Time Travel Omnibus, page 1178
“Be careful.” Jingjing looked at him as though she wanted to say something more. Then she withdrew, leaving him alone in the room.
The patterns in the ceiling changed. Now they resembled undulatus asperatus, the roiling clouds before a storm.
Welcome, Mr. Du. We’ve been observing you for some time. It’s good to finally meet face to face.
The voices, speaking in sync, were androgynous.
“Great to . . . meet you too. But I must confess that I don’t understand the purpose of this meeting.”
The parameters of your behavior model have been displaying some wild swings in the last few weeks. We cannot explain such shifts unless you are harboring doubt. Your doubts, unresolved, may become everyone’s doubts.
“I doubt I’m as influential as all that.”
Lets get to the point then. You’re threatening our entire value system.
“I think . . . I’m just not used to this new way of life.”
A sudden feeling of absurdity seized Ruofei. He was literally trying to justify monogamy to the ceiling.
No. You’re doubting the very foundation of this world. That is why your body is showing signs of rejection.
“I’m not—”
Look at yourself!
Countless faces appeared on the ceiling.
The refined, handsome, perfect faces drifted across the ceiling like tentacleless jellyfish. Each was a face that Ruofei had tried at one time or another. At this moment, all the mouth corners drooped and eye corners stiffened, smiling in that empty, anguished, false manner.
Pained, Ruofei lowered his eyes. But beneath his feet was another familiar but also strange face. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
Because you’re special. You bear a responsibility to this world.
“I’m nothing more than an outcast who won the lottery. I had no choice.”
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Right? Why can’t you perform your role as an idol like you’re supposed to?
Ruofei began to laugh. He couldn’t help it.
“No, you’re the fool, sitting up there on your throne in space like some despot of old. Your people are tired of this life of endlessly chasing the latest and newest. They can’t see a future in it. They want another possibility.”
And you’ll provide them that?
“I’m only speaking the truth from my heart.”
The ceiling dimmed, as though the speaker at the other end of the link was deep in thought. The pause grew so long that it became suffocating.
Ruofei leaned against the wall and sat down. The whole room glowed with an anxious red.
We’ve made a mistake in our calculations concerning you. We have to correct the error.
“What correction?” Ruofei realized that he could no longer move his feet.
A minor surgery lasting only a few minutes. You won’t feel a thing.
“Don’t even think about it!”
Ruofei fought against the invisible force immobilizing him, but the more he struggled, the more stuck he became. Suddenly, some force dragged him toward the center of the room and held him there. From far away he heard knocking noises as well as the faint voice of Jingjing.
“Jingjing! Help!”
A smooth tentacle dropped down from the ceiling, nimbly twisting as it sought the brain port at the base of Ruofei’s skull.
“I’d rather be killed by the fanatics from the Three-Legged Crow!” Ruofei grimaced and dodged the tentacle.
All of a sudden, the mysterious force disappeared. Ruofei collapsed to the ground.
How can you—
Before the voices could finish, the floor beneath Ruofei whorled open. He was pulled into the hole, and, as though guided by a transparent tube, slid through the many floors in the tower like a bullet shot down the central column. Faster and faster he plunged, and he felt his innards flattened by the acceleration until, with an abrupt turn, he fell into endless darkness.
As he suddenly sped up again, he lost consciousness.
Ruofei was watching a film starring himself. All of the scenes were so strange, so illogical, as though cut from films from different genres in different periods, spliced together randomly, and then played back as a long, under-cranked reel.
He saw himself being stuffed into a silver hover car by people dressed in black. The hover car then swept with incredible speed through mountains, valleys, tunnels, highway recharge stations, streets and alleyways until it reached a beachside concert that had just ended, with scattered bottles and cans on the sand, simulhol dispensers, quick-mold masks, aphrodisiac sticks, and used injectors glinting everywhere like seashells. A speedboat rushed toward the coast, hopping over the waves.
The black-clothed people carried Ruofei onto the speedboat. Like a twitching sperm, the speedboat raced toward a large ship in international waters. He was lifted high by a crane and then gently deposited into a coffin.
Men and women dressed in elegant clothing from a bygone age sat around a stage, among them a beautiful man who smiled at him, revealing shell-like teeth. Spotlights swung to focus on the coffin at the center. After a drumroll, the coffin cover slowly slid open, revealing his sallow, deformed old face. The audience called for him to smile. He obeyed, and sustained applause followed.
Music, champagne, dancing, singing . . .
A beautiful woman led him through the narrow and twisted hallways of the ship. Just before they entered her cabin, another woman stopped them. The first woman shouted in rage, and summoned sailors to tie up the second woman, stuffing her into a large cask. Apparently the first woman was the captain’s lover. Ruofei stared at the woman in the cask, thinking that she seemed somehow familiar. Before they pushed the cask off the side of the ship, the woman inside cried. Suddenly, Ruofei realized that the woman’s face was one of the many once worn by Jingjing. The cask sank into the water and then floated up, bobbing as it disappeared into the darkness.
Finally, the ship reached the end of its long journey and docked at a harbor. They crossed dense tropical forests, dirty slums, neon-lit commercial sex districts, and entered a magnificent palace, where nearly nude men and women cavorted in sacred dances to outlandish drumbeats. They surrounded Du Ruofei and lifted him into the air. A woman wearing a black veil appeared, and everyone knelt to her. Ruofei saw that on the back of every neck was a tattoo of a three-legged crow.
They pushed Ruofei to stand in front of the woman, whose eyes shone with an eerie golden light.
She lifted one hand and pressed it against Ruofei’s chest. He closed his eyes, expecting his chest to be torn open and his heart ripped out.
“Are you happy?” the woman whispered.
Shocked, Ruofei tried to open his eyes. But the hand gave him a gentle shove, and he fell backward.
The same scenes began to run in reverse in rapid succession until everything faded to black.
An acrid smell filled his nostrils, waking him. He found himself in a tiny hut. There was no palace, no woman in a black veil. There was only a crude wooden bowl bubbling over what was left of an open-pit fire.
“You’re finally awake.”
He turned at Jingjing’s voice, but he saw an unfamiliar face lit by the soft light of dawn.
“This is the original me” The woman drew close to him. It was a plain, imperfect face, but a face that struck him with inarticulable power.
“. . . I hope you don’t mind.”
Ruofei hadn’t realized how long it had been since he had seen an unmodified face. He was touched.
“Not . . . not at all,” he said. He felt clumsy as he tried to assemble the words. “Where am I? What happened?”
“This is the wilderness, far from the panoptic gaze of the space station. Three days ago, you were almost turned into a puppet. We rescued you.”
He lowered his gaze and saw the three-legged crow tattooed on Jingjing’s arm. His face froze.
“Have you been lying to me all this time? Why?”
“Listen to me. I can explain.”
Her voice was as placid as the sea before dawn.
The Three-Legged Crow wasn’t nearly as fanatical or violent as rumored. Members believed that a spiritual nature pervaded all beings, so that worshipping idols or any infallible authority was a laughable error. There was a compact that bound all things in nature, and humanity was merely one party to the compact, no more noble or special than any of the other parties. The technology-driven novelty-lust promoted by the new world was not only damaging to the relationship between humanity and nature, but also disruptive of the common web of bonds between all creatures and their environment.
Worse still, humanity thought of itself as the only subject. Lost in an endless narcissistic dream, humans maintained only a compact with technology, having abandoned the capacity to connect with the wider universe.
“We call that capacity wildness” said Jingjing. She bit her bottom lip, as though trying to forget some unpleasant memory. “In order to successfully integrate into the new world, you have no idea how much training I had to undergo to disguise my wildness under a veneer of so-called ‘civilization.’ I was absolutely disgusted.”
Ruofei finally understood the source of the odd quality he had detected in his mate.
In a society devoted to the pursuit of the new, some must be out of fashion. Each bored soul was potentially a recruit for the Three-Legged Crow. Like cancerous cells slowly dividing, they infiltrated every nook and cranny of the new world. Azul450-Qin-Ye was one of them.
“So . . . you’ve been acting with me all along.” Ruofei felt wounded. “I suppose acting is the custom of the new world.”
“Yes and no.” Jingjing didn’t avoid his gaze. “You’re extremely important to us. You’re a man from outside of our era. You can influence many with your observations, your stances, your choices.”
“Then why did you kill all the other hibernauts?”
“Lies.”
“But you’re the one who repeated those lies to me.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Jingjing dropped her gaze. “You’re special . . . to me.”
“If I had petitioned for another mate back when you first brought up the idea, would you still think I’m special?”
“Are you certain I’m still the same woman as the Azul450-Qin-Ye you knew then?”
Ruofei had no response to that. Jingjing held his hand.
“You are that man. Help me.”
“I’m no one. I’m nothing. How can I help you?”
“You’ll find out. But we need to get going. It’s almost time.”
Back in the old world, Ruofei had never experienced such landscapes devoid of signs of civilization.
Riding on giant deer-like creatures, they departed from the ThreeLegged Crow camp and passed through a kingdom of wildness birthed by time and gravity. The kingdom’s history was far apart from human rationality, and yet it was also full of the chaos, lusts, taboos, and ignorance projected thereon by human nature. Order emerged in places far older than Hammurabi’s code and Solon’s laws; mountains and rivers moved in accordance with their own regularity, merging into oneness. The bodies and treasures buried here bore witness to the process by which humanity emerged from wilderness and then returned to it in another form. Countless living things nested and multiplied here, generations without end.
The weather was unpredictable, temperamental. Ruofei found the extreme variation difficult to adjust to, but Jingjing seemed to find delight in the uncertainty itself.
“Life in the new world is rich but empty. We look at nothing but ourselves, thereby cutting off our links to the world and everything in it. Rocks, clouds, and our bodies are all reflections of nature’s laws. Only when we’re completely immersed in them can we appreciate their beauty and become aware of the entirety of the system’s meaning, including the irrational, the corrupt, and the cruel.”
As she preached, Jingjing also showed him how to eat a wriggling larva to derive nourishment.
Ruofei missed most the automatic shower stall.
Finally, the journey took its toll. Ruofei fell ill. His face turned as pale as the larva, and his body trembled like a cicada’s exuviated shell dangling in the wind. Jingjing squeezed a cup of dark green liquid out of a thorny plant and held it in front of Ruofei’s lips. He took one whiff and vomited.
“Trust me,” said Jingjing, her eyes full of love. “Drink it”
Ruofei drained the cup in one gulp.
He fell into a bottomless abyss. He was stabbed by needles, drowned, burned, shocked, bitten by chitinous jaws.
He saw a giant three-legged crow spread its wings to cover the sun. Black feathers fell to the earth, and, carried by streams and blood, passing through the food chain and nervous systems, entered the body of every person, leading to violence, instability, massacre, chaos.
With a shock, he realized that the wilderness was the only true form, and the new world was but a projection. The moment a person stepped across the border between the two worlds was also the moment the human shadow turned into animal, river, rock, and grass.
He tried to describe this chaotic world using words, but the moment he spoke, all meaning disappeared like an intricate papercraft palace bursting into flames.
He fell into a coma, hallucinated, woke up, and then began the cycle anew.
Finally, as he felt himself pressed to the limits of endurance, on the verge of a slumber from which he would never awaken, his soul was yanked from his body and hauled through an endless tunnel.
A pale, creamy light glowed at the end of the tunnel.
“You made it!” Jingjing was holding his sweat-drenched body, murmuring into his ear. “You’ll be fine now. You’ll be fine”
As the sun set, they finally reached the edge of the new world.
“Do you remember what you must do?”
“First, I must turn you in to the authorities as the Three-Legged Crow spy responsible for sabotaging the data tower.”
“Uh-huh.” Jingjing tilted her head to look at Ruofei with a smile.
“Next, I’ll agree to deliver a speech at the opening ceremony of the Olympics+, though I should act as though I came to this decision reluctantly, after much psychological struggle.”
“Very good. Continue.”
“After my memory-manager reconnects to the network, encrypted data hidden in memories categorized as ‘dreams’ will take over and substitute the Three-Legged Crow’s declaration for the official text of the address. And then . . .”
“And then, your speech, livecast to every corner of the new world, will serve as a signal flare. Three-Legged Crow recruits across the globe, until now dormant, will rip off their disguises and show their wildness. Together, they’ll overthrow the tyrants in the space station. At that moment, you, Du Ruofei, will be celebrated as the hero from the wilderness . . .”
“And you’ll be careful, right?”
Jingjing nodded. “Nothing will happen to me”
Things did not go as planned.
At the border control station, Jingjing pressed her hand against Ruofei’s chest. Before a single heartbeat, she had been dragged away, and the two of them were shoved into two separate hover cars and sent on their way to the security center. Through the narrow windows on the hover cars, they could only see each other’s eyes. Jingjing’s eyes, lit by the golden fireworks that exploded overhead, were fearless and calm.
The hover cars became stuck among the parade floats celebrating the opening of the Olympics+. The enforcement agents had no choice but to take the two out of the cars, unshackle their feet, and bring them on foot through the jubilant crowd.
Ruofei knew that agents of the Three-Legged Crow had spread the news through the media that the Man Out of Fashion had returned and was about to deliver a speech. This was what had forced the authorities to act so quickly.
Ruofei and Jingjing made their way through the crowd slowly. Their tattered clothes and grimy faces made them seem like mendicant monks of old, but the crowd treated their unexpected costumes as a new trend in fashion. High on drugs and simulhol, the euphoric mob knelt down to worship them, and some even lifted them onto their shoulders.
Surfing the crowd face-up, Ruofei turned to look at Jingjing, similarly adrift above a sea of people. The drumroll began, and they smiled at each other. Under the starry sky, they glided over this liquid humanity, passing parade float after parade float, each an island with its own distinct scenery. Dancers on the islands wriggled and twirled passionately, leaping through forests of rainbow-hued beams, scattering fluorescent confetti into the air.
Abruptly, Jingjing sank out of sight and disappeared under the surging sea of bobbing heads. Ruofei rolled down from the crest of his own wave, but enforcement agents caught him and held him to the ground.
“Don’t struggle if you want to see her again,” growled a low, rumbling voice.
They frog-marched him into the arena where the opening ceremony was being held. After a long, dark tunnel, he was pushed into the security center, lit bright as day. A group of elegantly dressed men and women waited for him as he was scanned from head to toe. He sat down, and a beautiful man sat across from him.
“We’ve received orders to have you deliver the speech,” said the man. “However—”
He shoved a transparent slate into Ruofei’s hands.
“—you must read exactly what’s written here. Otherwise, your wild companion will be—”
The wall facing Ruofei turned transparent, revealing Jingjing lying on an operating chair, a thick cable plugged into the base of her skull. Her expression was as empty as a puppet’s.
Ruofei tried to get up, but was held down.
“Don’t worry. We’re all civilized people here. This isn’t your age”
Another wave of cheers swept through the arena outside. It was almost time.
Ruofei glared at the beautiful man, his eyes spitting fire. In the end, he looked away. “I’ll do as you say.”
