Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #213 Read online

  The old woman said, “My name is He Lai. My daughter told me you would come here.” He Lai's face was tanned by the sun, and wrinkled like an overripe plum. She exuded a serenity I found uncanny.

  "He Chan-Li told me someone would be waiting for me. I expected a servant, not a member of the family."

  He Lai shrugged. “It is not menial work to welcome a guest into your home."

  There were ponds covered with lilies and lotus flowers, and weeping willows with long branches trailing in the water: a beauty that seemed to belong to another time, to another place. But I saw the small, unobtrusive control panels that controlled the security system, and knew that this was no pleasure garden. It was a fortress.

  "Here.” He Lai was pointing to a small pavilion by the side of a bigger building that was presumably the main house. “These are my granddaughter's quarters. We have touched nothing since she left. I kept the servants away."

  "Thank you,” I said, and realised she was looking at me, waiting for something.

  "You will find her?” She sounded worried.

  "Do you have any idea of where she might be?"

  "She confided in me, but she told me nothing about leaving. I would have thought...” He Lai shook her head. “I ought to know the risks, living in that house. Two years ago, a gang kidnapped my daughter's maid and held her for ransom."

  "And?"

  She looked down. It had ended badly, then.

  "I'll do my best,” I said. “But you know I can promise nothing."

  "I know. But you can understand how I feel."

  I remembered sitting in the doctor's waiting room, waiting for the diagnosis of my lover Mei-Lin, and how badly I had wished that it was nothing, that Mei-Lin would live. I did understand how frightening it was, to be in the dark.

  So I made no false promises. I bowed to He Lai, simply. And then I slid the door open, and entered He Zhen's rooms. The servant followed me, no doubt to make sure I stole nothing.

  It was everything I'd expected a Xuyan room to be: a low bed of ebony, with a lacquered pillow laid over the sheets; a few pieces of furniture arranged in a pattern for long life; a laptop on the mahogany desk; and in one corner of the room, a shrine to the spirits of the ancestors, with ashes in the incense burner.

  I knelt to check the shrine, triggering a flood of blue light from the neons above it. The ashes were old. It did not look as though the missing girl had gone back to her room. I had not expected it.

  Several engravings adorned the walls: Chinese paintings, reproductions from the Ming dynasty, including the most famous of all, the eunuch Si-Jian Ma's ships departing from Nankin, on the journey that would lead him to discover America long before any European set foot on those shores.

  I opened the drawers of the bedside table and found a jewellery box filled with pearls and jade pendants, as well as a sheaf of yuans, neatly tied together. Enough to pay my rent for several months.

  I rifled through the jade pendants until my hands snagged on something, a small item that had been carefully hidden at the bottom of the drawer. I raised it to the light. It was a twisted knot of jade in an abstract pattern, one that was familiar, although I was not sure why. It did not seem like a traditional Xuyan pendant, unlike the rest of the jewellery.

  Apart from that, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  And yet...

  I turned again, to look at the room, at the small things that were not quite right. Someone else might have missed it, but I'd seen enough rooms like this to know where the subtle sense of wrongness came from. Someone had been here before me. Someone who had attempted to put everything back into place, but had only partially succeeded.

  According to He Lai, the servants had touched nothing. It could have been He Chan-Li, but I doubted that.

  Odd. A place like this, with its state-of-the-art security, would be hard to get into. Why go to all that trouble?

  I opened the laptop. It was the latest fad from Greater Mexica: sleek metal outside, with a corn-yellow keyboard inside, and a touchpad adorned with a stylised butterfly, symbol of Quetzalcoatl, the Mexica god of knowledge and computers. The laptop beeped as I started it up, but it did not ask for any password or fingerprint.

  Ah well. You never knew. Likely whoever had ransacked the room had also erased everything from the hard disk, but they might have been sloppy.

  I took the laptop, slid it back into its embroidered case. I also picked up the pendant, and turned to the servant, who for the duration of my search had been standing silently in a corner. “Can I take this?"

  He shrugged. “You'll have to ask the mistress."

  Before I left the room, I snapped a few high-res pictures. My instincts were telling me I'd missed something, but I couldn't figure out what.

  I'd expected He Lai to be waiting for me outside. She wasn't. In her place was another Xuyan, a dapper man dressed in red silk robes. He had no insignia of rank, but I was not fooled. There was steel in his bearing and in his gaze: not someone you'd want to cross.

  "I suppose you are the investigator Mother hired to track down He Zhen,” he said.

  I did not miss the way he referred to He Chan-Li; in Xuyan, it could only mean one thing. “You would be the fiancé?” I asked.

  He smiled, displaying yellow teeth. “Wen Yi."

  "Jonathan Brooks,” I said grudgingly, still looking at him. He was not pure Xuyan. Although his skin had the waxy, yellow cast I associated with Xuya, his features were distinctively Chumash Indian, the original inhabitants of Fenliu. “What are you doing here?"

  Wen Yi smiled again, in an angelic way that was starting to get on my nerves. “I wanted to talk to you."

  "You are talking to me."

  He looked amused. “You Americans are so uncivilised. Sometimes I wonder why you come into Xuya at all."

  I did my best impression of a smile, though it was thoroughly insincere. “Some of us like it here.” Not entirely true. I'd never have moved past the Rocky Mountains if I hadn't had a fifteen-year jail sentence hanging over my head in Virginia. The United States take foreign sympathies very seriously, and even though Mei-Lin was only half-Xuyan the state police judged that our being lovers was a crime. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  Wen Yi looked surprised. “I'm family."

  "Not yet."

  "Almost,” Wen Yi said. “The marriage was to take place in a month."

  There was something in the way he spoke—it wasn't the absolute confidence the sentence required. It was ... anger? I'd learnt to read Xuyans, to see beneath what Americans thought was a smooth, calm facade. Had I been asked what Wen Yi felt, I would have said rage. But why?

  "When did you last see He Zhen?"

  "We had ... a meeting scheduled seven nights ago, but she never came."

  "What kind of ‘meeting'?"

  "I do not know,” Wen Yi said. “She said she had important things to tell me, but would not say what."

  Liar. Smooth and smiling, but liar all the same. He had seen her that night, I was ready to bet.

  "Can you tell me about her?” I asked.

  "A lovely girl,” Wen Yi said.

  "Is that all you have to say about her? You two were engaged."

  He shrugged. “An arranged marriage, Mr Brooks. You know how things go in Xuya."

  "A marriage for the sake of Leiming Tech?” I said. “You don't sound so worried that He Zhen's gone."

  He raised mild eyes to me, but I could feel the anger simmering within. “I am worried, Mr Brooks. You would do well to remember that."

  "Is that a threat? If that is all you have to offer..."

  Wen Yi was not looking at me. He said, “She was a beautiful, charming girl. When she laughed, it was as if the sun had risen in the room."

  "You think she's been kidnapped? That she's run away?” I didn't believe that. Running away required planning, and He Zhen would have taken her laptop, as well as the money in the drawers of the bedside table, all of which were still there.

&n
bsp; He started. “No. She'd never run away. She was such a devoted daughter."

  "I see."

  "If you have any information on her whereabouts—” he slipped me a glossy card “—call me."

  And that was likely all he had come here for. He played the part of the besotted fiancé very badly, save for his worry at her disappearance, which sounded genuine. Which didn't mean anything, he could still be afraid that I'd find out he was behind all of it.

  I watched Wen Yi walk away. When he was gone, I went into the main building, where I found He Lai waiting for me. She had a lacquered box in her hands. “My daughter said you should have this."

  Inside the box was the tracking implant. I bowed to thank her, and asked, “You knew her well?"

  He Lai's eyes watched me, expressionless. “She was my only granddaughter. How could I not know her?"

  "How was she, in the days before she disappeared?"

  "She was in high spirits, but then the engagement had just been finalised after a year—"

  "How did she feel about the wedding?” I asked.

  "She was happy,” He Lai said. “Wen Yi is a man of status in the community. She was going to be an adult—"

  "And move away from this house?” I asked, and when I saw her wince, I knew I was right. “So she and your daughter did not get on."

  "Zhen always showed proper deference.” He Lai looked defiantly at me.

  "I do not doubt that,” I said. But there were other ways to disobey. Still, it was looking more and more unlikely that He Zhen had run away. Whatever her quarrel with her mother, He Zhen would have been out of He Chan-Li's reach in a month. Raising a furore in Fenliu would have been counter-productive.

  And, whatever had happened to He Zhen, why had her room been searched? What had they thought to find there, and had they found it?

  All questions to which I had no answer.

  I raised the pendant I'd found in the drawer, dangled it before He Lai's eyes. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked.

  He Lai's face twisted. “It's Zhen's favourite."

  "It's not Xuyan,” I said.

  "No. Zhen's father brought it back from a business trip in Tenochtitlan. It's a glyph that means ‘Good Omen’ in Nahuatl."

  "I thought He Zhen was very young when her father died."

  He Lai did not speak for a while. “There are some things you don't forget. Zhen loved her father very much."

  The implications were clear enough. He Zhen had not loved her mother.

  He Lai said, “You can keep it, Mr Brooks. If you find Zhen..."

  "You know I can't—” I said, and she cut me forcefully.

  "I know what I am doing. Keep it. You can always give it back to me later.” Her tone implied, very clearly, that she hoped I wouldn't have to do that.

  I showed her the laptop, and she shrugged. “You can take that too.” She sounded distracted, as if the pendant had brought back unwelcome memories. I guessed seeing her daughter and her granddaughter quarrel regularly must have been disheartening.

  * * * *

  I spent some time questioning the servants in He Chan-Li's house, asking them if they had any ideas of where she might have gone, but nothing interesting came of it.

  After leaving the house, I took another train to the place they'd found the tracking implant. It was a shabbier maglev, which kept pitching as it ran, giving the impression it could leave the tracks at any time.

  The people sitting by me were the usual crowd: the wild-eyed youths drunk on opium and morphine; the dullard beggars reeking of rice alcohol; the lone mothers with tired eyes, hugging their children to their chests as if afraid someone would steal them. Many of them were Whites or Blacks, lured west by the promise of a better life in Xuya and discovering they could not fit into this alien society. I, at least, had had Mei-Lin to help me, in the short months before cancer carried her away. They had no one.

  I could not afford pity; I had barely enough money to help myself. But, still, every time a crippled beggar moved past me, I felt an obscure guilt.

  I alighted at the Gardens of Felicity, a small station blackened by pollution and grime. The place reeked of urine. I silently made my way out of the station.

  The place where they'd found the tracking implant was one of the numerous social buildings started by the previous magistrate of Fenliu, and abandoned when Prefect En Pao had come to power and the whole staff of the tribunal had changed. I stepped over crushed paper lanterns and plastic wrappings, wincing each time my shoes hit a puddle of unsavoury things. It seemed even beggars did not sleep here.

  At last I stood on the fifth floor, staring into an incomplete apartment. There was nothing remarkable here.

  No, not quite true. I knelt, and rubbed my fingers on the ground. What I had mistaken for brown paint was dried blood. I looked up at the outer walls, which had once been decorated with plum flowers and swallows. Beneath one fading set of characters, I found what I was looking for: two small holes, barely visible, with the same reddish stains. Bullet impacts.

  I took pictures of the holes from all possible angles and took a few samples of the blood. A quick scan with ultraviolet revealed a few hairs on the ground. I bagged those as well.

  But, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find the shell-casings, which meant that someone had taken them away. Someone who was used to wielding a gun.

  I was starting to understand why He Chan-Li looked so fearful. This wasn't a bored teenager running away. In fact, if, as I suspected, the blood belonged to He Zhen, there was a chance she might not even be alive.

  * * * *

  I came back to my flat late at night, exhausted. I dumped He Zhen's computer on the bed, and fixed myself a meal of instant noodles and sweet-sour pork.

  When I was finished, I quickly rinsed the chopsticks and plastic bowl, and sat before my computer to look at the results of the search I'd started before leaving for He Chan-Li's house.

  There wasn't anything surprising about He Chan-Li (co-founder of Leiming Tech, nowadays leading partner, and one of forty-nine businessmen entitled to the qi'lin insignia), or He Pao (He Chan-Li's husband and co-founder of Leiming Tech, dead of congenital heart failure ten years ago). But on our smiling fiancé Wen Yi...

  Ostensibly, he ran a small but very successful company of personal care for the elderly. However, he had ties with the White Lotus, a rebellious organisation that had fought the Chinese motherland in Xuya, and that had turned to crime after the independence.

  No charges had been brought against Wen Yi—not surprisingly, since there was no tangible proof, and since his money had funded part of Prefect En Pao's re-urbanisation campaign.

  Clearly the kind of man who'd have access to guns and would not hesitate to use them.

  I sighed, and ran an analysis on the blood and hair samples I had gathered at the derelict building, and on the pictures of the bullet holes.

  In the three quarters of an hour that it took to complete, I busied myself with He Zhen's computer, rifling through her personal folders. There wasn't much. I found a few pictures of He Zhen with friends, grinning into the camera with that same reckless abandon. The pictures with her mother were more subdued; seeing the way she stood, I doubted her childhood had been happy. A businesswoman entitled to the qi'lin was not always the best or most sensitive of parents.

  But the folders were abnormally empty. Someone had indeed erased almost everything from the memory. They had made only one mistake: the only way to erase anything permanently from a hard disk was to destroy the physical support. I could still probably manage to recover the erased files, but it would require an enormous amount of time, all the more so because I had no idea what I was looking for.

  My computer beeped to warn me the analyses were complete. I moved from He Zhen's computer to mine, and looked at the results.

  The bullets had come from an automatic Yi-Sen with a modified barrel, a gun favoured by agents of the White Lotus. And the rest: no great surprises either. There we
re two different DNAs involved: the blood was He Zhen's, but the hairs belonged to smiling Wen Yi. Neither of which, of course, had any reason to be in that building seven days before.

  I debated over whether to call Wen Yi and demand explanations, and dismissed that as clumsy. Wen Yi apparently still believed me on his side; better not do anything to antagonise him.

  I launched a standard analysis on He Zhen's computer, on security files and erased mails. That alone was going to take most of the night.

  Before going to bed, I moved the pictures of He Zhen's splendid room to my laptop, and stared at it, but try as I might, I couldn't find what I had missed.

  * * * *

  I woke up long before my alarm clock beeped; seeing, over and over, the stylised butterfly on the touchpad of the laptop, and knowing exactly what was wrong with it. The butterflies of the Mexica god Quetzalcoatl did not have markings on their wings, and this one had.

  I got up, throwing a cotton robe over my pyjamas, and opened up the laptop again, looking at the wings very carefully. They looked like markings, but, if you bent the right way, there was something about them ... Something I'd seen before. Like He Zhen's favourite pendant, the markings were Mexica glyphs.

  I did not speak Nahuatl, the language of Greater Mexica, but in the age of the internet that was no problem. I hooked up to my building router, then to a Mexica search engine, and from there to a Nahuatl-Xuyan dictionary.

  The glyphs were easy to find. They read ‘Smoking Mirror'.

  Smoking Mirror. A further search ascertained that this was the frequent epithet of the Mexica god of War and Fate Tezcatlipoca, whose favourite occupation was challenging travellers at night to outlandish contests.

  Which made me feel as though I'd leapt a wall only to find myself staring at a deep ravine.

  A password?

  Think. Why had He Zhen left this here? Had she suspected that her laptop wasn't safe, and left a message for someone else, someone familiar with Mexica customs? I thought there might be a connection with the Mexica pendant I'd found in He Zhen's room, but no matter which way I looked at that pendant, I couldn't make the pieces fit together.