Gateways (4 page)

You will die if you keep this up,
he finally told himself.
And someone else will get the treasure.

That thought made it firm. Still, even without any more trips inside, there was more work to do. Yanking some decayed boards off the upper story, Wer dropped them to cover the new entrance that he’d found, gaping underneath the house. And then one final dive through dark shallows,
to kick sand over it all. Finally, he rested for a while with one arm draped over his makeshift raft, under the dim glow of a quarter moon.

Do not the sages counsel that a wise man must spread ambition, like honey across a bun? Only a greedy fool tries to swallow all of his good fortune in a single bite.

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

Wer pondered the strangeness of fate, as he finally turned toward home, fighting the ebb tide that kept trying to haul him seaward, into the busy shipping lanes of the Huangpu. It was a grueling swim, dragging the raft behind him with a rope around one shoulder. Several times—obsessively—he stopped to check the sacks of salvage, counting them and securing their ties.

It is a good thing that basement also proved a good place to deposit my earlier load of garbage, those pipes and chipped tiles. A place to tuck them away, out of sight of any drifting environment monitors. Or I would have had to haul them, too.

The setting of the moon only made things harder, plunging the estuary into darkness. Except, that is, for the glitter of Shanghai East, a noisy galaxy of wealth, towering behind its massive seawall. And the soft glow of luminescence in the tide itself. A glow that proved especially valuable when his winding journey took him past some neighboring shoresteads, looming out of the night, like dark castles. Wer kept his splashing to a minimum, hurrying past the slumping walls and spidery tent poles with barely a sound. Until, at last, his own stead was next, its familiar tilt occulting a lopsided band of stars.

I can’t wait to show Ling what I found. This time, she has to be impressed.

That hope propelled Wer the last few hundred meters, even though his lungs and legs felt as if they were on fire. Of course, he took a beating, as the raft crashed, half-sideways into the atrium of the ruined house. A couple of the salvage bags split open, spilling their glittery contents across the old parquet floor. But no matter, he told himself. The things were safe now, in easy reach.

In fact, it took all of Wer’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?” Ling asked, staring at the array of objects that Wer spread 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.

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

“They were on
shelves
, all neatly arranged and with labels,” he explained, while spreading ointment across a sore on his left leg, one of several that had spread open again, after long immersion. “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 a special pedestal, 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 all 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 Ling was reheating last night’s meal, the one that he had missed. Wer smelled some kind of fish that had been stir-fried with leeks, onions, and that reddish seaweed that she put into more than half of her dishes.

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

Wer would have gladly wolfed it down cold. But he nodded with resignation and gathered himself together, somehow finding the will to move quivering muscles, once again.
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 of the bags of salvage, these bulging with sharply angular objects. Dragging them up and retraversing 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 for a generation . . .

. . . and then worse again. For the poor.

Hope was a dangerous thing, of course. One heard of shoresteaders striking it rich with a great haul, now and then. But, most of the time, reality shattered promise.
Perhaps 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 Ling’s nimble fingers worked at the tie ropes. Upending one bag, she spilled out a pile of stony objects, along with three or four 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 Ling’s eyes. Or interest, at least. One by one, she lifted each piece, turning it in the lamplight . . . and 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 Wer spooned some food from the reheating pot into a bowl.

“Open this,” 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. Wer started to pry at the corroded clasp, while Ling picked up little Xie Xie in order 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?” Ling asked. “Another stone?”

Wer turned it over in his hands. The thing was heavy and hard, with a greenish tint, like 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 handsome 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.

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

. . . and then began to glow on its own.

The wooden box bore writing in French. Wer learned that much by carefully cleaning its small brass plate, then copying each letter, laboriously, onto the touch-sensitive face of a simple tutor-tablet.

“Unearthed in Harrapa, 1926,” glimmered the translation in Updated Pinyin. “Demon-infested. Keep in the dark.”

Of course that made no sense. The former owner of the opalescent relic had been a high-tech robotics tycoon, hardly the sort to believe in superstitions. Ling reacted to the warning with nervous fear, wrapping the scarred egg in dark cloth, but Wer figured it was just a case of bad translation.

The fault must lie in the touch-tablet—one of the few tech-items they had brought along to their shorestead, just outside the seawall of New Shanghai. Originally mass-produced for poor children, the dented unit later served senile patients for many years, at a Chungqing hospice—till Ling took it with her, when she quit working there. Cheap and obsolete, it was never even reported stolen, so the two of them could still use it to tap the World Mesh, at a rudimentary, free-access level. It sufficed for a couple with little education, and few interests beyond the struggle to survive.

“I’m sure the state will issue us something better next year, when little Xie Xie is big enough to register,” she commented, whenever Wer complained about the slow conection and scratched screen. “They have to provide that much. A basic education. As part of the Big Deal.”

Wer felt less sure. Grand promises seemed made for the poor to remember, while the mighty forgot. Things had always been that way. You could tell, even from the censored histories that flickered across the little display, as he and his wife sagged into fatigued sleep every night, rocked by the rising tides. The same tides that kept eroding the old beach house, faster than they could reinforce it.

Would they even let Xie Xie register? The baby’s genetic samples had been filed when he was born. But would he get residency citizenship in New Shanghai? Or would the seawall keep out yet another kind of unwanted trash, along with a scum of plastic and resins that kept washing higher along the concrete barrier?

Clearly, in this world, you were a fool to count on beneficence from above.

Even good luck, when it arrived, could prove hard to exploit. Wer had hoped for time to figure out what kind of treasure lay in that secret room, underneath the biggest drowned mansion, a chamber filled with beautiful or bizarre rocks and crystals, or specimens of strangely twisted metal. Wer tried to inquire, using the little mesh tablet, only carefully. There were sniffer programs—billions of them—running loose across a million vir-levels, even the gritty layer called Reality. If he inquired too blatantly, or offered the items openly for sale, somebody might just come and take it all. The former owner had been declared a public enemy, his property forfeit to the state.

Plugging in crude goggles and using a cracked pair of interact-gloves, Wer wandered down low rent avenues of World Town and The Village and Big Bazaar, pretending to be idly interested in rock collecting, as a hobby. From those virtual markets, he learned enough to dare a physical trip into town, carrying just one bagful of nice—but unexceptional—specimens, unloading them for a quarter of their worth at a realshop in East Pudong. A place willing to deal in cash—no names or recordings.

After so long at sea, Wer found troubling the heavy rhythms of the street. The pavement seemed harsh and unyielding. Pulsating maglev trolleys somehow made him itch, all over, especially inside tight and sweaty shoes. The whole time, he pictured twenty million nearby residents as a pressing mass—felt no less intensely than the thousands who actually jostled past him on crowded sidewalks, many of them muttering and waggling their fingers, interacting with people and things that weren’t even there.

Any profit from that first trip had been slim. Still, Wer thought he might venture to another shop soon, working his way up from mundane items to those that seemed more . . . unusual. Those kept in ornate boxes, on special shelves, in the old basement trove.

Though just one specimen glimmered, both in his dreams and daytime imaginings. Frustratingly, his careful online searches found nothing like the stone—a kind of mineral that glowed with its own light, after soaking in the sun. Its opal-like sheen featured starlike sparkles that seemed to recede into an inner distance, a depth that looked both brighter than day and deeper than night. That is, until Ling insisted it be wrapped up and put away.

Worse yet, time was running out. Fish had grown sparse, ever since the
night of the jellyfish, when half the life seemed to vanish out of the Huangpu Estuary. Now, the stewpot was seldom full, and often empty.

Soon the small hoard of cash was gone again.

Luck is fickle. We try hard to control the flow of chi, by erecting our tent poles in symmetrical patterns and by facing our entrance toward the smiling south wind. But how can one strike a harmonious balance, down here at the shore, where the surf is so chaotic, where tides of air and water and stinging monsters rush however they choose?