by Neil Clarke
Zhu Dagun didn’t speak, only listened intently.
Prince Lu suddenly pulled open a drawer and took out a book. He read from it, “‘In the sixth month of 882 CE, the height of summer, Shang Rang led an army from Chang’an to attack Fengxiang. He had reached Yijun Camp when suddenly a great blizzard fell. Within three days, the snow was many feet thick. Thousands died or became frostbitten in the cold, and the Qi army retreated in defeat to Chang’an.’ Have you heard of this incident?”
“Huang Chao’s rebellion!” Zhu Dagun finally had an opportunity to add to the conversation. “Shang Rang was Grand Commandant of Qi. The story of the blizzard in the second year of Zhonghe is still oft told among the people. It’s recorded in the historical annals as well.”
“Exactly,” said Old Wang. “I’m a modern man, but I don’t have death rays or nukes or any kind of sci-fi weaponry, and I don’t have the Starship Enterprise or Macross to back me up. All I can do is use the scraps of knowledge I got from high school and college to alter this era as much as possible. It’s a historical fact that Song conquered Northern Han. In the vast majority of universes, the annals record that on the fourth day of the fifth month, the Song army took Jinyang and the Han ruler Liu Jiyuan surrendered. On the eighteenth day of the fifth month, Emperor Taizong of Song drove out all the city’s inhabitants and burned Jinyang to the ground. But here, I’ve already postponed these dates for more than a month. The Song army can’t stay here indefinitely; anyone can see that the primitive siege weapons of this era can’t break through the fortifications strengthened with my knowledge. Once the Song army retreats, history will be completely rewritten, and the universe will split, without a doubt!” He toyed with the little bottle of silver iodide and laughed delightedly. “And that’s without mentioning my new invention. This little thing is going to change history immediately and fill my observational platform’s fuel tank! The ancients believed in omens from the heavens more than anything. What could change history more than a snowstorm in the middle of summer?”
“Burn . . . Jinyang? Snowstorm?” Zhu Dagun said numbly.
“It’s easier to show than to explain! Follow me!” Prince Lu leapt to his feet and dragged Zhu Dagun by his sleeve to the room’s west wall. He pulled some mechanism, a hinge turned, and the entire wall suddenly fell outward to reveal a courtyard hidden among dense overhanging eaves. The blinding sunlight forced Zhu Dagun to squint; it took a few moments before he could clearly see the contents of the courtyard.
He was astonished. Laid out in the courtyard were many extraordinary things that he’d never seen before and didn’t know the names of. Several dozen East City Institute workers were laboring under the hot sun. They knelt to pay their respects when they saw the prince. Prince Lu smiled and waved a hand. “Continue. Don’t mind me.”
“We’re testing the hot air balloon,” Prince Lu explained, pointing at the workers in the middle of sewing cotton fabric. “I agreed to build an airship for the emperor so he can escape to Liao. An airship takes more time than this, but I’ll do what I can and build a balloon for now. When I came to Jinyang, I made a few flashy novelties and bribed some minor officials for an audience with the emperor. I told him I could make Jinyang impregnable for him, and he granted me the convenient title of Prince of Lu right on the spot. I have to repay that kind of generosity.”
They turned and came to a group of workers filling a cannon cast of black iron with gunpowder. “This cannon will be used to fire a cloud-seeding canister. Gunpowder isn’t strong enough a propellant, so we need the hot air balloon to lift the cannon into the air, and then fire it up at an angle. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the weather patterns lately. Don’t be fooled by how hot it is; the clouds that drift in from the Taihang Mountains every afternoon are full of cold air. By providing enough condensation nuclei at the right time, we can create a snowstorm out of nowhere!” Prince Lu grinned. “I sent the recipe over earlier. The chemical factory off-site is currently devoting all its resources to manufacturing silver iodide powder. It won’t be long before we can fill a cloud-seeding canister and load it into the cannon. We’ve already test-flown the hot-air balloon. All we have to do is wait for the right weather conditions!”
Zhu Dagun gazed up at the clear and fair sky. The sun shone like fire. The distant sounds of battle were fading; a magpie squawked from the eaves. A fire-oil carriage rumbled along a stone-paved road. The air smelled of blood, oil, and flatcakes. Zhu Dagun stood by the prince, unable to move, his mind in a muddle.
10.
The wall swung shut, returning the room to darkness. They ate a little. Prince Lu sent instructions to the city defense and the workshops through the internet, asking Zhu Dagun questions about alchemy as he worked. Zhu Dagun braced himself and spouted enough smooth-talk and nonsense to pass muster.
“Ah, I need to sleep. I pulled an all-nighter and I’m running out of steam.” Prince Lu stretched wearily and headed for the cot in a corner of the room. “Keep an eye out, will you? Wake me if there’s any news.”
“Yes, Your Highness.” Zhu Dagun bowed respectfully. He watched as Prince Lu lay down, pulled the brocade covers around himself, and soon began to snore. He let out a quiet breath and sat down, head spinning, to collect his chaotic thoughts.
Zhu Dagun didn’t understand everything Prince Lu had said, but he grasped the tone of his words clearly enough. The master of the East City Institute couldn’t care less about the Han dynasty or the people of Jinyang. He had come from a different land, and he would ultimately return there. He’d created his dazzling novelties and exotic toys to garner public support and earn money. He designed the internet to win over the scholar gentry and relay the East City Institute’s orders; he sold the fire-oil carriages, weapons, and fine wine to show goodwill toward the military; and the life-saving grain, deadly fire, and impossible snow were all, in the end, to further Prince Lu’s own selfish goals. Han Feizi had written, “Consider one who refuses to enter a dangerous place or fight in the army, who will not for the gain of all the people sacrifice even one hair on their leg . . . you have one who values life above all else.” Was Prince Lu not “one who valued life above all else?”
Something was fomenting inside of Zhu Dagun. His chest felt stuffed, his head swollen. His ears rang. He thought of what Ma Feng and Guo Wanchao, Liu Jiye, and the emperor had said. He thought of this state, this prefecture, this city, and the tens of thousands of living beings within. Liang, Tang, Jin, Zhou, and Han had taken the land in turn; Hu and Han were thrown together in this time of chaos. An inhabitant of this turbulent era, Zhu Dagun had once considered abandoning the brush for the sword and carve out some great undertaking. He’d settled in a quiet corner discussing philosophy all day long, not because he was lacking in strength or courage, but because he lacked for direction. The scholars frequently chatted of the grand principles of governing a state and bringing peace to the land. Zhu Dagun always thought that it was empty words, but what aside from their arrogant talk of the halcyon days of the Rule of Wen and Jing, the Restoration of Zhao and Xuan, the Golden Age of Kaiyuan, had they to while away their time? All he wanted was food, a bed, and a roof to sleep under; to spend his leisure time chatting and drinking; to be able to roll into bed after eating, express his aspirations online, visit the brothels when he had the money; to be at ease with the world. But in this era of chaos, to be at ease with the world in itself required swimming against the flow. Even a minor character like him had been dragged into a struggle for the survival of a country. At this moment, he held the fate of Great Han and the lives of everyone in the city in his hands. If he didn’t do something, how could he claim to be a scholar, one who spent twenty years filling himself with the words of sages?
Zhu Dagun pulled the fine steel dagger from his sleeve. He knew he couldn’t persuade Prince Lu because Prince Lu wasn’t a citizen of Han. Grand principles were a sham to him; only the six and three-tenths inches of steel in Zhu Dagun’s hand were real. In this moment, an idea floated into
Zhu Dagun’s mind, perfect in three ways. He slowly unfolded his large frame and stood, a smile hovering on the corners of his mouth. He stepped soundlessly across the floorboards and reached the cot in a few steps—
“What the fuck are you doing!” Prince Lu snapped up, eyes wide and staring. “I got bitten by a mosquito and got up to burn some bug-repelling incense. What are you doing here with a knife? I’m going to call my memmmph”
Zhu Dagun had covered Prince Lu’s mouth solidly, setting the dagger at his pale, tender neck. “Don’t make noise and I’ll leave you a way out,” he murmured into the prince’s ear. “Earlier, I saw you use the internet to move the East City Institute’s city defense forces. You had a row of wooden movable type in your text tray. Give me the type blocks and tell me your passphrase, and I won’t kill you.”
Prince Lu was a prudent man. He nodded frantically, his forehead beaded all over with sweat. Zhu Dagun loosened his fingers, allowing a gap. Prince Lu gasped and panted as he took the movable type of red-colored wood from his pocket and threw them on the cot. “There’s no passphrase,” he stammered. “My orders pass through a special line straight to the city defense camps and the workshops. No one can fake it . . . Why are you doing this? I’ve protected Jinyang and invented countless novelties for every facet of life for soldiers and civilians alike to enjoy. Everyone in the city loves me. Where have I wronged Northern Han, wronged Taiyuan, wronged you?”
Zhu Dagun laughed mirthlessly. “Empty words. You look out only for yourself, while I plan for the benefit of a city’s worth of people. First, I’ll order the East City Institute to stop the defense. Once the fire-dragons, pillars, and catapults have stilled, General Guo Wanchao will open the gates and welcome the Song army in.
“Second, Minister Ma Feng is waiting inside the palace. Once the city gates are open and the army is thrown into panic, he will persuade the ruler Liu Jiyuan to come out with his family and surrender. But I will take the emperor and help him escape in the chaos, aboard the so-called hot air balloon to the Khitans.
“Third, I will bind you and give you to Zhao Guangyi, trading you for the lives of the city’s inhabitants. The Song army has besieged the city for three months without success; the Song ruler must be filled with hate for you, the inventor of the city’s defensive machines. If I bring you to him bound hand and foot, he is certain to be greatly relieved and spare Jinyang from the sword. In this way, I will not fail Guo Wanchao, Liu Jiye, or the emperor, or the people in danger of terrible suffering. I can achieve both benevolence and justice!”
Prince Lu gaped. “What kind of crappy plan is that? Whose faction are you in? You’ve cut everyone else a sweet deal, but I get thrown to the wolves, huh? Do you have to be so extreme? Let’s talk it out; everything is open to discussion. All I wanted was to gather a bit of energy and go home. Does that make me a bad person? Did I do anything wrong? Did I do anything wrong?”
“You did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. No one did anything wrong. So whose fault is it?” Zhu Dagun asked.
Old Wang didn’t have a chance to come up with an answer to this profound philosophical question before the dagger hilt struck his forehead, knocking him unconscious.
11.
Wang Lu slowly regained consciousness, just in time to see the hot air balloon slowly rise above the roof of the main building of the East City Institute. The balloon was sewn from one hundred and twenty-five panels of thick lacquered cotton, with a basket woven from bamboo. The basket held a fire-oil burner and the heavy pig iron cannon. Three or four people were squeezed into the basket in clear disregard of weight capacity, but as the throttle opened and the flames roared, hot air swelling the balloon, the massive flying object continued its swaying ascent. The dark brown lacquer gleamed in the setting sun, the balloon’s long shadow stretching across Jinyang.
“It worked . . . it worked!” Wang Lu sat right up, laughing skyward. The north wind was blowing, the summer heat dissipating in its chill. Clumps of water-vapor-rich clouds were gathering in the sky, perfect weather for artificially inducing snow. The time traveler watched the balloon as it rose higher and higher into the heavens, muttering, “Not enough not enough not enough, two hundred meters higher and then it can fire, a little more, a little more . . . ”
He tried to stand and find a better angle to observe from, only to realize that he couldn’t move his legs. He looked down and discovered that he was tied onto a fire-oil carriage parked in the middle of the road. The driver lay slumped over in his seat, dead. He looked farther and saw that the road was covered in piles of corpses—Han soldiers, Song soldiers, and Jinyang civilians, all dead in a variety of ways. Blood flowed down the roadside ditch, moistening yellow earth that had lain dry for months. Crying, screams, and the sounds of fighting came from the distance, like the roll of thunder on the horizon. And yet Jinyang seemed abnormally still, except for the crows circling and gathering in the sky.
“Fuck, what happened?” Wang Lu yelled, trying to twist free. His hands and feet had been soundly tied; movement made the coarse fibers slice agonizingly into his flesh. The prince let loose a string of curses, panting roughly, afraid to struggle further. At this time, a cavalry troop shot down the street, their armor and uniform marking them as Song. The riders didn’t even glance at Wang Lu as their steeds galloped toward the East City Gate, trampling the corpses. A few snatches of conversation lingered in the air.
“—We’re too late! What do we do if our arrows can’t hit it?”
“—It’s not a south wind, but a north wind. It’ll never reach Liao. It’ll only be blown southward—”
“—Will we be blamed?”
“—Otherwise we’d be too late!”
“Hey! What are you doing! Don’t leave me here!” Wang Lu yelled wildly. “Tell your master I know physics and chemistry and mechanical engineering! I can build you a steampunk Song Empire! Hey, wait! Don’t go! Don’t go . . . ”
The hoofbeats faded. Wang Lu looked up despairingly. The hot air balloon was now a small dot high in the sky, drifting southward with the north wind. Bang. He saw the puff of white smoke rise a moment before the sound reached him. The cannon had fired.
Wang Lu’s eyes filled with the light of his last hope. He wrenched his head down, bit his clothing, and tore it aside, revealing the skin of his chest. A line of light glowed beneath his left collarbone: the fuel gauge for the observational platform. At the moment, it displayed red to indicate low power. The wave function engine required at least thirty percent to carry him back; snow in July would create a universe split that would fill his tank to at least fifty. “Come on.” He was crying, bleeding, talking to himself with gritted teeth. “Come on come on come on and give me a big fat blizzard!”
Each gram of silver iodide powder could generate more than ten trillion particles; five kilograms was enough to create all the ice crystals for a blizzard. It seemed ridiculous, that someone could artificially create snow in an era of such low technology, but perhaps the time traveler’s crazed prayer had been fulfilled: the clouds began to gather in the sky, roiling, pitch-black and restless, reducing the setting sun behind them to a thread of golden light.
“Come on come on come on!” Wang Lu roared toward the sky.
A rumble of thunder resonated to the horizons. First, rain fell, cold rain mixed with ice crystals. But as the ground temperature continued to drop, the rain became snow. A single snowflake drifted down, landed on the tip of Wang Lu’s nose, and instantly melted from his body heat. But right after it came a second, then a third, heralding their quadrillions of compatriots.
The drenched time traveler laughed heavenward. It was a proper blizzard in July, the snow coming down in clumps; he couldn’t wait to see the palaces, buildings, willows, and walls painted powder white. Wang Lu looked down and saw the gauge on his chest glowing green. The engine’s energy forecast had crossed the baseline; the moment this universe split into two, the observational platform would collect the energy and automatically activate. In a m
oment too brief to be assigned a unit, it would send him home to his warm 900 square foot apartment near the Beiyuan neighborhood roundabout, Tongzhou District, Beijing.
“This will be legendary,” Wang Lu said to himself, shivering. “I’m going to go home, find a less dangerous job, find a wife, squeeze my way onto the subway every day to go to work, and do nothing but play video games when I get home. I’ve had enough adventure for a lifetime, truly . . . ”
At the rate the snow was accumulating, it would have taken less than an hour to bury Jinyang under a yard of white. But right at that moment, twenty dragons of fire rose from the four directions.
From the dozen gates of West, Central, and East City, the fire-dragon chassis were spraying pillars of flame, accompanied by countless pig bladder catapults hurling fireballs. They were weapons of city defense he’d built with his own hands, weapons the Song army had feared more than any other.
“Wait a . . . ” The light went out of Wang Lu’s eyes. “No, are they burning Jinyang down anyway? At least they could wait a little, until this snow’s done . . . wait, wait—”
Thick, viscous fire-oil sprayed everywhere; flames roared heavenward. The fires spread with a speed beyond anyone’s imagination. Jinyang had been long under drought, and the precipitation called by the time traveler hadn’t the chance to soak into tinder-dry timbers.
The fire in West City began in Jinyang Palace, engulfing Xiqing Ward, Guande Ward, Fumin Ward, Faxiang Ward, and Lixin Ward in turn in a sea of flames. The fire in Central City set the great water wheel alight first, then burned west toward Xuanguang Hall, Renshou Hall, Daming Hall, Feiyun House, Deyang Hall. The East City Institute soon transformed into a brilliant torch. The snowflakes whirling above vaporized without a trace before they had a chance to land. The green light on the time traveler’s chest faded. He howled his grief and agony, “Motherfucker, I was so close, so close!”