The Apex Book of World SF 2 Page 8

  Seeing where his gaze lay, she smiled. "Joao," she said. She removed the necklace and held it towards him with both hands, saying something incomprehensible, and then "Joao," again.

  He shrugged and bowed, allowing her to pass the offering over his head. It caught on one ear, but was soon in place around his neck.

  "Thank you," he said, and she smiled back, understanding the meaning, if not the words.

  Joao felt more relaxed. Having accepted her gift, he felt that it would be all right to return to his camp. He turned away from the fire, the afterimage of the embers dancing in his eyes. He waited for them to subside, for his night vision to return.

  But, instead of disappearing, the moving lights came into sharper focus, resolving themselves into points of light just beyond the ember's illumination. Eyes that stared unblinkingly back at him, seemingly an arm's-length away. De Menes recoiled from those eyes, his steps taking him straight into Tehuech's waiting embrace.

  He knew the fire was all that kept them away, and that the girl was all that kept the fire alive, and that the creatures of the netherworld were not there to interfere, but to bear witness to a consummation.

  The following day dawned bright and clear; memories of the previous night burnt away, but De Menes was still surprised to wake inside the tent. He had no recollection of having returned, and his memory of the rest was blurred as if veiled in grey fog. But it had not been a dream: the clicking of his new necklace as he crawled out of the tent assured him of it.

  "Come on, sleepyhead," Carrizo chided. "The sun's been up for an hour, and Magalhaes is back. He found some more savages a little further west, and they seem a bit more advanced than these. We have to pull up the tent and return to shore."

  The manual labour allowed De Menes to temporarily forget about midnight rendezvous and ghostly eyes and, as he approached the sea and its waiting boat, he felt an enormous weight lifting from him. Each step felt lighter than the last.

  A small party awaited, natives mixed with sailors. The savages even helped to load the boat, only asking a few trinkets and some cloth in return for their unnecessary help, which were given gladly—too often, the sailors had had to fight natives who took a dim view of outsiders. Tehuech, amongst the local group, said nothing and kept her gaze on the ground.

  Finally, as De Menes was about to step aboard, one of the older women came forward, and said something to Herrero.

  Herrero listened, and turned to Joao. "I'm not really sure what she said, but I think it was "That man wears a wedding circle," and she pointed at you. Do you know what she's talking about?"

  De Menes hung his head. "I think I do." He pulled the necklace back over his head and walked to where Tehuech was standing, heart heavy with dread and remorse. He held the jewellery out to her, but she made no move to take it and refused to meet his gaze, eyes resolutely turned away. Finally, he left it at her feet and stepped back. Still, she gave no sign of acknowledgement.

  Joao walked back to the shore and boarded the boat. None of the savages made any move to stop them.

  As the Trinidad left the hills with eyes far behind, the crew began to taunt De Menes, asking what had happened, and attempting to get the details of what they imagined must have been one of the more sordid escapades of the journey. But he refused to elaborate and the speculation soon passed into the realm of wild orgies and fantastic pleasures.

  De Menes heard none of it. The lewd shouting seemed to him a far-off whisper. As the ship advanced, it grew fainter and fainter.

  Even the ship itself seemed to be fading. It had sailed into a fog which became thicker as they sailed through it. The Trinidad's prow became a ghost of itself, and soon, even the mainmast, scant metres away, seemed a spectre.

  A small tremor of panic coursed through him as he realised that the deck beneath him was no longer solid, but made of ethereal mist, but he simply shrugged it off. Understanding had replaced fear, and a broken trust was suitably punished. Perhaps the endless, featureless grey at the end of the world would not be as bad as the visions of fire and torment that the hell of his own land promised.

  And perhaps, just perhaps, he would be called upon to bear witness in some distant future, thereby remembering what it was like to tread upon the grass at the end of the world, and share the love of one of its guardians.

  The Tomb

  Chen Qiufan

  Chinese writer Qiufan Chen is a graduate of Peking University and a prolific short story writer. He is the author of the novel The Abyss of Vision, and winner of, amongst others, the Dragon Award. The following story appears here in English for the first time.

  This is entrance; and exit, of course.

  The dim blue light slid across the cold, wet, rock y ceiling and into deep darkness. Between the indistinct here-and-there stood a mouldy wooden counter, the type in an old-school by-the-hour hotel, with the bell, the chair, the, and the man.

  A hand as skinny as an insect was wiping the metal plate with a black cloth clipped between the fingers. The man, hidden in the blue shadow, breathed upon the plate once in a while till the engraved words shone:

  "That seeing they may see, and not perceive."

  "Ding." The bell quivered on the counter. The face lifted immediately—the fine wrinkles bathed in the blue light—and gathered into a smile. "Hello, sir.name is Chen, code V0817. A pleasure to serve you. Are you passing by or assigned here, please?" He straightened his legs, his back slightly bowed and his hands curled on his breast, rubbing against each other and jerking like a pair of mating arthropods.

  No answer.

  "Hmmm, confidential? No problem. Please register?" He opened a purple book and drew out a rusted pen. The edges of the blue pages had grown black.

  Again, no answer.

  "Want to look around? Okay. Let me introduce some lovely neighbours to you." Calmly, he closed the book with a loud snap, removed the keys from the wall and staggered into the darkness while holding onto the rock wall.

  "You liked the words on the plate. Well, that's from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 4, verse 12. No, no, I'm not a Christian. Religion no longer matters if you are already in hell. You said you call this place ‘Alice's Rabbit Hole'?"

  Chen was deep in thought, his skinny fingers scratching a few scraggly lines into the wall like a long musical score without any notes. Must've been from section B.

  The British are the only ones into such silly fairy tales. The Greeks called it "The Prison of Hades", Argentineans, "The Library of Babel", and Americans, "Zion", which is Biblical, but more likely they took the name out of movies. With all these names, all of them mourned the past glories of their civilisations.

  Only the Chinese did not.

  Against their five thousand years of tradition, the Chinese showed amazing courage and candour this time.

  They named this world—"The Tomb".

  I've lived in The Tomb for ten years, twenty, or perhaps longer?

  The sliding fingers were stopped by a bulge on the wall. He came back to his senses, stopped and showed a pleasant smile.

  "Sir, this is our Room 1, the magic hut of Mrs Shi." His hand was poised to knock, but he thought it over, put his hand down and pulled out a key. "Shhhh… I think we'd better just take a peek instead of frightening her."

  "You know, the people here on the outskirts of section V have all been assigned here because the old level could no longer hold so many…" Hmm, what's the word? The critically ill? The diseased? But Mrs Shi never considered herself ill. She's just living in a spiritual world.

  How fantastic that experience is: the teapot tilts to pour not water but an arc of whiteness; everyone's playing the puppet game; all she can see are mechanical poses and expressions, then it all disappears, or else the eye sees through walls, furniture or bodies and pauses at another corner. The world is like a badly degraded copy with too many dropped frames, its beauty only glimpsed in jerky, broken bursts. Chen licked his lips.

  "Multiple regions in Mrs Shi's lateral cortex were "fil
tered", so she can't perceive moving objects. Bodies and objects flit into her vision like ghosts. It was very difficult at first; her screams almost became our time piece. Heh-heh."

  Wheresoever is physical phenomenon, there is delusion; but whosoever perceives that all phenomena are in fact no-characteristics, perceives the Tathagata.

  "She considered this her sin and kept praying to the Buddha for relief."

  When all phenomena became no-characteristics all of a sudden, the human race wasn't ready. When the Tathagata was perceived, thus came one. How ironic.

  He sighed. When was it? Ten years ago, Twenty, or longer? Was it war? An unidentified virus? Or divine retribution? Forgotten, all forgotten.

  All we knew was that the visual cortex regions of the brain were severely damaged, a phenomenon known as "Filtration". In the post-Filtration world, one-third of the population died of brain damage; one-third became insane and committed suicide; only less than one-third survived and eked out a living on the ground, immersed in toxins and radiation. To protect themselves, the survivors built huge burrows and lived off underground water and food reserves. Several small wars followed as people competed for resources before the synthesiser was invented. Thereafter, the burrows were expanded, networked together, until even the continental networks were connected. Social and economic systems were re-established, and the Cult of Satan spread and extended into the arts.

  Chen closed the door quietly. "She's searching for peace in the darkness, like everyone else." His fingers resumed the progress to the next door. He looked at the visitor, Hmmm, an ordinary grey suit, an ordinary pale face, what kind of filter does he have?

  Each victim had his own filter. No-one realised this frightening fact until five years after the Filtration. It was discovered at the end of 20th century that "vision" is a brain process involving the active interpretation of stimuli from the environment. There was no noticeable gap in our visual field despite the existence of the scotoma on the retina, a region with no photoreceptors. The visual system interpolated and filled up the blind spot through a precise and complicated process, and created the illusion of "reality". In other words, what you see is not what you get. Filtration selectively destroyed the brain regions responsible for the formation of vision such that the world through filtered eyes was significantly altered, not unlike the filters used in photography, and thus the symptoms were named "filters" as well.

  Room Two. "Mr Wei's luckier than the others." He knocked, but the door creaked and swung itself open. "Wei, this is our new neighbour. Come on, shake hands with him. Right, you'll take care of each other."

  He waved and closed the door with a click.

  "Wei is a blindsighter. Large areas of his V1 visual cortex were destroyed. The prevalence of that is 0.03 percent. Did you notice that he gripped your hand immediately when I told him to shake hands with you, and that his blink reflex was intact when I waved? But he thinks he's blind. People with these symptoms can perceive light, shape and simple movements and react accordingly, but they resolutely deny that they can see."

  Useless trash gets special privileges, what a world…

  He let out a sly grin. "Aren't the blind luckier than the seeing, here?"

  "Why doI know so much? Ho-ho, didn't they tell you where this is?" Chen stopped at another door. "Not your fault. It was a long time ago."

  "Mr Wang must be sleeping. He usually stays up all night working. But you can check out his works." He opened the door softly. A rotten stench filled the air. "Oh, the sun is gone, but time continues."

  In the dim light, broken chunks of plaster were scattered around the room, their phosphorescence like bones in a graveyard. Inspected closely, these were fragments of female bodies, plump breasts next to slim calves, chubby hips connected directly to pretty heads. Quite a terrifying sight. The only thing the pieces had in common was a lack of proportion and symmetry, like failed genetic experiments that had been abandoned.

  "Mr Wang used to be a sculptor, you know, before. His filter is "planarity". The world is two-dimensional in his eyes. Even an elephant looks like a piece of paper. And objects can only be identified from certain specific angles; that is, he can't distinguish a disc and a sphere from above."

  Chen stepped on the white splinters. The snaps and crackles, like breaking bones, haunted this room day in and day out. Mr Wang's hope, modelled with those distorted Venuses and Aphrodites, was smashed along with them, as well. A lone easel stood in the corner. Chen touched the panel and wiped away the thick layer of dust, revealing a sketch of the face of a middle-aged man. The proportion and expression were both surprisingly accurate, despite empty spaces where the irises and pupils should have been. Like a soulless stone face.

  "The beauty in his eyes has already been filtered. This sketch was a requiem for himself."

  Chen stared at the sketch thoughtfully. When he discussed the painting, Mr Wang's tone, like that of a deserted wife, gave him a headache, but that face… The fingers ran over the high forehead, along the brow bone, across the tall nose ridge, and fell into the deep philtrum and the pair of bow-shaped lips, and then held the full chin. He sighed. It had been almost unbearable.

  He rubbed his fingers, and looked at the visitor again. Hmmm, an ordinary black suit, an ordinary yellow face, what kind of filter did he have?

  "This is the home of the obsessed. They were either infatuated with the filtered world, or denied the existence of the Filtration. While others re-adapted to the world with the assistance of rectifiers, they were sent to this, ho-ho, Shangri-La, for the peace of their heart."

  Chen flung his head back towards the rocky ceiling as if he could look through the layers of infinitely dark rock to see the vast underground world, complex like neural networks. On those prosperous new floors, humankind was attempting to modify itself. Fresh flowers would bloom on the summit of the evolutionary tree, to wither or to fruit?

  What about us? Are we left to ourselves, in this crack of Hell, to live or die in due course?

  No. "I am their watcher. I will lead them back to light." He sounded resolute, full of sanctity and pride.

  But, but what kind of filter do you have, indeed? Chen's hands twisted together, rubbing and writhing.

  He hurried his steps, scraping one door after another, his fingernails screeching along the wall.

  "Miss Ji in Room 5, the ‘stranger' filter. She lost the ability to recognise faces and lives in a world of strangers. Every day, after waking up, she spends half a day habituating herself to the new weeping face in the mirror…

  "Mr Lv in Room 7, hippocampus and adjacent cortex damaged. His short-term memory lasts for one minute and twenty-three seconds only, so his life is sliced into episodes each lasting one minute and twenty-three seconds, just like the name of his filter—‘debris'…"

  All those familiar feelings flashed through his memory, various misfortunes, the same destiny, the past filtered to nothing, patched and woven together again this day. Just like me…

  No, I'm different. Chen shook his head, hard, and strode forwards.

  I am their watcher.

  Finally, at the end of the cave, a grand door blocked the way, with a small "c" etched on it.

  "I'm sure you've found that the cave dead-ends here. I dug every single one of these rooms with my own hands and left the last one for myself. I can see all the doors, watch all the people, all…"

  The rapturous hands paused in the air like a conductor pausing at a rest. His mind slipped again, remembering a proverb: Man turned into an animal, digging one exit after another in the burrow to protect itself, but he can never walk out of the burrow. That's from Austria, a dead country.

  But why should I walk out?

  "Don't you want to come in?" He put on his routine smile again. The door banged open, deep darkness soaking everything except the faint fluorescence on the ceiling. "I'll show you my private collection."

  He danced on, light-footed, sliding and swirling in the dark room, his voice flying like a moth. />
  "Do you know the ‘dark burrow' filter? This name actually originated from Anton's blindness, and the symptoms are very similar: blind without realising the blindness." He paused for a moment. "I was like that, living in my fictional world, even the rectifiers couldn't help me…"

  Great Anton, no, the Sovereign Dark Pope, grant us lightness and hope, the sacrifice of the black mass will be offered immediately.

  In the blue fluorescence, by the line of dome-shaped containers, his form fluttered about, and his hands kept on stroking the glossy domes.

  "Are you feeling dizzy and weak? Ah-ha, it's suppressing your neural transmission. Soon, soon it'll be all right.

  "Soon…" He fished about for something with great effort. With a crack, a strong electric arc flashed behind Chen, revealing a strange machine: two long thin tentacles stretched out from a jumbo-sized fruit blender, wriggling like snakes.

  "You know, when I was assigned here, I tried to communicate with them, learning to match the hallucinations in the brain with the reality, but I failed, and I almost broke down from the failure." Chen began to hyperventilate, huffing like the bellows of a broken organ, his breaths imbued both with nervousness and excitement. "Man is too self-centred, too attracted by the present, the past, the undamaged world, even if it is just an illusion. But I couldn't. I needed release. Finally, the forbidden Society of Compound Eyes opened up to me. You must have heard about it, yes, the so-called "evil cult". That, that is all true…"

  Chen's breath came even faster, breaking up his sentences.

  Oh, the Society of Compound Eyes, the loneliest child of the dark Church of Satan, but also the one with the mightiest dark power. We, the three million "dark burrow" filter owners, were called to serve the sole truth: only with compound eyes will we see again. Each compound eye needs many ommatidia, each ommatidium needs…