Existence (15 page)

Oh, but wasn’t it a tempting treasure trove? Carefully cloaked by the one-time owner of this former beachfront mansion, who took the secret of a concealed basement with him—perhaps out of spite—all the way to the execution-disassembly room.

If they had transplanted any of his brain, as well as the eyes and skin and organs, then someone might have remembered the hidden room before this.

As it is, I am lucky that the rich man went to his death angry, never telling anybody what the rising sea would bury.

Bin finally turned toward home, fighting an ebb tide that kept trying to haul him seaward into busy shipping lanes. It was a grueling journey, squatting on the overloaded block of polystyrene while propelling his paddle in an exhausting figure eight pattern … till his trembling fingers fumbled, losing their grip and dropping the makeshift oar! Night swallowed it, but there was no use searching, or cursing his fate. Bin couldn’t rig another paddle. So, with a soft sigh, he slipped back into the greasy Huangpu and commenced dragging the raft behind him with a rope around his waist.

Several times—obsessively—he stopped to check the sacks of salvage, counting them and securing their ties.

It is fortunate that basement also proved a place to deposit my earlier load of garbage—all those pipes and chipped tiles—tucking them away from sight. Or I’d have to haul them, too.

The setting of the moon only made things harder, plunging the estuary into near blackness, except for a sprinkling of stars. And the glitter of Shanghai East, of course, a raucous galaxy of wealth, shimmering and flashing beyond the nearby seawall. And a soft glow of luminescence in the tide itself—a glimmer that proved especially valuable when Bin’s winding journey took him by some neighboring shoresteads, looming out of the night like dark, medieval castles. He kept his splashing minimal, hurrying past slumping walls and spidery tent poles with barely a sound.

This time Mei Ling will be impressed with what I found.

That hope propelled Bin till, at last, his own stead was next, its familiar tilt occulting a lopsided band of stars. In fact, so eager was he to get home that he let his guard down … and almost swam into disaster.

Even a little moonlight would have alerted him to the jellyfish swarm, a cloud of drifting, pulsating umbrella shapes that surged through the bay—just an offshoot of a vast colony that infested the East China Sea, growing bigger every year, annihilating age-old fishing grounds. Driven by the tide, one throbbing mass of filmy bodies and dangling stingers flowed directly in his path.

Frantically backpedaling, Bin barely avoided plowing into the horde. Even so, he soon discovered by the light of his failing torch that he was surrounded by outliers and stragglers. In pushing away from one cluster, he inevitably drifted toward another. Unable to avoid individual jellies altogether, he kicked with flippered feet … and inevitably felt sudden flares of pain, as a stinger-tendril brushed his left ankle.

Left no recourse, he clambered back atop the raft, praying the makeshift lashings would hold. It sank under the weight, leaving his body awash. But the tendrils couldn’t reach him. For now.

Fumbling in the dark with his knife, Xiang Bin hacked at a torn milk jug and contrived a paddle of sorts—more of a scoop—and began a hard slog forward through the morass of poisonous creatures. Waiting for the swarm to disperse was not an option. By then, currents would take him far away. With home in plain sight, a brute force approach seemed best.

These awful things will kill all the fish in the estuary and tangle my nets,
he thought. Worst case? His family could go hungry. Maybe for weeks.

Didn’t someone tell me you can eat these things, if you’re careful? Cooked with sesame oil? The Cantonese are said to know all the good kinds.

It sounded yucky. They might have to try it.

The last hundred meters were pure agony. Bin’s lungs and arms felt on fire, and his right hand somehow took another painful jelly sting, before the main opening of the ruined house gaped before him at last. Of course, he took a beating as the raft crashed half sideways, into the atrium. A couple of salvage bags split, spilling glittery treasures across the old parquet floor. No matter. The things were safe now, in easy reach.

In fact, it took all of Bin’s remaining energy to drag just one bag upstairs, then to pick his way carefully across the slanted roof of broken tiles, and finally reach the tent-house where his woman and child waited.

*   *   *

“Stones?” Mei Ling stared at the array of objects that Xiang Bin had dropped before her. A predawn glow was spreading across the east. Still, she had to lift a lantern to peer at his little trove, shading the light and speaking in a low voice, so as not to wake the baby. Low-angled illumination made the scars on one cheek stand out, an injury she had suffered as a child, in the terrible Hunan earthquake.

“You are all excited over a bunch of stones?”

“They were on
shelves,
all neatly arranged with labels,” he explained. After treating the two stinger wounds, he began carefully applying small amounts of ointment to a sore on his left leg, one of several that had opened again, after long immersion. “Of course the tags were unreadable after all this time. But there used to be glass cabinets—”

“They don’t look like gems. No diamonds or rubies,” she interrupted. “Yes, some of them are pretty. But we find surf-polished pebbles everywhere.”

“You should see the ones that were on special pedestals, in the center of the room. Some of them were held in fancy boxes, made of wood and crystal. I tell you it was a
collection
of some sort. And it
must
have been valuable, for the owner to hide them all so—”

“Boxes?” Her interest was piqued, at least a little “Did you bring any of those?”

“A few. I left them on the raft. I was so tired. And hungry.” He sniffed pointedly toward the stewpot where Mei Ling was reheating last night’s meal, the one he had missed. Bin smelled some kind of fish that had been stir-fried with leeks, onions, and that reddish seaweed that she put into most of her dishes.

“Get some of those boxes, please, Xiang Bin,” she insisted. “Your food will be warm by the time you return.”

Bin would have gladly wolfed it down cold. But he sighed in resignation and gathered himself together, somehow finding the will to move quivering muscles.
I am still young, but I know how it will feel to be old.

This time, at least, the spreading gray twilight helped him to cross the roof, then slide down the ladder and stairs without tripping. His hands trembled while untying two more bags of salvage, these bulging with sharply angular objects. Dragging them up and re-traversing the roof was a pure exercise in mind-over-agony.

Most of our ancestors had it at least this bad,
he reminded himself.
Till things got much better in China, for a generation …

… then worse again. For the poor.

Hope was a dangerous thing, of course. One heard of shoresteaders striking it rich with a great haul of salvage, now and then. But, most of the time, reality shattered promise.
Perhaps, after all, it is only an amateur geologist’s private rock collection,
he thought, struggling the last few meters.
One man’s hobby—precious to him personally, but of little market value.

Still, after collapsing on the floor of their tent-home for a second time, he found enough curiosity and strength to lift his head, as Mei Ling’s nimble fingers worked at the tie ropes. Upending one bag, she spilled out a pile of stony objects, along with a couple of the boxes he had mentioned, made of finely carved wood, featuring windows with beveled edges that glittered too beautifully to be made of simple glass.

For the first time, he saw a bit of fire in her eyes. Or interest, at least. One by one, she lifted each piece, turning it in the lamplight … then moved to push aside a curtain, letting in sharply horizontal rays of light, as the sun poked its leading edge above the East China Sea. The baby roused then, rocking from side to side and whimpering while Bin spooned some stew from the reheating pot into a bowl.

“Open this,” Mei Ling insisted, forcing him to choose between the bowl and the largest box, that she thrust toward him. With a sigh, he put aside his meal and accepted the heavy thing, which was about the size and weight of his own head … maybe a bit longer. Bin started to pry at the corroded clasp, while Mei Ling picked up little Xiao En, to nurse the infant.

“It might be better to wait a bit and clean the box,” he commented. “Rather than breaking it just to look inside. The container, itself, may be worth—”

Abruptly, the wood split along a grainy seam with a splintering crack. Murky water spilled across his lap, followed by a bulky object, so smooth and slippery that it almost squirted out of his grasp.

“What is it, husband?” Mei Ling asked. “Another stone?”

Bin turned it over in his hands. The thing was heavy and hard, with a greenish tint, like pale jade. Though that could just be slime that clung to its surface even after wiping with a rag. A piece of real jade this big could bring a handsome price, especially already shaped into a pleasant contour—that of an elongated egg. So he kept rubbing and lifted it toward the horizontal shaft of sunbeams, in order to get a better look.

No, it isn’t jade, after all.

But disappointment slowly turned into wonder, as sunlight, striking the glossy surface seemed to sink
into
the glossy ovoid. Its surface darkened, as if it were drinking the beam greedily.

Mei Ling murmured in amazement … and then gasped as the stone changed color before their eyes …

… and then began to glow on its own.

SCANALYZER

MARCIA KHATAMI:
We’re back. Before the break, we heard Professor Noozone—our favorite science-dazzler and gadfly—question some of the assumptions behind Project Golden Ear, the world’s greatest SETI program, headed by our other guest, Dr. Hannah Spearpath. Professor, you asserted, in your colorful rasta-way, that
economics
will play a crucial role in the decisions made even by advanced alien cultures. Wouldn’t superbeings be beyond such things as money?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
Look true,
them may come in many types
! Some may be like supersocialist hive-dwellers, or solipsistic self-worshipping Ayndroids, or shi-shi foo-foo babylon-capitalists, or mistik-obeah wizards … or even hyper-elightened rastabeings, living inna smoke ring of sacred, loving yum-aromas. Diversity is grand, an’ who tell dere isms an’ skisms?

DR. SPEARPATH:
What? Look, I knew you as an undergrad at Tulane. You spoke plain English before picking up this faux-Jamaican patois! So just spit it out, will you? Are you saying that every alien culture will have
money
?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
Whatever
system a superculture uses to govern itself, some things are dictated by simple physics. A pure beacon that continuously screams “hello!” in all directions, whole-heap, for centuries inna de morrows is just
mind boggling
—an’ surely more annoying to the neighbors than a tone-deaf steel drum band! Especially since dere be more efficient ways by far.

MARCIA KHATAMI:
More efficient?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
Long time back at the turn of the century, three white coolboys—Benford, Benford, and Benford—showed that any civilization wanting to transmit First Contact messages will do so
periodically,
not continuously. Dem use narrow, practical beams an’ shine
briefly
upon likely abodes of young-uplifting civilization, then move on to the next, spot-calling each one in turn, before returning to the start again, in a regular cycle. Sight? Seen?

DR. SPEARPATH:
It’s called “pinging.” The famous WOW signal may have been a brief ping.

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
So right, mon. Simple calculations show—this approach use less than a
millionth
the energy of those garish beacons SETI looks for.

T’ink about it. If
both
teacher and de pupil be sifting the sky by hopping aroun’ with narrow beams, what dem odds that
both
the looker and transmitter will face each other, at exactly the same moment, iwa? That’s quattie, my ol’ girl-fren! Soon come, we won’t get anywhere!

MARCIA KHATAMI:
What kind of search strategy would be better?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
Searchers like Hannah assume
we
can
seek narrowly
while ET
broadcasts broadly.
It make more sense to
seek broadly
for mas-ET’s
narrow
messages.

DR. SPEARPATH:
That method would need hundreds of radio telescopes, spread across the world, in order to cover the sky. Might I ask our showman “scientist,” who’d pay for such a vast array?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
(laughs) Hundreds? Oh my, thousands! So? Make dem cheap, bashy an’ trivial to use by lots of
amateur
science-bredren an’ sistren, corned-up all over this lovely globe! Each backyard dish will then patrol just one livicated strip of sky.
Ah sey one.
Networked, these home-units make the greatest telescope looking in
all directions at once
! Letting us spot brief signals from far civilizations … assuming upfull-wise aliens exist. But there also be an important, bashy-awesome
side benefit.

MARCIA KHATAMI:
What is that, Professor?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE:
Why … making it so-much harder for any badulu thing or any bakra tief to sneak up on us! Picture a planet where millions of amateurs have patient, robotic antennae in de backyards, gazing out. A stoosh network with no central control.

Want a benefit? No more creep-a-silly fables about
badbwoy UFOs,
bringin’ baldhead, ginnal phantoms to vank on good folks!
No more UFO obeah stories?
Bless up pon that! (laughs)