Existence (46 page)

Whatever the answer—Mei Ling had lost patience.

Chinese people used to be forthright, known for saying what we mean and meaning what we say. Only now that we are the world’s greatest power, are we slipping into more classic Asian ways? Masking our motives and goals behind layers of tiresome symbolism?

Anyway,
she thought with some satisfaction,
people will forget about these kids just as soon as the Artifact Conference resumes.

Moving against the nearest building wall, she concentrated on blink-navigating away from this weird vir-level, aiming for the blessed simplicity of stratum ten, where a friendly yellow arrow might start guiding her back to the seawall separating these rich Shanghai citizens from dark, threatening tides. And from there to the water taxi dock, where she might grab some lunch before hitching a ride—

Abruptly, something popped into her foreground. A beckon-symbol, informing her that a live message was coming in. It flashed with urgency … and the striped colors that denoted official authority. A bit nervously, Mei Ling looked toward the pulsating icon, and winked to accept the phone call. What then ballooned, just above the surrounding traffic and pedestrians, was a face and upper torso—stern-looking and male—wearing a uniform.

“Piao Mei Ling, I am Jin Pu Wang of state security. I had to exert some time and effort to locate you.”

It came across as a rebuke.

“Fortunately, I was able to lay a sift-Mesh that found your iris pattern once you began using this pair of overlay spectacles. It is important that we meet right away, to discuss your husband.”

Mei Ling felt her throat catch and she stumbled. Little Xiao En, who had drifted off to sleep, grunted in his sling carrier and clenched his little fists.

“What … what has happened?”

She had to utter the words loudly, in order to be certain the specs would hear. A couple of passersby glanced at her in surprise, clearly miffed that anyone would be so rude. Holding a phone conversation loud enough to bother others in a public place? Outrageous!

Lacking even a throat microphone, however, Mei Ling had little choice.

“What news do you have of him?”

“No news,”
the official answered.
“I want to discuss with you ways to rescue him from the bad company he has fallen into. How to return him to the embrace of his beloved nation.”

Mei Ling felt a wave of relief, having feared they had bad tidings. Moving to face the nearest wall of grimy bricks, she answered in a lower tone of voice.

“I … already told your other officers everything I know. They verified my truthfulness with machines and drugs. I don’t see what I could possibly add.”

Mei Ling said it with no sense of regret or betrayal. Xiang Bin had said that it would be best to cooperate fully, if authorities came asking questions. Nothing she knew should enable them to find him, after all. Anyway, at the moment of his departure with the penguin-robot there had been no reason to believe that he was doing anything against the law.

“Yes, well…”
The man looked briefly to one side, nodded, and looked back toward Mei Ling. Making her wonder what viewpoint he was using to see her. Though his image appeared on the inner surface of the specs, he was probably using a pennycam on that lamppost over there.

“We would like to speak to you again,”
he explained.
“It should only take a few minutes to clear up one or two discrepancies. After that is done, we will provide you with a ride to your home, courtesy of the state.”

Well. That actually made the prospect rather tempting, instead of trudging across East Pudong District carrying both her purchases and an infant who seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment.

“I have the contact code for Inspector Wu, who interviewed me last time. Shall I call her to arrange an appointment?”

Jin Pu Wang shook his head.
“No. My department cannot spare the time to go through local officials. These questions are relatively minor, but they must be clarified at once, on orders from the capital.”

Mei Ling swallowed hard.

“Where do you want me to go?”

“Let me give you the coordinates of a nearby police station. The officers will put you in a comfortable meeting room with refreshments. I will send my holvatar to meet you. Then a car will take you home.”

Her specs immediately reset to stratum fifteen. Some code numbers quickly scrolled by and a virtual arrow materialized in front of Mei Ling, indicating that she should proceed to the end of this block and then turn left.

“I hope that Inspector Wu was not unhappy with my level of cooperation,” she said, while starting to walk in that direction.

“Do not worry about that,”
the policeman reassured her.
“I will see you soon.”
His face vanished from her view.

For some distance Mei Ling followed the guide arrow automatically, steeped in lonely gloom. It was not a good thing to draw attention from the mighty authorities—even though Inspector Wu and her technicians had been polite and unthreatening during the questioning session, with their big, shiny hovercraft bobbing next to the little shorestead she had built with Xiang Bin.

Of course, they wanted to know all about the glowing stone. The one so similar to the emissary Artifact in Washington. When asked why her husband’s discovery wasn’t reported to the government, Mei Ling explained with complete honesty, they feared what happened to the crystal’s earlier owner.

“Lee Fang Lu fell victim to the paranoia and corruption of that time,”
Inspector Wu had conceded.
“But those who executed him later suffered the same fate during the reforms that followed the
Zheng He
disaster and the Big Deal. It’s too bad your husband did not take that into account and bring his find to us, to benefit the nation.”

When Mei Ling protested that she and Xiang Bin had nothing but love and reverence for the great homeland, Inspector Wu seemed mollified.
“It’s all right. We’ll find him, I’m sure. He will have ample opportunities to demonstrate his loyalty.”

With that reassurance the police investigators departed, leaving Mei Ling woozy from drugs and neural probing. They even let her keep the penguin-robot’s stipend, the modest comfort and freedom from want that Bin’s absence had earned.

Might other officials, even higher, feel differently? Mei Ling felt her nerves fray as she drew near the assigned coordinates. But what choice did she have, other than to do as authorities asked? They knew where she lived. They could cancel the shorestead contract, costing the small family everything. This meeting would be a “cup of tea, served with fear.”

The guide arrow indicated another turn—to the right, this time—through a little retail alley. Responding to her skeptical squint, the spectacles presented a map overlay showing it to be a shortcut to the Boulevard of Vivacious Children’s Mythology, famous for its robotic sculptures of beloved characters, from Journey to the West, to Snow White, to Fengshen Bang.

Perhaps I will get to glimpse Pipi Lu or Lu Xixi or Shrek, along the way,
Mei Ling hoped. But first, to get there.…

She peered down the dim passage where old-fashioned, open-faced shops seemed to drop back in time, to an era when this sort of street could be found in every village and town. Especially before the Revolution, when four generations of a family would toil alongside each other, sharing cramped quarters over their store, while scrimping for one of the sons to get ahead. A traditional eagerness for advancement that she once heard cynically satirized in an ancient proverb.

First generation—coolie; save money, buy land

Second generation—landlords

Third generation—mortgages the land

Fourth generation—coolie

Weren’t those nasty cycles supposed to be over by now? Finished certainly by the Revolution’s centennial year? Mei Ling coughed into her fist, knowing one thing for certain. Her son would be smart, educated, and she would teach him to be wise!
If we can get past trying times.…

She started forward into the narrow street—when a voice interrupted.

“Honored mother should not go there.”

Mei Ling stopped, glanced to both sides, and realized that she was the only clear-cut mother in sight. Peering toward where the words had come from, she found a figure sitting deep within a shadowed doorway. Her cheap specs tried to do image enhancement—though not very well—revealing a
child
perhaps twelve years old, wearing a faded green parka and some glasses that had been repaired with wire and generous windings of tape.

“Were you talking to me?”

Something about the youngster was odd. He rocked back and forth slightly and, while staring toward Mei Ling, his gaze slipped past hers, as if his eyes kept focusing on some far horizon.

“Mothers are the source of all problems and all answers.”

Spoken in flat tones, it sounded like some kind of aphorism or saying. She now saw that he had bad teeth, a serious underbite, plus a rash along one side of his neck that looked ongoing. Clearly something was wrong with the boy.

“Um … pardon me?”

He stood and shuffled closer, still not looking directly at her face.

“Jia-Jupeng, your
mother
wants you to come home to eat.”

Now
that
expression she had heard before. Something her parents’ generation used to say to one another, to get a laugh, though Mei Ling never understood what was funny about it. Suddenly, she realized—this child must be a product of the Autism Plague. In other words, a modern parent’s nightmare. Reflexively she turned a hip, moving her body to protect little Xiao En, even though the defect wasn’t contagious.

Maybe not the disease. But luck can be.

She swallowed. “Why did you say that I shouldn’t go down the alley?”

The boy reached toward her with both hands. For a second Mei Ling thought that he wanted to be picked up. Then she realized—
he wants my spectacles.

Mei Ling felt one part of her try to pull away. After all, the policeman was someone she did not want to make impatient. Yet something about the boy’s calm, insistent half smile made her instead bend over, letting him take the cheap device off her head. The smile broadened and his eyes met hers for less than a second—apparently as much human contact as he could stand at a time.

“The men,” he said, “aren’t here to buy soy sauce.”

“Men?” She straightened, glancing around. “What men?”

Appearing to ignore the question, he turned the specs around, examining them, taking evident care not to let the scanners look closely at his own face. Then, with a laugh, he tossed them into a nearby garbage bin.

“Hey! I paid good—”

Mei Ling stopped. The boy was offering his own pair of glasses, with stems repaired by wire and tape.

“See them.”

She blinked. This was crazy.

“See who?”

“Men. Waiting for a mother.”

Without specs, he seemed to have a pronounced squint. The voice barely rose or fell in tone. “Let them wait. Mother won’t come. Not today.”

She didn’t want to reach for the glasses. She didn’t want to take them, or to turn them around, or to slip the stems over her ears. Especially Mei Ling did not want to find out who or what the child meant by “the men.”

But she put them on and saw.

Now the alley was illuminated, down a tunnel that seemed to penetrate through the sunless gloom, pushing by several shops where tinkerers reforged metal jewelry, or made garments out of real (if illicit) leather, or where one family bred superscorpions for both battle and the table. The glasses had looked simpler and more primitive than hers. They weren’t. She could make out the texture of the jujube fruits that a baker was slicing for a pie, and somehow their
smell
as well.

Symbols swirled around the tunnel’s rim—many of them Chinese, but not all. They arrayed themselves not in neat rows or columns, but spirals and surging ripples. She tried to look at them. But this view was not hers to control.

Perspective suddenly jumped, flicking to some pennycam that was stuck to a wall halfway down the alley, just above a little, three-wheeled
tuktuk
delivery van. The camera zoomed past the truck, whose motor was running, into a small shop where Mei Ling saw an elderly woman hand-painting designs on half-finished cloisonné pottery. The artist seemed nervous, trembling and biting her tongue as she bent over her work. Dipping her brush into a pot of red, it came out shaking. Droplets fell as the brush approached a fluted carafe she was working on.

Now the cam-view shifted again. Mei Ling suddenly found herself looking through the very specs that the old woman wore, seeing what she saw.

At first, that was only the tip of the paintbrush, filling in the tail of a cartoon lobster—the ancient Disney character who was a favorite companion of the Little Mermaid. Though confined by cloisonné copper wire, the red paint spread a bit too far, unevenly. Mei Ling heard a muttered curse as the artist dabbed at the spillover … and glanced jerkily upward for just a moment.

Toward the small van, parked just outside with its smoky exhaust pipe—the driver was sitting idle with the door open, smoking a cigarette. A bundle of twine on his lap.

A jittery glance again at the paintbrush, as it dipped into the red again. Then, the camera view jerk-shifted to the left, only briefly, but long enough for Mei Ling to glimpse a second man, burly and muscular, standing well back in the shadows, shifting his weight impatiently.

Without her bidding them to, the child’s specs froze that image, amplified and expanded it, showing what the big fellow held in his hands. One clutched a bundle of black fabric. The other, a hypo-sprayer. Mei Ling recognized it from the crime dramas she often watched. They were used by cops to subdue violent criminals. And also … by kidnappers.

The view then returned to that seen by the elderly pot-painter. The old lady was looking at the carafe again. Only now her brush tip was defacing the gay, underwater scene with a single character in blood red. Mei Ling gasped when she read it.