “Don’t go to your institute.”

  That got my attention. Telling me I was in a crisis might be a simple guess—but telling me that a disaster awaited me didn’t seem like a simple fortune teller’s trick. The experiment scheduled for today was indeed very dangerous—but how could he know? How could he be so sure that it would go wrong? Was he really able to tell the future? Should I believe him and go home? No, that was ridiculous. He was just some street mountebank, and I had important scientific work to do. The experiment was vital to our research, and a positive outcome would produce a long-awaited scientific breakthrough. I couldn’t simply withdraw based on the work of an old man on the street.

  Besides, I’d never really believed in fortune telling. I was a scientist. He was a charlatan or, at best, a good guesser. Mystifying people was part of his job. He probably wanted to scare me, to predict a disaster to see my reaction. It didn’t take a genius to guess my work was dangerous. He knew I was working in the Institute of High Energy Physics. He had already guessed correctly that my work was in crisis. He had probably observed that I was anxious and nervous when I approached him. He probably put all that together and guessed—not predicted, but guessed—that I’d be involved in a disaster. If I was frightened away from my work, no one would know if his prediction was right or not. Later he might tell other people that he saved my life. It would certainly be good for business, especially if I confirmed it. If I didn’t go to the institute, if we didn’t run the experiment, who could know if it would have ended in a disaster? He was on safe ground, not me.

  “How did you know that?” I asked, trying not to sound too serious.

  “Look.” The old man pointed to my left hand. “Your life line and career line are very close to each other. They are also long and clear. This shows that you are very successful in your work. However, there is a short and deep line cutting through both of these lines. From the position of this short line, I can tell that today, something disastrous will happen to you. It will terminate not only your career, but also—your life!”

  “Are you saying that I will die today?”

  He nodded. “I beg you: do not go to work today.”

  This was too much. I couldn’t stand this nonsense anymore. I took out a ten-yuan banknote from my pocket and dropped it next to him. Then I stood and walked toward my institute.

  “You must not go there today,” shouted the old man.

  I stopped, turned around, and smiled at him. “Thanks. But I am a scientist. I believe in science. We don’t tell the future, we build it.” Then I walked away, feeling his sad gaze following me to my building.

  Although I didn’t believe in fate and mysticism, I did feel uneasy after this incident. However, after entering the institute, I was soon immersed in the preparations for our experiment and became completely oblivious to what the old man had told me.

/>   The experiment was designed to test a revolutionary theory made by our project leader, Dr. Fang Shi. The theory postulated that if a certain group of particles with extremely high energy entered into a super strong magnetic field, the particles would stimulate a distortion of the space-time continuum in the field and then generate a gateway to a space parallel to ours. If a person happened to be placed in the distorted field, he would fall through the gateway and enter the parallel space.

  We had already sent a cat to another space and successfully retrieved it. We named that animal “Schrödinger’s cat.”

  The subject for today’s experiment was not a cat. It was a man.

  And the man was me.

  There was no lack of volunteers for today’s experiment because his or her name would be written into historical books. I was thrilled when Dr. Shi chose me, possibly as a reward for my years as his closest assistant.

  The machine was huge and complicated. Staff members worked around it like ants and bees. I wore a special suit and entered the hall with Dr. Shi, who seemed much more nervous than me as he reviewed all the details. The others were eerily silent. Many of them had dedicated their time and energy to this experiment, for which the institute had invested an astronomical amount of funding. If it failed, the whole institute would probably be shut down.

  The final minute arrived. I shook hands with Dr. Shi and walked toward the round plate in the centre of the hall. I stepped on to the plate and stood at the very centre of a big Tai Chi symbol.

  The symbol reminded me of the old fortune teller and his stall. I didn’t believe in fate, but who could prove that fate didn’t exist? Maybe someday an Einstein or a Hawking would discover the principle of fate hidden in a quantum equation. I thought about the old man’s prediction. Would the experiment fail? Would I die?

  The machine started to hum. The operators’ fingers skillfully danced over keyboards. The super magnetic field began to generate. I felt a sudden dizziness. The Tai Chi symbol on the plate began to rotate, whirling faster and faster until it was a blur. I could not distinguish Ying and Yang of the symbol anymore. All I could see were black and white circles rotating like crazy. Suddenly, I heard a tremendous explosion in the air, and then a dazzlingly bright light shot toward me. Before I knew what had happened, I lost consciousness.

  When I woke up, I found myself lying on the Tai Chi symbol. Dr. Shi and the other members of the research group stood around me, observing me with deep concern.

  “How do you feel?” Dr. Shi asked. “Are you all right?”

  My head was burning like hell. The other people helped me to sit up. I stretched my arms and legs. They seemed to be okay.

  “All right, I suppose,” I answered. “How was the experiment?”

  “It is much more important to know that you are fine. Our experiment—unfortunately—failed,” replied Dr. Shi. “You didn’t reach that other space. All the high energy particles and the strong magnetic field did was knock you out. At first, we were afraid you were dead.”

  Although he seemed more concerned about me than the experiment, he couldn’t hide his disappointment. He had planned this experiment for most of his career, and he had been so close to succeeding. We had checked every technical detail, and we all believed that it would succeed. The failure was devastating because we couldn’t possibly afford to try again. We were finished. All of our efforts were for nothing.

  I suddenly recalled the words of that old fortune teller. He was right that my career would end today, but I didn’t die. I had bet my life against the old man. I was still alive after the accident, so I won. I laughed out loud.

  Dr. Shi and the others stared at me in surprise. For a minute, they must have thought that I had contracted some mental disorder under that strong magnetic field. I stood up and assured them that I was fine.

  After cleaning all the mess from the experiment, I decided to take off early. When I walked out the front door, the old fortune teller’s stall was still there, so I walked over to it.

  “Hey, look at me!” I said. “I’m still alive!”

  The old man raised his head, his eyes wide with wonder. He stared at me as if looking at a ghost.

  “This is impossible! You must be dead at this moment!”

  “Is that your wish?” I said with an amused smile.

  “Why would I wish your death? I was telling the truth from your palm-prints. I have never been wrong in my reading.” The old man’s voice was shaking. “Give me your hand. I want to see it again.”

  I smiled and stretched my left hand out to him. The old man hastily grasped it and began examining. After a while, he raised his head and stared at me, puzzled. “This is not the palm I saw this morning.”

  I pulled my hand back and looked at the palm-prints. A chill went through my whole body. The career line and the lifeline were far away from each other, and there was no trace of any shorter line cutting through them.

  Of course, I was familiar with my palm-prints. The prints on this palm were not the prints of my left hand.

  They were the prints of my right hand.

  I quickly checked my right hand. The career line and the lifeline were close to each other, and a short line cut through them. Those were the prints from my left hand! My left hand and right hand had been switched!

  I felt a mix of terror and excitement. As a physicist, I immediately understood the reason.

  Imagine a being living on a plane. If it wants to jump to another parallel plane, the only way to get there is through the three-dimensional space. But if, instead of going to that other plane, it flips itself over in the three-dimensional space, and goes back to its own plane, then its left and right sides will become reversed—which was exactly what had happened to me. My left and right hands had been switched. The only explanation was that I had jumped from our three-dimensional space into the four-dimensional space, and then flipped over in the four-dimensional space . . .

  I turned around and dashed toward our institute, leaving the perplexed fortune teller behind.

  Maybe his fortune telling was accurate. Maybe his prediction about me was true. But my left hand was not my original left hand anymore. My fate had been changed through the fourth dimension.

  I didn’t have time to explain this to the old man. I was not sure who the winner of this battle of fate was: science or fortune-telling. I was not sure what other parts of me had been changed in the fourth-dimensional space, nor did I care. All I wanted to do at this moment was to find Dr. Shi and tell him that our experiment hadn’t failed after all.

  DNR

  Gabriela Lee

  The process was simple: each citizen of the Philippine Protectorate carried an ID card. It had the person’s name—an unfortunate relic from their Spanish colonial past—and the person’s designation, a serial number for accessing the public info terminals across the colony, and an “In Case of Emergency” contact number. Beneath these, in very small print, depending on the citizen, were the following words: “In case of termination, DNR.”

  However, Melissa had an unfortunate habit of leaving her ID in her office cube. She hoped, sometime in the future, she would remember to bring it in case she would ever breathe her last oxygen-recycled breath. Not that it would be too much trouble to figure out her place of work: the white lab coat, with a stylized caduceus on the breast pocket, was enough to remind people that she worked at the Hospice.

  She would receive ten, maybe twelve DNRs, that needed processing during a nightlight shift at the Hospice. She knew that Helen usually dealt with more during the daylight cycle. The colony was thriving, and they could afford to lose more and more bodies in an effort to achieve population balance. Even though the Protectorate was established off-world almost fifty years ago, people were still afraid.

  The rapid expansion of the population, thanks to a mix of conservative government procedures and religious fervour, helped cause the collapse of Old Metro Manila and the surrounding provinces during the first of the Great Tremors. The
interim government in Davao City, down south of the Philippines, quickly began sending colonists off-planet to establish a protectorate; every other Southeast Asian nation was already crawling across the Milky Way. Plans were made and scrapped and planned again, and after ten years, the Bakunawa Class-3 ship, carrying both human and terraforming loads, started flying to Mars.

  Melissa was on that trip. Her landing papers showed that she was a recent medical school graduate. The hospital where she worked planetside said it would be easier to find her a placement off-planet if they fudged her papers; her face was still fresh enough to seem like it belonged to a twentysomething graduate. But in reality, she figured it would be a new chance at a life, a way to look at the world again, especially after her own world had recently fallen apart. She carried nothing but a single bag; she didn’t have anything else she wanted to save.

  Nowadays, Melissa would reflect on the irony that even though they were on the cusp of almost zero waste throughout the entire Martian protectorate, people would still hang on to the vestiges of their past lives. Unlike Helen’s office cube, hers was pristine and sparse. No projections of family members on the wall or plastic plants that bounced to solar energy or even a reminder pad. Melissa fastidiously kept her desk that way, especially after her early years as a field med in the colony, when she was part of the team that would respond to DNRs at their home cubes. She could still remember one of her first DNR cases: Mrs. Melendez was found behind a stack of old Songhits magazines that she managed to smuggle off-world. God knows how. They had to sift through a small mountain of crumbling newsprint and lyric sheets to find the old woman and take her to the hospice to process her DNR.

  It rattled Melissa’s senses to find the corpse—and Mrs. Melendez was without a pulse when they finally found her—still clutching one of her faded magazines to her breast, as though the pages held the answers to all of life’s mysteries in their stained-ink glory. Even when they transported the dead woman back to Natural Resources and lifted her on the metal gurney, even as Melissa slowly opened up and examined the body for the final pathology report (“Cause of death: cardiac arrest”), she couldn’t help but feel irritated at the woman. After all, she could have easily prolonged her life for a good five, ten years if she had followed colony instructions properly and hadn’t smuggled useless contrabands into her cube.