Camera Obscura (20 page)

 
 

For a long time after he had arrived in the city the voices were quiet. He had gathered a little of their history. They were weak, their vessel inactive for long periods of time. A human presence revived them, gave them strength, but only for a while. They were, he thought later, when he had learned of Tesla waves, a little like a man turning a dial in the hope of finding a working band. But their attempts were futile. They spoke of
transdimensional calibration
and
quantum effervescence
and
chrono
spatial matrices returning negative values
but mostly what he felt from them could only be described with a human term, and that was loneliness.

  He knew that feeling well.

  As time passed he became accustomed to the city. It lay in the conjunction of two great rivers, one of which was the Mekong. Above it towered mountains, high forbidding cliffs and thick forests where bears and tigers roamed. The city had many temples and a royal palace and a king, and was a vassal of Siam, but they spoke a different language, which was Lao.

  Also spoken in the city were Chinese; Hmong; Karen; Hakka; there were many dialects and tongues and many different people. There were mountain people and lowlanders, Siamese merchants and Chinese traders, and here and there the people called franag or falang or Europeans. Once he saw something he had thought impossible – a lizard taller than a man, and walking upright, and dressed in clothes. It was dressed like a prince, was escorted by a retinue of farang and Lao. He had thought it one of the Emerald Buddha's illusions, but later found out it was not so, and that such beings did exist, and were very powerful.

  He washed in the river and ate when he could. In the dry season he helped the farmers plant seasonal gardens on the banks, and build bamboo bridges across the river. He carried sacks of rice and flour for the Chinese merchants, interpreted for the Siamese, stole from the Hmong when they had something worth stealing. He learned the city, came to know its tiny stone alleyways, its hiding places and its night places, roaming from beyond the half-island of the rivers' confluence into the lands beyond.

  The statue gave him lightness; he could see in the dark and leap across walls, could spin and kick and duck and run faster than any other child. He could pass unseen even in a crowded place. It was what the wuxia novels had called
Qinggong.

  There weren't many books but there was one Chinese merchant who sold fishing nets and tackle and sundry small items from Chung Kuo and he had a small library, and when Kai did small jobs for him he let the boy borrow a book, in lieu of pay. And so he continued to follow the adventures of the Shaolin monks and the Wu Tang Clan and the Beggars' Guild and their enemies, of assassins sent after evil emperors, of lovers fighting impossible odds, of the Wulin and Jianghu and the eternal battle between right and wrong.

  Few noticed him. For a while he had the sensation of being watched, closer than was usual, by a decrepit old beggar whose single eye seemed a little too bright, but when he sought him out the man was gone, and no one could recall seeing him before or after. For a while he worked at the palace, cleaning up the elephants' dung, sweeping floors, watering the flowerbeds, helping the cooks or the gardeners or the monks. He was, in the words of one of the novels, unrolling his mat. He was settling in, making the city his home. For a short time, he was happy.

  As he grew older he began to notice changes in himself. His skin grew thicker, coarser, a metallic grey. One day, scrabbling in the mud, his hand returned and a fingernail had fallen off. Another became loose the next day. He felt the change sweep over him, his old body shedding itself for something new. "What is happening to me?" he asked the statue.

  There was a faint sense of amusement. Yo
u asked to be made
into a gun
, the voices said.

  "I changed my mind," he told them, and had the mental impression of a shrug.

  
It is too late to undo what has begun.

  His face, too, acquired a metallic sheen. It did not spread evenly, only affected one side of his face. The fallen nails were replaced with thicker, sharper versions, their colouring metallic, grey, and he felt as if he were a ghost that still, somehow, had substance.

  
You could be anything you want
, the voices told him. Yo
u could
be king of all this land.

  "I want my father. He died for you."

  
He died for an inaccurate belief
, the voices said.
It is unfortunate.
Your race does not have the –
a concept, divorced from words
– to
comprehend us, make sense of what we are.

  "What
are
you?"

  A shifting series of wordless concepts, images, and he said, "What do you want of me?"

  
We wait
, the voices said.

  "For what?"

  
A sign. There is another in this world now. A child, but it is
– and then a void, a gap where understanding lay.

  He didn't know what they meant about the child. But he understood being alone.

  
Too long…
the voices said.

  For months after that he did not speak to the voices. He tried to be human, to eat and to drink and to think like a human. He watched the puppet shows that were popular at that time. He drank rice whisky (he was old enough now) and had his first hangover, though it passed swiftly. He watched the sun set over the river and the mountains. He gambled with the Chinese, and lost, and read the mulberry scrolls in the monastery's library, finding hints of a story about an impossible statue that spoke and drove people mad. For several months he became a monk, and wore the saffron robes, and felt peace.

  He thought himself safe.

  He was wrong.

 

Perhaps, he thought – much later – the statue itself was sending out a signal of some sort. Perhaps in its search it was also broadcasting – and it was possible others had devised some sort of machine that was able to pick up that signal. He had hidden the statue, though the statue could hide itself quite effectively. Kai had a little bamboo shack on the bank of the river and the statue was safely buried in the soft earth under the woven mat. And were anyone to find it, they would not see the Emerald Buddha – a flash of light, perhaps, like water moving in a stream, and as if in a dream they would turn away, their mind fogged by grey impenetrable clouds.

  And yet they came.

  The black-clad men. Chinese, and well trained. He was in the hut, watching the flow of the river, when they came. They had surrounded the hut. It was twilight, the sun had almost disappeared. There was chill in the air. They had guns.

  There were four farangs with them.

  He fought them. Desperation made him bold. Qinggong made him lithe and light. The change wrought in him made him strong – terribly strong.

  But there were too many of them.

  As he fought them he thought of his father, the silent attackers in Chiang Rai, men like these; he lashed out and his nails took out a man's throat and he watched the blood flow on the black earth. He leaped and descended and two more men were down.

  "Don't kill him," he heard someone say.

  Instead, they went for him with nets.

  The nets were connected somehow, by a long wire, to an engine the men had brought with them. It belched steam and its cogs moved and current came through the wires and fed into the nets. He tore at them, but they were made of metal, and he couldn't break it. They caught him with long rods and ran electricity through the metal and made him scream.

  "Search the hut."

  "Yes, Manchu."

  So their leader was a Manchurian. He swore at the man, telling him he'd kill him, and the man laughed. By then Kai was pinned back, caught in the webbing of their trap, and the electric current ran through him and pain blossomed everywhere.