Spirits Abroad, page 34
She would leave without saying anything. Siew Tsin could not bear it. “Please—”
“But you might as well know,” said Ling’en. A smile of pure pleasure spread across her face. “It will annoy Junsheng so much. I am going to find a sedan chair to take me home. Walk with me to the main street. I’ll tell you.”
Yonghua was sitting alone in the room where Siew Tsin had left her. She looked up when Siew Tsin came in.
“Junsheng’s gone to his study,” Yonghua said. “He seemed—”
She hesitated. Yonghua was exquisitely correct on the subject of their husband, as in everything else. But it was not clear what she thought of him.
“He did not seem happy,” she said.
“He and Ling’en can only fight when they are together,” said Siew Tsin. “Sometimes they do it through other people.”
Yonghua put her head on one side like a bird. “You do not seem happy.”
“Do you know why you were made?” said Siew Tsin abruptly.
Yonghua did not seem to think this a strange question.
“I was made to profit my makers,” she said.
This was true, of course.
“Do you know why Junsheng married you?” said Siew Tsin.
Yonghua cast down her eyes with the modesty befitting a young girl.
“I believe it is thought prestigious to own me,” she said. “I am very expensive.”
“Worth more than your weight in gold,” said Siew Tsin. Ling’en had said that.
Yonghua smiled. “Precisely.”
Ling’en seemed to have decided that Siew Tsin’s years of torpor came from an intelligent wish to stay out of trouble, rather than intense shyness. She had said:
“If you have as much sense as you seem to have, you would take care to avoid that machine. If you pretend ignorance, you might have a chance. But better than that, save up, or steal if you have to, and get away from that house. Let Junsheng go to—ah—paradise on his own. There’s no reason why you should be dragged into trouble with him.”
“Is that why you left?” said Siew Tsin.
Ling’en was so narrow-faced, high-cheekboned, and sharp-chinned that everything she did had edges. Her smile cut like a knife.
“I left because I knew we would be the end of each other if I stayed,” she said. “We were always too busy trying to save the other from becoming what we did not like. This way perhaps I’ll avoid Junsheng’s brand of salvation.”
“Yonghua, you are in danger,” Siew Tsin wanted to say now, but the door swung open and Junsheng appeared, restored to good humor.
“My precious, why are you sitting here in the dark? I am sorry I was cross. That useless old woman! She has found religion, and it is softening her mind. But forgive me. Come upstairs and entertain your old husband. My useless descendants have exerted themselves for once—we have a new wireless. You can show me how to operate it.”
Yonghua rose, murmuring disclaimers. Siew Tsin stayed where she was, just outside the circle of light cast by the lamp.
The light shining in through the windows turned the room a lurid red, smeared with shadows. Outside there was a dim cavern roof for a sky, black volcanic floor for earth, demons and spirits for neighbors. Despite their horse heads and bull faces, the demons of the tenth court were mundane creatures, pot-bellied and often flushed with liquor, courteous enough to the wife of a rich man. But the red light that filled hell made everyone look terrifying—human, demon, or otherwise.
It was not a world Siew Tsin would have chosen to live in. But she did not want to be reborn, either, any more than Junsheng did, any more than all the other spirits showering gold and favors on hell officials so that they could stay where they were. Rebirth entailed a true death, the severing of one’s memory and the loss of one’s self.
That day she sat in darkness for a long time, and only stirred when a paper maid called her to dinner.
Yonghua heard the attackers before Junsheng or Siew Tsin knew anything of it. They had been reading, Junsheng playing idly with Yonghua’s hair, Siew Tsin pretending not to be bothered.
Junsheng seemed to have realized that it pleased Yonghua when he included Siew Tsin. When he called Yonghua to him now he usually asked his second wife to come along, and they spent the evenings together, talking, reading and listening to Cantonese opera on the gramophone. He also seemed to enjoy the pretence of being a family.
Siew Tsin and Yonghua rarely spoke to each other on these occasions. Yonghua because she was the perfect wife and all her attention was on Junsheng. Siew Tsin because nobody could know of their friendship. Nobody could know how much Siew Tsin liked Yonghua.
This was their unspoken understanding. It was a shock when Yonghua breached it. She shook off Junsheng’s hand, sat up and said directly to Siew Tsin:
“You must leave now. They’re coming.”
Siew Tsin stared.
“What?” said Junsheng.
But Yonghua was already on her feet. She put her shoulder against an armoire and pushed it in front of the door while Siew Tsin and Junsheng goggled.
“That will slow them down,” she said.
She turned to Siew Tsin, picked her up by the waist, and—moving so quickly Siew Tsin barely had the chance to gasp—threw her out of the open window. Siew Tsin splashed into the ornamental koi pond just as the terra-cotta soldiers kicked the door in.
“Run!” called Yonghua. She slammed the window shut.
There were three attackers, Siew Tsin learned later. It was easy enough to find a terra-cotta warrior willing to be a mercenary—it was one of the few jobs they deigned to do, preferring most of the time to obtain their gold by force—but they didn’t take orders at a low price. They were expensive.
It was a rare assignation that could task the abilities of even a lone warrior. Terra-cotta warriors were made for fighting. They were inhumanly strong, nearly indestructible, and subject to none of the restraints that governed the behavior of humans or hell officials. They were built to protect the dead. Nothing frightened them.
Three terra-cotta warriors to murder or collect one rich man was overkill. But of course their employers had known about Yonghua. They had taken her into consideration.
Unfortunately for them, they had miscalculated.
It felt like an eternity to Siew Tsin before she managed to climb out of the pond, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Coughing, tears running from her eyes, she crawled to the window and pushed the shutters open. In her hurry, Yonghua had omitted to lock them.
A red clay face loomed out of the window. Siew Tsin almost screamed, but choked it down. She balled her hand in a fist, raised it—and realized that a large crack ran along the terra-cotta warrior’s forehead. She pushed at the head, and the body slumped sideways, lifeless.
Inside the room Junsheng was lying on the floor, his eyes closed. He must have been hit on the head—or thought it wise to feign unconsciousness. And Yonghua—
Yonghua was a blaze of color, a many-layered swirl of fabric, her preternatural silence a heart of stillness in a fluid world of movement. She slammed the heel of her palm into a warrior’s jaw, grabbed his arm and threw him. He crashed into the wall with the sound of a vase smashing to pieces.
Yonghua turned around, blocked the descending arm of the other remaining warrior, drew a hairstick from her head, and drove its sharp point into his neck.
The warrior staggered back, groaning. It was a strange noise, like the grinding of rocks. Even stranger were the words that could be distinguished amidst the groans.
“Sister,” the warrior said. “Sister, have mercy—”
Yonghua put her fist through his chest.
When she dusted off her hands, Siew Tsin saw that her knuckles were bleeding. She clambered through the window, stepping daintily to avoid the shards of terra-cotta warrior scattered around the room.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
Yonghua barely glanced at her bleeding hands.
“It’s just liquid,” she said. “See to Junsheng. Is he hurt?”
But he was stirring. He opened his eyes and gave Yonghua a pallid, pathetic look. She knelt by him, slipping an arm around his neck.
“You are not well,” she said.
“I am an old man,” he said.
Only 54 when you died, thought Siew Tsin, and you could pass for 40.
“In my youth I could have fought off these bandits. But I cannot take shocks like these anymore.”
He struggled to sit up. This was what Siew Tsin hated about men, she thought suddenly, to her own surprise. She had not realized before that she hated men. But she did, and this was one of the reasons why: this incessant demand for sympathy and interest from every woman in the vicinity. Junsheng did not like Siew Tsin, he did not even know her, and yet he was extending this appeal to her. It was a sticky thing, his need, with tentacles that would strangle her if they could.
Siew Tsin rejected it.
“You are bleeding,” she said to Yonghua.
The look Yonghua gave her was typically opaque, but it felt like a reproof. Siew Tsin was being too obvious.
“That isn’t blood,” Junsheng said. “It’ll be a solution dyed to resemble blood, but its function is almost purely ornamental. It helps oil her joints, but losing some of it won’t harm her. You don’t feel it at all, do you, my heart-liver?”
“Not at all,” said Yonghua. Her eyes passed unseeing over the remains of the terra-cotta warriors lying around them. Junsheng followed her gaze.
“Fools,” he said in low-voiced triumph. “You are a jewel—worth every tael I paid for you. They underestimated you. This will have cost them dearly.” He turned his head. “See, Siew Tsin, isn’t it as I have always said? This is what comes of religious mania—it clouds your vision. The man will succeed who allows neither bodhisattva nor demons to frighten him.”
But the self-interested see clearly, thought Siew Tsin.
Siew Tsin had believed that Junsheng had married Yonghua for vanity. She had not wondered why it had occurred to Yonghua’s inventor to create her. If you could make something that resembled a human and endow it with every grace and beauty possible, what else would you invent but an exquisite young woman? There would be a sure market.
“You think it is about money and face, and perhaps lust,” Ling’en had said the day Siew Tsin had followed her into the street to wait for her sedan chair. Ling’en had spoken amidst that heaving crowd of souls and bureaucrats as if she were discussing haircuts instead of conspiracy and rebellion, her voice unself-consciously clear. “But they are much more ambitious than that.”
Think, Ling’en had told her, what could you do with a thing that resembled a human body? Stronger than a human, more beautiful, and most importantly—immortal. Impervious to illness and the persecutions of demons alike. Such a thing was not pinned to the spokes of the Wheel, unlike the bodies of every natural thing. Rebirth did not apply to it.
As spirits, Ling’en and Siew Tsin and Junsheng felt alive. They ate and slept in houses with thatched and tiled roofs, as the living did. But everyone knew the sturdy-feeling walls, heavy doors, and solid roofs were paper. If they were taken out of the fragile unreal world in which they were suspended, every pleasure and pain of the flesh they believed they experienced would show itself to be an illusion. Light their afterlives with a spark and they would burst into flame—and vanish.
“We can last as long as our money and luck hold out,” said Ling’en. “But sooner or later some demon or god will take us away from ourselves and flush what remains into our next lives, whether we will or no. Sooner or later, we will die.
“But this man or woman, whoever it was who created our Yonghua—they asked themselves: What if we could transfer our consciousness into something that is not vulnerable to the demands of the Wheel? If there was something like that, it would render the idea of past lives and future lives obsolete. All lives would become one.”
“They want to become Buddhas?” said Siew Tsin.
“Without putting in the work,” said Ling’en. “There is a group claiming that they have found the secret of immortality. They have worked out a way to insert their minds into an immortal shell that does not need food or air to live, that is not affected by material things the way humans are.
“Once a person has locked their consciousness into this shell, their memories are sealed in with them forever. Even if the shell drank Lady Meng’s tea of forgetfulness, the mind would be untouched. The person could climb up into the living world again and live as themselves forever. They say to live in this shell is like being human, but even better.”
“How do you know about this?” whispered Siew Tsin.
“The revolutionaries asked me for money,” said Ling’en. She looked displeased. “Some fool among my servants has been talking too much. It seems people think I am rich enough that I could afford to buy an immortal body to live in. That’s why I came to see Yonghua. I would be a fool to buy without checking the merchandise first.”
“Yonghua is—”
“A trial. And an advertisement. A few hundred gold taels and my mind could be inserted into a body like hers. I must say she is stunning. The chance to have a body like that is very tempting to a woman my age.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Siew Tsin. “Where is her mind from?”
“It’s just some script they put in there,” said Ling’en. “They have not tried the process with any real mind yet. She is only a prototype.”
“And Junsheng has known this all along,” said Siew Tsin.
“His brain has grown soft from lack of use,” said Ling’en. “If only he’d started a business as I told him to when we first died. It would have kept him occupied. Being kept in style by his descendants has spoilt him. Now he is indulging in conspiracies and plots. We are too old for such things.”
“How much danger are we in, eldest sister?” said Siew Tsin.
Ling’en shrugged. “If I were a god, I would be angry at the audacity of mortals, trying to invent a new pantheon. Wouldn’t you? But it would be even worse if I were a hell official. It is not just my status that would be threatened. It is my livelihood. What would a hell official do if he did not have spirits to corral into the next life, or to bribe him to refrain?
“Junsheng is well-known enough that they won’t simply collect him and toss him into his next life. They don’t want the spirits to revolt, and they don’t want the rich men to stop paying out. But if they become desperate, they may use other means to get at him and Yonghua. You are not important—but they won’t notice if their spears pierce three instead of two.”
Siew Tsin had asked whether Ling’en was going to sign up.
“Hn!” said Ling’en. “Be tied to this mind for the rest of eternity? That is a worse hell than anything you could endure in the ten courts.”
“But . . . you’re still here,” Siew Tsin ventured.
Some of the old shrewishness returned to Ling’en’s voice.
“And you always do exactly what you should?” She shrugged. “Anyway, the plan will never work.”
“Why?”
“It’s bad theology,” said Ling’en. “This fool who created Yonghua was a reanimation engineer when he lived. You’ll never persuade me that someone who would do that job could have any understanding of religion.”
“A necromancer?” said Siew Tsin, using the English word. “I thought they were only in Europe?”
“This Chen Fei was trained in England. The rain in that country must have washed away all his sense,” said Ling’en. “Unlike us, Westerners are not content with feeding their dead regularly and putting in the occasional request for protection. They bottle the vital essence just before it escapes the bodies of the dead and insert this into automata, and put the poor creatures to work doing their drudgery for them.”
Siew Tsin’s jaw dropped. “But aren’t they worried their ancestors will punish them?”
“Westerners have different feelings about their ancestors,” said Ling’en. “They say the soul flies from the body at the moment of death, and the vital essence that clings to the corpse is nothing but energy.
“I suppose when Chen Fei died he expected the Devil to greet him in a top hat and tails. Instead he ended up here with the rest of us Chinese. So he has turned his hand to this—perverting the technology of our ancestors for his own vanity. Once he has raised enough funds to fix himself and his followers up with immortal bodies, I expect he will climb up into the world with his army and try to storm the Christian heaven—or the Royal Society, which is much the same thing to him.”
Siew Tsin could not imagine Junsheng putting himself out for membership of any society, heavenly or royal or both. She said so.
“No. But for self-interest?” said Ling’en. “My dear sister, who would not move the worlds for that?”
The day after the attack, Siew Tsin shut herself up in Junsheng’s library and read furiously.
If she had paid attention, she would have guessed what was going on. The clues were there. Junsheng had a startling number of books on automata, the qualities of terra-cotta as a building material, rebirth, and the soul. There were Buddhist scriptures, anthologies of Taoist tales of the Immortals, and motivational pamphlets on how to win friends and influence people.
And maps. Siew Tsin gave these her closest attention.
When she emerged, her head swam with information—philosophy fighting with topography, folktales entangled with engineering.
It had all been there, laid out like dishes on a banquet table. Junsheng had not even taken care to hide which books he had been reading: they were stacked on the desk and scattered on the floor. He’d written notes to himself in the margins and folded over significant pages. If Siew Tsin had had half the ordinary curiosity of the average sentient being, she told herself, if she’d bothered to peep in one or two of these books, she would have found out what Junsheng was up to.
