She raised her fists and swung them toward him, as if shooting a puck with a phantom hockey stick.
“You’re fair game.”
The girl’s head snapped back. She coughed once, and began speaking her native language again. The crowd turned away.
Marta? Answer me.
Prajapati tugged on his sleeve. “It’s late. Walk me home. We’ll take the shortcut.”
She took his arm again, pretending to need it for balance on the rocky path, but in truth she was holding him up. Han Song and Paul trailed behind, talking in low voices.
Marta? Marta!
She answered before they got to top of the ridge.
Sorry, kid. I was in a closed-session meeting. Total privacy veil.
Are they coming for me?
What? No. Is there a problem in Paizuo?
Zhang Lei groaned. Prajapati looked at him sharply. Worry lines creased her plump face.
They know who I am. What I did.
Who knows?
Everyone. And all their relatives. From all over. Dorgon told them.
That’s impossible.
He grabbed his viewcatcher, pinched off the last ten minutes of data, and fired it to her.
Watch this.
The path descending the ridge was treacherous, lit by nothing but stars. If he’d been alone, Zhang Lei would have run down the ridge. If he fell and broke his neck, he deserved it. But the oldsters needed his help.
He took Prajapati’s hand—warm, dry, strong—and used the fill flash on his viewcatcher to light each step while Han Song shone the brighter light from his camera down the trail. The two oldster men helped steady each other, Paul’s hand on the photographer’s shoulder. When Han Song slipped, Paul caught him by the elbow.
Yeah, okay, Marta whispered. Someone figured out who you are and told the girl. I’ll talk to the security team. Don’t do anything stupid, okay? We’re on this.
When they got to the studio, Paul fetched a bottle of whiskey from his room. He poured four glasses and handed the largest one to Zhang Lei.
“I found the news feed from Luna a couple days ago,” Paul said. “But I didn’t tell anyone.”
“I found the painting,” said Prajapati. “I wasn’t looking for it, but the sofa was in the wrong place. I showed it to Paul and Han Song. It’s effective work, Zhang Lei. Palpable anguish.”
“If you want to keep something private,” said Han Song, “don’t put it in the common areas.”
“None of us told anyone,” Prajapati added.
“So, how did the story get to the Miao girl?” Paul asked. The other two oldsters shook their heads.
“Jen Dla?” Han Song ventured.
“I’ll ask her in the morning.” Prajapati patted Zhang Lei’s knee. “Try to get some sleep.”
The whiskey burned Zhang Lei’s throat and filled his sinuses with the scent of bonfire. What kind of messages would you send from beyond if you could? Vengeance. Dorgon had watched and waited for his opportunity. The news would travel fast. Brawler teams were searching the county for him.
Zhang Lei poured the rest of the whiskey down his throat.
“When they come for me, keep hitting my disable button,” he said.
The three oldsters exchanged confused looks. A whirring sweeper bot bumped Zhang Lei’s foot. He nudged it away with his toe and headed for the stairs.
Don’t be so dramatic, Marta whispered.
“When who comes for you?” Prajapati asked.
“Let them do whatever they want to me,” he said. “Don’t put yourself in danger. But if you can, keep knocking me out. Please.”
Marta sighed. Honestly.
You, too. Keep hitting the button. Whatever they do to me, I don’t want to know about it.
He climbed the stairs two at a time. If his life was about to crushed under the boots of a Lunite brawler gang, there was only one thing he wanted to do.
The scarred face of the new moon glared through the high windows of the communal studio. Zhang Lei chose the largest of his prepared canvases and flipped through his viewcatcher compositions. The water buffalo lying in the stream. Jen Dang catching a fish. Ripening rice terraces under golden mist. Jen Dla carrying a pot of sour fish soup, a lock of hair stuck to the sweat of her brow.
The fighting cocks in their cages, separated by the corner of a house, their torn flesh healing only to be sliced open another day.
He flipped the canvas to rest on the long side and projected the composition on its surface. How to make the three-dimensionality of the scene clear in two dimensions—that was the main problem. Each cock each knew the other was just out of sight. If they could get free, they would fight to the death.
It’s in their nature, he whispered.
What nature? Marta asked. Oh, I see. Are you going to paint all night?
I’ll paint for the rest of my life.
Okay, ping me if there’s a problem.
First, he drafted with a light pencil, adjusting the composition. The corner of the house dividing the canvas into thirds, with one caged brawler directly in front of the viewer and the other around the corner. It was a difficult compositional problem—he had to rub out the draft several times and start again. Then he began a base layer in grays, very lean and thin. What the old masters called en grisaille. Solve the painting problems in monochrome before even thinking about color. The texture of the wooden walls of the house, the figures of the birds filling the canvas with belligerence. It took all night.
A few hours before dawn, Han Song brought him a cup of tea.
“That’s good,” he said, squinting at the canvas. “I’ve got some pictures of those birds, too.” He settled at his workstation and sipped his own tea as he ruffled through his files. “You can use them for reference if you want.”
A package hit Zhang Lei’s message queue—the only communication he’d received since leaving Luna that didn’t relate to his immigration status. The photos were good. Details of the cocks’ livid faces and dinosaurian legs, the pinfeathers sprouting from their bald backs, the iridescent sheen of their ruffs.
He added crimson and madder to his palette and used Han Song’s photo of the cock’s flayed wattle to get that detail exactly right, then moved on to the next problem. He thinned the paint with solvent to make a glaze. No time to wait for fat oils to oxidize, for thick paint layers to cure. In places, the paint was so thin the texture of the canvas showed through. That was fine. He would never be a master painter, but this would be the best painting he could make.
His friend’s photos helped. Gradually, color and detail began to bring the painting to life.
“Thank you,” Zhang Lei said, hours later. Han Song didn’t hear him. Prajapati smiled from across the studio, her hands caked with clay to the elbow.
“Don’t skip lunch,” she said. “Even painters need to eat.”
“And sleep,” Paul added.
Sleep. He had no time for it. And Dorgon was in his mattress, behind his door, in his closet. He would join Dorgon soon enough, and next year, when Paizuo’s rice crop had turned yellow, they could scream public challenges at each other through a Miao girl.
Until then, there was only the work. Work like he’d never known before. As an athlete, he practiced until instinct overtook his mind. On the ice, he didn’t think, he just performed. In the studio, he used his whole body—crouching, stretching, sweeping his arms—continuing the action of his brush far off the canvas like a fighter following a punch past his opponent’s jaw. And then small, precise movements—careful, considered, even loving. But his intellect never disengaged. He made choices, second-guessed himself, took leaps of faith.
It was the most exhausting, engrossing work he’d ever done.
The eye of the cock flared on the canvas, trapped in the pointlessness of its drive to fight and fight and die. Zhang Lei hovered his brush over that eye. One more glaze of color, and another, and another, over and over until nobody looking at the painting could misunderstand the meanin
g of that vicious and brainless stare.
Paul put his arm around Zhang Lei’s shoulders.
“Come on down to lunch. The painting is done. If you keep poking, you’ll ruin it.”
“Ruin yourself, too,” said Han Song.
“He’s young, he can take it,” said Prajapati.
They fed him rice and egg, bitter green tea, and millet cake. No fish soup. No Jen Dla.
“She’s giving birth,” Prajapati explained. “Went into labor last night. Brave woman.”
“We should break out Paul’s whiskey again,” said Han Song. “Drink a toast to her.”
Paul laughed. “Maybe. We have something else to celebrate, too.”
They all looked at Zhang Lei. His mouth was crammed with millet cake.
“I don’t know. What?” he said though the cake.
“Your button is gone, dear,” Prajapati said gently.
He swallowed, pinged his ID. Zhang Lei, Beijing resident. No caveats, no equivocations. And no button.
Marta, he whispered. Is it done?
The notice has been sitting in your queue for half an hour. I pinged you when it came through. Looked like you were too busy painting birds to notice.
Are the brawlers gone? he whispered.
They’re on their way home. They can’t touch you now and they know it. I don’t recommend going to Luna anytime soon, but if you did and there was a problem, at least you could fight back.
Zhang Lei excused himself from the table and stumbled out of the guest house. He skirted the cabbage patch and followed the trail to the pavilion, with its perfectly composed view. Up and down the valley, farmers walked the terraces, examining the ripening rice.
How? You said it would be weeks, at least. Maybe never.
I took your painting directly to the tribunal.
That made no sense. His painting was upstairs in the studio, on his easel.
They were impressed, Marta added. So was I.
I don’t understand.
The wet blood. Smart move. Visceral. The tribunal got the message.
Blood?
On the ice. They brought in a forensic expert to examine and sequence it. That gave me a scare because I had assumed the blood was yours. Didn’t even occur to me it might be somebody else’s. If it had been, things wouldn’t have turned out so well.
My blood?
I guess the tribunal wanted to be convinced you regretted killing Dorgon.
Zhang Lei leaned on the pavilion railing. A fresh breeze ruffled his hair.
I do regret it.
They know that now. I’ll keep the painting for you until you get a place of your own. So keep in touch, okay?
I will, he whispered.
On the terrace below, Jen Dang walked along the rice paddy with four of his grandchildren. The farmer waved. Zhang Lei waved back.
The author acknowledges the generous support of the Future Affairs Administration and Danzhai SF Camp.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Hannu Rajaniemi is the author of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, The Causal Angel, and a stand-alone novel, Summerland. Rajaniemi was born in Finland and completed his doctorate in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh. His works have received Finland’s top science-fiction honor, the Tähtivaeltaja Award, and The Quantum Thief was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science-Fiction Novel. He is the CTO of HelixNano, a synthetic biology startup based in the Bay Area, where he currently lives.
Jacob Weisman is the publisher at Tachyon Publications, which he founded in 1995. He is a World Fantasy Award winner for The New Voices of Fantasy (co-edited with Peter S. Beagle) and is the series editor of Tachyon’s critically acclaimed novella line, including the Hugo Award–winning The Emperor’s Soul, by Brandon Sanderson, and the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award–winning We Are All Completely Fine, by Daryl Gregory. Weisman has edited the anthologies Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature, The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (with David G. Hartwell), and The Treasury of the Fantastic (with David M. Sandner). He lives in San Francisco.
The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 40