Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Are you still alive?”

  Beatrice fluttered the question away with a butterfly-like hand gesture. “Not relevant. It’s like that unresolvable philosophical game you can play. Am I someone else’s dream? Well, I’ve actually lived that game, and it doesn’t interest me very much anymore.”

  Howard looked around the room, expecting a sommelier to appear at any moment. “Where are we?”

  “My guess would be somewhere aboard the Nepthys. But I wouldn’t make any bets.”

  “And our next move?”

  “Is not ours to make. It’s his.”

  “The Transvaluator? Are you just using conventional pronouns? Or do you feel a maleness about him?”

  Beatrice looked embarrassed. “Oh, a definite maleness. At least in his relations to me, as he dreams my existence.”

  Obviously seeking to change the subject, she said, “He was born through the concatenation of forces we have no understanding of, during the collapse of the progenitor star that formed the hole and he’s lived here ever since, subsisting on infalling matter and energies, trying to puzzle out what lies beyond the inescapable event horizon.

  “Inescapable, that is, until the gravitic engine.”

  A deep fear gripped Howard. “The Transvaluator wants out? To wreak his mad changes on the universe at large? We can’t possibly help him do that!”

  “You don’t understand. He’s neither wholly good nor wholly evil, any more than one of us is. He’s just a being who’s trapped and alone! Besides, there seems some question as to how much power he will retain, once he leaves the special conditions here and enters the broken symmetry of the universe at large. It will probably take most of his strength and attention just to maintain his identity.”

  Howard lowered his head into the cradle of his hands. “What a mess …”

  Beatrice clasped one of his wrists. “Cheer up. It’s out of our hands anyway. Listen, let’s order a meal.”

  A red velvet menu appeared before each of them. Reluctantly, Howard picked up his, opened it.

  Every single item was labeled “My Story.”

  Howard snorted ruefully. “I guess,” he said, “I’ll try this,” tapping one line at random.

  The menu became a piece of yellow paper with nine numbered statements. Beatrice had vanished. Howard recalled Dante’s remark that his Beatrice was a Nine. Not symbolized by Nine, but was a nine.

  Howard read:

  I. In the beginning was the Collapse, which begat the Mind, and He could detect no others.

  II. Then He had his first Thought, and Mind and Thought lived in endless play, as She traced out all things with and within Him.

  III. They came to know there was a Universe beyond Them, which fed and sustained Them with a rain of food.

  IV. They longed to achieve Oneness with Their glowing source of Life.

  V. They turned Their source of Life upon itself so that They could have a play Universe of Their own, limitless mock Creation.

  VI. In the fullness of time, the Mind and the Thought exhausted Their play, and died away into a quiescence of boredom.

  VII. Then the First New Thing fell into Their dark tomb and by its disturbing symmetry awakened the Mind. At first He imagined it was a bad dream, and so erased it. Then the Second New Thing arrived, and He chose to study it. But in his ignorance and eagerness, He broke it.

  VIII. When the Third New Thing appeared, he knew he must learn to talk with it.

  IX. And this was the way: not to greedily subsume all into Himself, but to create a mediator, a space between Himself and the universe.

  Howard placed the paper carefully on the table.

  Beatrice reappeared. Howard noticed she was now wearing the green earrings.

  “You’re not real, are you?” asked Howard.

  “Not quite as real as you. But then again, what’s ten—or infinity—times zero?”

  Beatrice cocked her head, as if listening to something, then informed him, “The Nepthys is thirty seconds away from apogee. We reenter normal space then.”

  “And at that point the Transvaluator is free?”

  “Yes.”

  “And us?”

  “Wait and watch.”

  The restaurant vanished. Howard was whelmed in prismatic blackness, devastating and crushing, blanking his thoughts.

  After a period of no time, he became aware through highly sophisticated sensors of normal starfields all around him. The volume of space around the black hole was filled with Commensality ships, all eagerly awaiting the fate of the SCAM.

  A shout of glee blared across all bands, broadcast by the freed Transvaluator. Howard felt the immaterial Mind shoot across the universe, eager to play.

  And himself?

  Where was he?

  What was he?

  Slowly, he realized what the Transvaluator had done.

  The Nepthys had been amalgamated with the Object, a fusion of Wudoc and human technology and forms. And Howard’s self, his body long ago destroyed, was running on the platform of the AOI.

  He searched the mutated interior of the SCAM for companions. Alone. The Mind had left him intolerably alone! Then, up from out of Planckian inscrutability, the Wudoc shadowmatrix arose. In it, Beatrice was embodied.

  Don’t despair, she counseled gently. We have a job.

  Then he realized. There were innumerable black holes left to visit.

  And Minds to set free.

  My career began with Barry Malzberg.

  While still a college student, I sold my first story: a pastiche of Mister Malzberg’s work, great jeroboams of which I had deliriously imbibed. During the mid-seventies, Barry Malzberg was a dominant figure in the genre, his engaged, sardonic, prolific voice everywhere, hectoring the field of science fiction to new heights. Thirty years later he remains a master, his accomplishments gratefully acknowledged by the cognoscenti.

  The SF field being the tightly knit circle it is, as I became more and more a part of it, I found myself making the personal acquaintance of the man I had once so crudely imitated for a lark. Barry proved himself a big enough soul to forgive my youthful transgressions, and we soon came to call ourselves friends.

  The results of our friendship, on display below, seem to me somehow emblematic of a certain stage in my career. After three decades, I might just be done with my apprenticeship.

  Beyond Mao

  [written with Barry Malzberg]

  Halfway to Mars, Wu Yuèhai calls out to He Keung.

  He Keung is startled. More than startled, alarmed and shaken. Even terrified.

  In the close quarters of the Radiant Crane, a Shenzhou-11 module only three times the size of the compact Shenzhou-5 that lofted Yang Liwei into his historic orbit twenty years ago, there is no room for stowaways. He Keung and his two fellow taikonauts are jammed into quarters that even Mao on his fabled Long March would have found primitive and uncomfortable. The cockpit of the Radiant Crane is studded with instrumentation and storage lockers holding the ample supplies of freeze-dried shredded pork with garlic sauce on which the taikonauts mainly subsist. The three form-fitting chairs which double as bunks are separated by only centimeters.

  He Keung, occupying the middle of the couches, turns first to his left, to confront Huang Shen. A thin, ascetic figure, Huang Shen reminds He Keung of one of those dedicated cadre members you could see on old digitized newsreels of the Cultural Revolution, who would turn in his own parents for ideological trespasses. How such an archaic man—notable prior to this expedition mainly as the chief tax enforcer for Shanghai—came to arise in the twenty-first- century market-socialist China, which has been in existence since before any of the taikonauts were born, is a puzzle to He Keung. Perhaps such creatures are eternal, springing up despite external circumstances.

  Whatever the mystical explanation for Huang Shen’s origins, it is plain that the sober-sided, calculating man would not be the one to play a cruel practical joke involving the taping and disseminating through the ship’s cabin
speakers of Wu Yuèhai’s voice.

  That leaves Wang Yu, on He Keung’s right. Now, Wang Yu is a likely suspect. Burly and overfull of energy, the piggy-faced taikonaut has been renowned for his jests and japes since the days when he was a famous fighter pilot in the short war with Taiwan. Wang Yu has chafed on this long mission, finding little to occupy his enormous energies as the Radiant Crane hurtles under precise cybernetic control toward Mars. Yes, Wang Yu possesses the kind of coarse nature that would conceive of such a mean-spirited burlesque.

  Yet, He Keung recalls, Wang Yu was once romantically linked with Wu Yuèhai. He Keung himself saw the authentic flow of his comrade’s tears when Wu Yuèhai broke up with Wang Yu. There was no bitterness or desire for revenge then on Wang Yu’s part, only black despair. Surely he would not disgrace her memory in such a manner.

  The ventilation unit blows clammy air redolent of that uncontrollable HVAC mold-spore infestation over He Keung’s face, adding to his unease. Odd pinging noises from the skin of the Radiant Crane, evoked under the almost unimaginable stresses of interplanetary space, sound like the temple bells of some unearthly monastery.

  Discarding his only two suspects as agents of the jest, He Keung is left with a pair of equally repellent alternatives.

  Either He Keung is going insane.

  Or Wu Yuèhai is truly addressing him.

  From beyond the grave.

  For Wu Yuèhai is dead.

  The first female taikonaut perished in orbit during an unpredicted solar storm seven years ago. Her body riddled with radiation, her craft disabled by electromagnetic surges along its circuitry, Wu Yuèhai lasted for a week after the storm hit, broadcasting her final experiences to a world that hung on her every steadily weakening word. She became the very emblem of Chinese strength and courage, the shining symbol of both the triumphs and the necessarily harsh costs of the Chinese conquest of space.

  Like everyone in his generation of the taikonaut corps, He Keung idolizes Wu Yuèhai. He has had frequent dreams in which she figures, both erotically and heroically. True, she surfaces randomly in his thoughts every day, a beacon inspiring him onward toward Mars when his spirit flags.

  But this instance is different. He Keung can swear he actually heard her voice.

  And then, even as he seeks to replay the incident in his mind, Wu Yuèhai appears in the cabin of the Radiant Crane.

  The female taikonaut’s form is translucent, shimmering like a bad holo. Yet there is some indisputable element of vitality about the apparition, a sense of living interactivity and presence that would belie any mere recording.

  “I am come for you,” Wu Yuèhai says. She seems to be addressing He Keung directly. At least the others, drowsing almost narcoleptically, as they all three often do to pass the interminable hours, pay this apparition no regard. “You have been waiting for me, yes? All of your life?”

  Her face is radiant; her features now fully formed, well defined in the haze of the enclosure; if he did not know that she was dead, if he had not listened to her death agonies transmitted by private circuit long after the inspirational sections of her address had run out, he would have thought that she was alive. She beckons toward him. “Come with me,” she says.

  The situation is absurd. On his left in the module Huang Shen, dreaming of double-entry bookkeeping, arms folded across his chest, the little drafts of his breath stirring embers in the space surrounding; on his right in the Radiant Crane the formerly merry Wang Yu similarly gripped in slumber. The woman with whom he was rumored to have had liaisons—all in the name of China’s greater glory in space—drifts within two feet of him but he pays her no heed, no mind. Only He Keung seems to be alert to her presence, and yet her imminence, rather than stirring him as it had through all of the years he idolized her, seems rather to stun; he finds himself shifting toward lower levels of inhabitancy.

  “I have long been dreaming of you,” Wu Yuèhai says. “In all the stuffy and infinite volume of space, an empire vaster than any ruled by the Yellow Emperor. But only of you. You and you alone.”

  Her tone startles; it is the same lustrous, slurred enunciation with which she had called from the broken craft, the Lacquered Barge, announcing her travail, from the first jolt of the storm to the slow and unintelligible jargon with which some time later she announced the end of consciousness. Her voice in his ear had been like her voice all over the globe: personal, intimate, focused, as if she were drawing him not to her death but to her bed. It is this Wu Yuèhai whom he sees before him, and He Keung turns left and right again, sees his drugged or sleeping companions as they fail to remark upon this at all, and finally, feeling foolish-—as well he might—he speaks.

  “Why are you still alive?” He Keung says. “Why are you here? You died far from the Radiant Crane, locked in darkness. You were mourned. The Honorable Companion described the heavens as your shrine. There was mourning for three days. Now you are here. Is this you or have you only found the spirit of your ancestors to blame?”

  I am babbling, he thinks, I am not being scientific. I am not being precise. I am overwhelmed. I should be brave and decisive, like Lin Xiangru when he faced the fearsome King of Zhao. So much is depending on this flight, which will have repercussions that radiate throughout the Chinese economy and culture. Why, already action figures of the three taikonauts are available in the department stores of Beijing. Commemorative wristwatches bearing the likeness of the Radiant Crane are being sported by proud teenagers in the Tibetan province. A beer bearing He Keung’s visage on its label is being quaffed this very moment in Macao.

  “Watch this now,” Wu Yuèhai says. “Attend to the spirit of the Suns.” She bridges the distance between them and embraces him; even through the intelligent metal and sophisticated fabrics that swaddle him he can feel the force of that embrace. She is garbed in the simplest way, not in the equipment of space but almost as a courtesan. He Keung knows that he cannot be aroused, thanks to the antipriapic treatments enforced upon the taikonauts prior to the flight, but he finds himself mockingly considering what Wu Yuèhai’s embrace would feel like if he were aroused. There is no love in space, only engineering; that had been the link of their training. But this spectral clasp has been an utterly startling experience.

  “The Suns are revolving,” she says. “They are rotating within your spirit. I am infusing you with my portion of the Tao.”

  At any moment, He Keung knows, the two others will come to awareness and the situation will become uncontrollable. The accountant soul of Huang Shen will demand to know what his teammate is babbling about, what sensory derangements the youngest of the three taikonauts is experiencing. If He Keung reveals the truth of his encounter with the ghost of Wu Yuèhai, the others will surely clamp him into one of the American-made neural-restraint devices that the Radiant Crane carries as a precaution against just such a lunatic spree. (Nowadays the Americans excel at nothing so much as the “deaccessioning of transgressive personal liberties.” The Waldrop-McAuley Shock Carapace is one of their finest and most in- demand export products, rated with a 1.5 Hulk-disabling factor.) Nor can He Keung count on the jovial nature of Wang Yu to help him slough off any charges that Huang Shen might level. Wang Yu is only two years away from the iron rice bowl of retirement. He need only complete this mission, then adjourn to his state-owned mansion on the banks of the virgin lake formed by the Three Gorges Dam. Wang Yu will not jeopardize such a sweet deal to cater to the erotic, cosmic delusions of a youngster.

  No, he will have to lie to his teammates, tell them that he was merely reciting aloud the text of some fondly recalled Japanese manga, for his own amusement. (The music MP3s and compressed video files and engineering PDFs supplied by the National Space Administration have already palled for all of them, and they are only a quarter of the way in what will hopefully be a round trip.) But will his comrades believe such a shabby pretext? And if they do believe it, will they not still forevermore look askance at He Keung, as one who betrays the necessary vigilance and concen
tration demanded by this historic mission? (And yet dual supercooled cross-checking computers, no bigger than one of the many gold Olympic medals China will surely reap this year, are the real pilots of the vessel, at least at this uneventful stage.)

  Even as He Keung parses his options regarding his fellow taikonauts, Wu Yuèhai, squirming in his lap, renders both truthfulness and deceit moot by her next words.

  “He Keung, I can sense that your soul is fully invigorated by the immortal solar fluids which I have shared with you, a portion of the aetheric stellar radiation which did not end my life, but caused me to be reborn, along with the ministrations of the Tian Shi Yu. And now that your qi is flowing richly, I need you to terminate your fellows. They are a poisoned cargo you must jettison.”

  He Keung feels his heart stop beating, suspending itself for a seeming eternity, then hurl itself against his ribs like one of the oxen on his grandfather’s farm in Honan province, maddened by flies, running full tilt into a barn wall. To kill his comrades, the men with whom he trained so long and hard! He Keung recalls the weeks they lived in simulated Mars quarters in Antarctica, relying on each other for sheer survival. The time the two older men took him on a bawdy drinking binge in Hong Kong. What has either man done to deserve such a cruel end?

  As if half cognizant that their fates are being debated, both Huang Shen and Wang Yu stir fitfully on their couches, their respectively cadaverous and infantile cheeks bedewed with sweat. Their hair, though close-cropped, stirs under the ministrations of the personal blowers which prevent the carbon dioxide of their own exhalations from hanging around their faces in zero gravity and smothering them as they sleep. (How easy, simply to shut those fans off. What a reputedly comfortable death.)

  Seeking to delay the mortal answer he must make to Wu Yuèhai, recalling the proverb that advises, “When you want to test the depths of a stream, don’t use both feet,” He Keung seeks initially to unravel the mystery of her continued existence. “You claim the solar flux did not kill you, but instead brought new life. How can this be? And who are the Tian Shi Yu?”