The Apex Book of World SF Part 21

"Perfect," I said, slowly, staring at her.

She smiled. "You forget family does not always include ties of blood and flesh. Tell me why you came here."

"You know. Your mother hired me."

Her face darkened. "Yes. But you are no fool. You know the real reason. And still you came."

"You are in danger here," I said. "Wen Yi is looking for you. I need the proof you brought to your meeting with him."

She crossed her arms over her chest--one of them still moved awkwardly, and I guessed she had not completely healed from those gunshots. "Why?"

"Because I need to expose him."

"I could have exposed him at any time," He Zhen said. "I chose to come here instead. I am safe. I do not need you, Mr Brooks, or anyone else. This is a fortress safer than anything my mother could devise." She had moved toward the window; I followed her and saw, in the courtyard, Xuyans being dragged to their knees by burly Mexica. As I watched, the Mexica raised automatics and methodically shot the Xuyans in the head. "The White Lotus has no reach here, and never will have," He Zhen said.

"No," I said at last, feeling my stomach roil at the casual violence. He Zhen's face was still emotionless. "Tell me, was it worth the price, He Zhen? Was your safety worth that price? Tell me whether you're happy."

She smiled again, but there was bitterness in her expression. "Am I happy, moving from one arranged marriage to another? I do not know, Mr Brooks. Here I wield what power I can in the house. Here I am not sold like a piece of flesh to save the family fortune. What would you have done in my place?"

"I don't know," I said. "But if I had been your father, I wouldn't have let you be so bitter so young."

"But you are not my father. How fortunate." He Zhen moved between the gla.s.s cases, laying her hands over the beautiful codices. "You learn, you know. Living in my mother's house, you learn very fast."

"It mustn't have been so bad," I protested, moving to defend He Chan-Li through some obscure instinct.

She smiled again. "You know nothing. You are a lucky man, Mr Brooks."

"I know that your fiance tried to kill you. Do you find running away such an easy solution?"

Her face darkened again. "I am no coward."

"Then prove it."

"By coming back like a bird to the slaughter? I am no fool."

I sighed. "No, you are no fool. And yet what did you think you'd achieve, that night?"

She shrugged. "Foolish things. You are right. I thought I could break a marriage contract by myself. Life taught me otherwise."

"I can still get the man who shot you." I thought back to the picture of He Zhen her mother had given me, of the radiant, innocent smile, and knew that nothing I did would bring that back.

He Zhen looked at me with dead, emotionless eyes. "Why should I help you?" she said. "You came here to save your skin."

"I came for you," I said, knowing it to be a lie.

"I have no need of you."

"You've already said it."

"That does not make it any less true," she said. "Go away."

"No," I said. "I will not leave without proof."

"Go away. Find yourself a hiding place, Mr Brooks. Somewhere the White Lotus hasn't touched. They still exist." Her smile was ironic.

Once, ten years before, I had run away. I had crossed the border in the middle of the night with Mei-Lin by my side, going forth into the darkness with no idea of what I would find.

The world had shrunk since then. Mei-Lin had died, and I had traced my own path, to stand here, in the heart of the Mexica Empire, facing a girl who was no longer young. "I will not run away," I said, gritting my teeth. "I will see justice brought."

"Then you are brave," He Zhen said. "Foolish, as well, for all your words."

Perhaps she was right. But I could not walk away. I had not come all this way for nothing.

I had one last thing left--one last toss of the coin to convince her. "You may not care about what Wen Yi did to you, but others do."

"My mother?" He Zhen laughed--a sick, disabused laughter.

"You have a grandmother," I said, and saw her flinch.

But still she faced me, unmovable. "I had," she said. "Here it doesn't matter anymore."

I reached inside my pockets for the one thing I'd taken all the way from Fenliu to Tenocht.i.tlan: the jade pendant He Lai had given me, the one she'd said was He Zhen's favourite. Gently, I laid it on one of the gla.s.s cases and saw He Zhen's gaze sharply turn toward it.

"Your grandmother thought I should return this to you," I said. "She hoped I would not have to bring it back to her."

He Zhen said nothing. Her gaze had turned inward, as remote as that of a statue.

"What should I tell her?" I asked, softly.

"It doesn't matter," He Zhen repeated, with much less conviction. For the first time, emotion had come into her voice. She stared at the pendant for a whilst, biting her lip.

Then, slowly, agonisingly slowly, she reached out, snapped her hands shut around it. Her face still had no expression.

I did not speak, simply watched her wrestle with herself.

She said, at last, "Very well. You are a hard man to refuse, Mr Brooks. My servants will give you what you need. Do what you want with it. And then leave."

"Thank you," I said.

I walked back to the door in silence, leaving her standing before the open window, silhouetted in light. Beneath her, in the courtyard, lay the corpses of the White Lotus' agents.

When I lifted the curtain to exit the room, I heard her call me. "Mr Brooks?"

I did not turn around.

"I am not happy," she said, very quietly. "But don't tell her that. Tell her that I did the best I could, with the little I had. And that it will have to be enough. After all, isn't it the same, for everyone?" And for the first time I heard a sixteen-year-old bewildered girl, wondering if she had done the right thing.

I said nothing. In truth, I had no answer, and she must have known it. I walked away without looking back.

Before I left Greater Mexica, I went back to my hotel and used my connection to tinker with things. I forwarded the proof He Zhen had given me to the tribunal of Fenliu. I would have liked to send it in my own name, even to face Wen Yi myself and tell him who had delivered the final blow, but I knew this was foolishness. If I did this, there would be no safe haven for me in Fenliu, nor anywhere in Xuya. The White Lotus always avenged its own.

So to cover my tracks, I manipulated the router addresses until it looked as if He Zhen herself had sent the incriminating evidence.

It was the most satisfying thing I had done in a whilst.

As I drove back to Xuya, I followed the development of events with interest; although I wasn't in Fenliu, images of Wen Yi's arrest made the news even in Greater Mexica. The newscasters were betting on a strangling at the very least--Xuya did not joke with corruption of government officials.

In Fenliu, I dropped off the car back at the rental agency and took the mag-lev to He Chan-Li's house. I found her still awake, although it was the middle of the night.

She met me at the door, still dressed in her business suit. Behind her was her mother, He Lai, in the same traditional costume she'd worn when I'd come to the house. "Mr Brooks. You come at a difficult time," He Chan-Li said.

"I know." Leiming Tech's value had plummeted on the market, and the banks were withdrawing fast. "I came to tell you your daughter is well, but that she won't come home."

He Chan-Li's face did not move, but I could feel the hatred emanating from her. "She never did know what family was."

"No," I said. "Aren't you glad that she's alive?" But I already knew the answer to that. I knew why He Zhen had felt so oppressed in that house.

He Chan-Li said nothing; she turned away from me and walked back toward her house.

I was left with He Lai, who was quietly staring at me.

"I am glad," she said softly, as I pressed into her hands the other thing He Zhen had given me: a small pendant in the shape of the red lotus, the Xuyan symbol for filial devotion.

I asked, at last, "You were the one who erased the files on He Zhen's computer, weren't you? That's why she had to change the session from private to open, because otherwise the computer would have asked you for fingerprints."

He Lai said, not looking at me. "She is my only granddaughter. What else was I to do? Sometimes our paths take us far away from what seems truth, but they are still the ones the G.o.ds ordained for us." There were tears in her eyes, and she made no effort to hide them.

"I know," I said at last. "I'm sorry."

"Thank you. I'll see to it that you are paid."

"This isn't about money," I protested.

"Most things are," He Lai said. "You will be glad for it, trust me. Goodbye, Mr Brooks. I trust we will not meet again."

No. I did not think we would.

I rode the mag-lev back to my flat, staring at the patch of sky I could see between the skysc.r.a.pers. At this hour of the night, I was one of the only pa.s.sengers. I listened to the familiar whine of the train, like a symphony welcoming me home. I would go back to my flat, rise in the morning, and go again through the routine of my life, filling the days and nights as I had done since Mei-Lin's death. I wondered whether this was worth it, or whether I did it because I had no other choice. I wondered if it mattered, and thought back to He Zhen's words.

I did the best I could, with the little I had. And it will have to be enough.

Yes. It would have to be enough, day after day, night after night.

It would have to be.

"Excerpt From a Letter by a Social-Realist Asw.a.n.g"

Kristin Mandigma.

Kristin Mandigma is the founding president of a small non-profit organisation called Read Or Die, which promotes literacy and literary awareness in the Philippines. Her first story appeared in 2005 in the first Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology. She lives in Manila, where she works as a research a.n.a.lyst.

I apologise for this late reply. Our mail service has been erratic recently due to a spate of troublesome security-related issues. I don't think I need to elaborate. You must have read the latest reports. These government spooks are hopelessly incompetent but they (very) occasionally evince flashes of human-like logic. I expect it will only take them a matter of time before they figure it out, with or without their torturous diagrams, at which point I may have to seriously consider the advisability of having one of our supporters open another German bank account. As a diversion, if nothing else. And I have had nothing entertaining to watch on cable television (which I believe has also been bugged because it persists in showing me nothing but Disney) for a whilst. Just between the two of us, I do believe that if fatuous, single-minded politicians were not an irrevocable fact of life, like having to use the toilet, we would have to invent them.

Now, to your letter. I confess to having read it with some consternation. I am well acquainted with your penchant for morbid humour, and yet the suggestion that I might write a short "piece" for a speculative fiction magazine struck me as more perverse than usual. What on earth is speculative fiction anyway? I believe you are referring to one of those ridiculous publications which traffic in sensationalising the human imagination whilst actually claiming to enrich it by virtue of setting it loose from the moorings of elitist literary fiction? Or whatever? And for elitist, subst.i.tute "realist," I suppose. You argue that speculative fiction is merely a convenient "ideologically neutral" term to describe a certain grouping of popular genre fiction, but then follow it up with a defensive polemic on its revolutionary significance with regard to encapsulating the "popular" Filipino experience. To which I ask: as opposed to what?

I believe, Comrade, that you are conflating ideology with bourgeois hair-splitting. When it comes down to it, how is this novel you sent along with your letter, this novel about an interstellar war between monster c.o.c.kroaches and alienated capitalist soldiers, supposed to be a valid form of social commentary? I do not care if the main character is a Filipino infantryman. I a.s.sume he is capitalist, too. Furthermore, since he is far too busy killing c.o.c.kroaches in G.o.dforsaken planets on a s.p.a.ceship (which is definitely not a respectable proletarian occupation), his insights into the future of Marxist revolution in the Philippines must be suspect, at best. And this Robert Heinlein fellow you mention, I a.s.sume, is another imperialist Westerner? I thought so. Comrade, I must admit to being troubled by your choice of reading fare these days. And do not think you can fob me off with claims that your favourite novel at the moment is written by a socialist author. I do not trust socialists. The only socialists I know are white-collar fascist trolls who watch too many Sylvester Stallone movies. Sell-outs, the lot of them. Do not get me started on the kapre; they are all closet theists. An inevitable by-product of all that repulsive tobacco, I should say.

With regard to your question about how I perceive myself as an "Other," let me make it clear that I am as fantastic to myself as rice. I do not waste time sitting around brooding about my mythic status and why the notion that I have lived for five hundred years ought to send me into a paroxysm of metaphysical angst for the benefit of self-indulgent, overprivileged, cultural hegemonists who fancy themselves writers. So there are times in the month when half of me flies off to--as you put it so charmingly--eat babies. Well, I ask you, so what? For your information, I only eat babies whose parents are far too entrenched in the oppressive capitalist superstructure to expect them to be redeemed as good dialectical materialists. It is a legitimate form of population control, I dare say.

I think the real issue here is not my dietary habits but whether or not my being an asw.a.n.g makes me any less of a Filipino and a communist. I think that being an asw.a.n.g is a category of social difference--imposed by an external utilitarian authority--like s.e.xuality and income bracket. n.o.body conceives of being gay just as a literary trope. Do they? To put it in another way: I do not conceive of my biological const.i.tution as a significant marker of my ident.i.ty. Men, women, gays, asw.a.n.g, talk show hosts, politicians, even these speculative fiction non-idealists you speak of--we are all subject to the evils of capitalism, cla.s.s struggle, the eschatological workings of history, and the inevitability of socialist relations. In this scheme of things, whether or not one eats dried fish or (imperialist) babies for sustenance should be somewhat irrelevant.

I would also like to address in more depth your rather confused contention that the intellectual enlightenment of the Filipino ma.s.ses lies not in "contemporary" (I presume you meant to say "outdated" but were too busy contradicting yourself) realistic literature, but in a new artistic imaginative "paradigm" (again, this unseemly bourgeois terminology!). As I have said, I would emphatically beg to differ. Being an asw.a.n.g--not just the commodified subject, but the fetishistic object of this new literature you speak of--has not enlightened me in any way about the true nature of society, about modes of production, about historical progress. I am a nationalist not because I am an asw.a.n.g, but despite it. You only have to consider the example of those notorious Transylvanian vampires. No-one would ever call them patriots, except insofar as they speak like Bela Lugosi.

Before I end this letter, I must add another caveat: my first reaction upon meeting Jose Rizal in Paris during the International Exposition was not to eat him, as malicious rumors would have you believe. In fact, we spoke cordially and had an extended conversation about Hegel in a cafe. I do think that he is just another overrated il.u.s.trado poseur--brilliant, of course, but with a dangerous touch of the Trotskyite utopian about him. I prefer Bonifacio, for obvious reasons.

In closing, let me say, as Marx does, that "one has to leave philosophy aside." You must inure yourself against these pernicious novels about c.o.c.kroaches and s.p.a.ceships (and did you mention dragons? All dragons are either Freudians or fascists) for they can only lead you to a totalising anthropogenetic att.i.tude toward the world. Concentrate on the real work that needs to be done, Comrade.

(For all that, let me thank you for the sweaters. I can only hope you did not buy them in that cursed cesspool of superexploitation, SM Shoemart. It is getting quite cold here in America, hivemind of evil, and it has been increasingly impractical for me to fly out without any sort of protective covering.) Long live the Philippines! Long live the Revolution!

"An Evening in the City Coffeehouse, With Lydia on my Mind"

Alexsandar Ziljak.

Alexsandar Ziljak was born in Zagreb, Croatia. He is the author of the short story collection Slijepe ptice (Blind Birds) and is a three-time winner of the Sfera Award for best short story. With Tomislav Sakic he edited Ad Asta, an anthology of Croatian science fiction stories, and the duo currently edit the genre magazine UBIQ.

Maybe I shook them off. I don't feel them breathing down my neck anymore. I turn around, but I don't see them in the crowd.

The square is swarmed by people. I elbow through the sea of bodies, carried by the current of fear. Conversations, laughter, shouts are everywhere around me. It's supper time, and crowds gather in front of manna machines. In Gaj Street, the Bolivians drawl El Condor Pasa on their flutes and drums, wood and stretched skin bringing snow from the Andean peaks. Performers are dancing under the clock and in front of the Vice-Roy, not giving a s.h.i.t about ten degrees below zero. Nanopigments in their skins pour colours across naked bodies writhing through retro-industry at full volume. Hare Krishnas reach me from the Dolac. Their mantra collides with the flutes and ghetto blasters, mixing and merging into a bizarre noise of three worlds melted in the same pot.

I look at my wrist.w.a.tch. The Underground from Samobor arrived a couple of minutes ago and a new crowd spills out on the square, seekers of evening amus.e.m.e.nt in the metropolis core. I drown amongst people, one fish in the glittering school that moves to and fro, hiding me from gaping jaws.

A bunch of kids in fluorescent jackets buzz next to me on their roller skates. One of them almost runs down some babe, her skin violet, her snow-white hair reaching halfway down her back. The girl spouts obscenities after them, but the punks don't even hear her, their players at full pitch.

I walk across the square and find my refuge in the City Coffeehouse, a preserve of the Kaiser-und-Konig Zagreb tradition in the midst of the nano-Babylon. Also, a relatively good place for taking a break: they will hardly dare to off me here. Absent-mindedly, I order a cup of coffee. The real coffee, expensive: Brazil. Just a few plantations left, surrounded by vast rainforests.