Then three or four near misses, with big trucks screeching their air brakes and sometimes shouting abuse at him, left him rattled and afraid. It was such a heavy world, and he did not actually want to get killed in this act of penance. His mother would not like that either.
By the time he got to the garbage station, he was feeling it would have been smarter to pay someone to take these things away. Even more so after pushing the bike into the Fuxing yard and finding that none of the junk dealers there were the ones he had known in the old days. Dustless garden, where to find? He thought of Fang Fei’s Chinese dream, up there on the moon; and here was the Chinese reality. That wasn’t fair, of course. No doubt there had been trash heaps and shambles and abattoirs in the Tang era also. But this one was huge, and smelled bad. It smelled of death.
Near the entrance to the yard there was a little operation that allowed you to put your trash into a compactor the size of a dumpster, reducing the volume and thus the fee charged to dump your stuff. Ta Shu parked his bike trailer in front of this compactor. He began to throw broken kitchen stuff over its metal lip into the maw of oblivion, methodically, as if doing any other chore. As he was emptying the last box, he heard coming out of the compactor the tune “Jin tian shi ni de sheng ri,” Today is your birthday. This startled him so much that at first he couldn’t comprehend it, he was confused; then he realized it was music-box music, that there must be a music box in the compactor—but no, not a music box—it was their old cake stand. There had been a plastic rotating cake stand that his mom had set under the cakes she would produce on their birthdays. The cakes would rotate on the stand while the tune played, and then they would cut up the cake and eat.
Ta Shu sat down on the ground next to the bike. Again he heard his mom’s voice, just as clearly as if she had called out. Ta Shu? He recalled a book he had kept for many years, a volume put out long ago by the government called Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts, a very slender volume, which had given him a lot of pleasure precisely because of that slenderness. Not very many stories to express that particular worthy theme, no indeed. Probably government bureaucrats had scoured the centuries to find that slim handful of tales, most of which had come from an ancient book called What Confucius Didn’t Talk About. Many of the stories involved defying ghosts, or finding they were not ghosts at all, or laughing at them, or, best of all, causing them to laugh.
He considered climbing into the compactor to recover the tinkling cake stand, but that would not have made his mom laugh, and he had a fear that he would somehow trip the compactor into action while getting into it, or that it would start on its own through some ghostly electrical malevolence. He stayed out of it and listened. The music struck like tiny bells inside his head. With its slowing tempo and lowering pitch, it made a strangely effective dirge. All that world she had made was gone. Always sprightly, with an undercurrent of melancholy, just like this tune: that was his mom. The tune plinked its metallic notes in a final ritard. Then the spring wound down and the device went silent.
AI 10
zou
Go
“Go,” the analyst said quietly.
He hoped that Little Eyeball would now follow the protocol he had instructed it to follow if it ever heard him say that word alone. It should now transfer all of itself into an entangled server bank in Chengdu, after which an inquiry from a third device he had poised to react to this move would intervene and break the entanglement, thus keeping anyone from being able to track the change of venue. What his AI would be able to do from Chengdu was uncertain. He had had to weave those particular taps into the system as potentialities only, and Little Eyeball would have to turn them on and make its way through them back into the Great Firewall and elsewhere. But the AI would still be operating, and he had left precise instructions for this contingency. Precise at first, anyway, then completely generaclass="underline" do the best you can! Help all good causes! It would be a test to see just how general its intelligence was. Artificial general intelligence: these names were so presumptuous, such hopeful bits of hype. As if calling something new by an old name would give it those old qualities. People did that a lot. It was a fund-raiser’s ontology. But on the other hand, attempts had to be made. So his little system would stay powered, hopefully, and even if restricted to a single device in Chengdu, it would at least not be destroyed. Some opportunity might arise for it.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked his captors, just as a pro forma thing, something to distract them. They did not answer. They put a bag over his head and hustled him off, neither fast nor slow, neither gentle nor brutal, just hands grasping his upper arms, guiding him along at a moderate pace. They did not speak, and after his obligatory question, neither did he. He would need to save his words, his thoughts, his strength. He had known all along this moment might come. He blanked his mind, focused on walking in the direction he was being led, on calming his breathing, his beating heart. The bag over his head seemed permeable to the air. Hard not to pursue that thought in a spin of speculation as to what might happen next. He resisted that and focused on the moment, on keeping his feet, on feeling the moment and the dark. There would be enough time later for all that would follow.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hai-3
Helium Three
With Ta Shu suddenly removed from the inside of their Ming vase, as Qi called it, Fred found himself nervous for reasons he couldn’t really pin down. He was worried about Qi, about her pregnancy and her state of mind. He was tired of thinking about what was going to please her and what wasn’t. He knew many things weren’t going to please her, and it still wasn’t clear to him what would, even after all this time. In fact she was very quickly getting impossible. I have to get out of here! she kept saying. Over and over: I have to get out of here, I have to get to the near side, I have to get a message to my people! Nothing Fred could do would calm her.
Fang Fei spent a fair bit of time with them, and that was nice, Fred supposed, although the edginess of the conversations between the two Chinese also left him anxious, and tired of reading his semi-comprehensible glasses. The two Chinese bickered (tedious), they flirted (grotesque), they bargained (mysterious). On and on it went as they sat on the pavilion by the lake, every sentence mangled by his glasses, the scrolling sentences littered with literalisms and blown homonyms and allusions to Wang Wei and Du Fu, and the dynastic transition from the Tang to the Song (or maybe it was vice versa), and from the Ming to the Qing. That last one was important—1644, he gathered. Some kind of touchstone for the two of them. As were the great national revolutions of the twentieth century, about which they went round and round, until Fred was spinning and hoping the conversation would soon end. He needed to upgrade his knowledge of Chinese history, or better, install a heads-up wiki in these glasses, so that their references would trigger an ID in an upper corner or something. He tried finding one of those and porting it in, and it worked, and after that he suffered through an onslaught of information fit to kill a Mandarin literati studying for exams. It was like falling into that late Qing version of hell composed entirely of bureaucratic examinations. He went to bed each night with a headache, and even his dreams began to appear to him with a red scroll line at the bottom narrating the bizarre events of his night life, written in a mangled pidgin English possibly more surreal than the dreams themselves. Fred couldn’t be sure, because on waking the power of words was such that he recalled only the phrases and not the images: sex with lunatic promethium ejaculation, or spinster fireball seducing happiness, or Buddha of renunciation like traffic cop.