Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (70 page)

Toma said, “Don’t tell Andi about this. All right?”

She nodded. “All right.”

Toma turned and started down the trail, a calm and steady pace. Like a man who’d just gone out for a walk.

Stella slid to the ground and sat on the grass by the wall until the old man was out of sight. Finally, after scrubbing the tears from her face, she followed him down, returning to the cottages and her work.

Andi was home in time for supper, and the household ate together as usual. The woman was quiet and kept making quick glances at Toma, who avoided looking back at all. It was like she knew Toma had had a plan. Stella couldn’t say anything until they were alone.

The night was clear, the moon was dark. Stella’d learned enough from Andi to know it was a good night for stargazing. As they were cleaning up after the meal, she touched Andi’s hand. “Let’s go to the observatory.”

Andi glanced at Toma, and her lips pressed together, grim. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I think it’ll be okay.”

Andi clearly didn’t believe her, so Stella took her hand, and together they walked out of the cottage, then across the yard, past the work house, and to the trail that led up the hill to the observatory.

And it was all right.

About the Author

Carrie Vaughn
is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. The tenth novel in the series,
Kitty Steals the Show,
is due out in 2012. She's also written novels for young adults (
Voices of Dragons, Steel
), two stand-alone novels (
Discord's Apple, After the Golden Age
), and more than fifty short stories. She's been nominated for the Hugo Award for best short story, and is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. After living the nomadic childhood of a typical Air Force brat, she's managed to put down roots in Colorado, where she lives with her fluffy attack dog and too many hobbies.

The Switch

Sarah Stanton

It starts out like this: halfway up a ladder looking at the stars. Xiao Zhu is behind me with the paint pots, whistling something tuneless to himself. I’ve got a brush in my hand and a delicate tracework of flowers in front of me; there’s a job to be done, and Lao Yang is waiting. But all I can think of is the stars.

We don’t see them that often, not the real ones. On the streets of Beijing you can see them every night, a glorious winking parade for the people who made them, but in the courtyards, the behind-spaces where we live and work and play, we just see clouds. Ever since I was a boy, there’s been a roof of smog over my head. And these days people think there’s something suspicious about stars. They’re for farmers and foreigners and dissidents, people who know how to find them and still want to. But they’re up there tonight, faint specks in the muck, and my hands go still as I stare.

Lao Yang coughs behind me. It’s a smoker’s cough, full of sound and fury, but it’s also a warning: there’s a job to be done. I turn my eyes to the roof beam, to the beautiful tracery of blossoms and leaves, and begin to fill in the green. Xiao Zhu begins to wander the courtyard, a young man’s amble, taking in the neat tiles and the potted pomegranate in one corner. Lao Yang just waits.

The paint takes shape under my brush as if it were a living thing. Red, green, blue, gold; it drifts across the wood and makes it real. When I have chased the last of the color into the corners, Lao Yang helps me down the ladder, and the three of us look up in silence at what we have done.

“It’s finished,” he says.

I nod.

“Three months’ work,” he says.

I nod again.

We walk out onto the street, sharing a steady silence between us. Xiao Zhu is already busy at the gate, stabbing at a small control panel with his slim fingers. We turn and look at the image of a house, the stone lions guarding its door, its roof beams painted like a sunrise. Above us, the false stars shine clear and unadorned.

Xiao Zhu hits the switch, and the hologram collapses. There is a quiet shimmer, and then nothing. The street remains unchanged.

Lao Yang smiles. “Let’s go home.”

It starts out like that, but that’s not where it started. It started fifteen years ago, when the hutongs disappeared. Those narrows alleys, pinpricked by public toilets and hawkers, the sights and the sounds and the pervasive smells, and on either side the courtyard houses, the heritage of Beijing. They were already vanishing by the close of the twentieth century, whole stretches of history being leveled to make way for apartments and poor quality condos. A lucky few were protected, turned into tourist traps and holiday homes. Gulou, Nanluoguxiang, Liulichang Jie: their names trip off our tongues like ancient mnemonics. But eventually, they too disappeared.

Lao Yang was forty when he saw the demolition sign go up above his door. He lived in a protected hutong, a heritage-listed area. When he went to register his protests with the local authorities, he was waylaid by plainclothes agents and beaten. That was the day the first hologram went up, in front of the place Lao Yang used to call home. Seen from the street, it looked like any other courtyard house, elegant and serene. From behind, it was a sick pile of rubble. He tells us over and over how he could put his hand through the mirage, how in that moment what he saw and what the world saw changed forever.

The next day, Lao Yang’s whole street was cloaked in holograms. The usual smog had subsided into a pearly blue. The crude demolition notices had vanished from the doors, to be replaced by fresh coats of vermillion paint. Lao Yang looked at them and knew that there was rubble waiting behind. And the holograms spread, street after street, so fast you could see a workman in the morning and know your whole district would be gone in the afternoon. I was just a boy when it happened, but I remember the spread of blue skies and green leaves like it was Chinese New Year. I didn’t understand back then. All I knew was that the city was beautiful, and I never wanted to leave.

I understand now. People believe what they see. These government holograms, they make Beijing a dream town, a false perfection that follows you home and leaves you at the door. We don’t see the demolition, the shaky buildings, the squalor. There are clear skies every day even though it hurts to breathe. We are a city of flickering images, of fantasy, of fraud, and nobody objects because nobody sees anything to object to. There are stars above us at night. Who cares where they come from?

We troop out of the hutong in single file, Lao Yang, Xiao Zhu and me. We never talk much after a job: we have done something majestic, something monstrous, and the silence is almost holy. We make our way through the winding streets like an ant trail, left, right and left again, until we reach the main road, bustling with cars. Xiao Zhu flags a taxi and bargains the price down to something we can afford. He sits in the front and we sit in the back, while the driver putters us home.

I met Lao Yang three years ago in a dingy noodle shop which had looked much cleaner from the outside. We were sitting side by side, slurping our noodles like some triumphant symphony. I had a book propped up against the vinegar pot and was considering it thoughtfully as I chewed. Not that I’m an intellectual or anything; I’m a man who works with his hands. But I like books. There’s something honest about a printed page. You know what it is today, and you can make a fair guess at what it’s going to be tomorrow.

Lao Yang peered over at my paperback. ‘You’re reading,” he observed.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why?”

I hooked a noodle out of my bowl. “I like words,” I said.

“You a writer?”

“No,” I said. “Just a laborer.”

Lao Yang considered this. Then he grunted. “Let’s have a few beers.”

I guess that’s where it really started: me and Lao Yang, getting drunk together in a deadbeat little noodle shop like any other in Beijing. That’s when he told me about what had happened to his home, the place he’d brought his wife back to and the place where his children grew up. He told me he had a plan to bring back the hutongs, as good as they’d been or better. He already knew a kid who could manipulate the hologram systems, knock out the feed to a single house. All we had to do was rebuild the ruins behind it, hit the switch, and watch the fantasy be replaced with something real.

We’ve restored twenty-odd courtyard houses so far. Some of them have been left vacant and fallen into disrepair; these are the small jobs, just repairing and repainting and finally, hitting the switch. The bigger jobs are the houses which were actually destroyed, demolished to make way for property developments which never came around. These we rebuild, brick and timber and roof tiles, until the only difference between the house and the hologram is the color of the sky. We are the quietest dissidents in Beijing. When we do our job right, nobody knows we were ever there. But little by little, the three of us are fighting to bring the barrier between truth and illusion down.

Home is the first courtyard house we ever fixed up, on the outskirts of Gulou. Lao Yang’s house. When we arrived it was little better than a heap; now a crab-apple tree hangs lazily over the courtyard, and goldfish drift in the ornamental urns. The only furniture we have has been salvaged from demolition sites, old moth-eaten futons and wobbly tables, giving the place an eccentric, creaking charm. We’ve never been able to afford to buy new things for ourselves.

Xiao Zhu goes into the kitchen to boil water for noodles. I join him, helping to shake the little flat cakes out of the packets and into the bowls.

“You did a good job today,” he says. “All those colors. Really pretty.”

“You too,” I say, tearing open a seasoning sachet.

I never quite know what to say to Xiao Zhu. He’s a young guy, good with all the technology which has long since left me and Lao Yang behind. He’s got a thick mop of hair and a rakish smile and he dances when he walks. He could’ve been a TV idol, but he became a dissident instead. He’s the one who works the holograms for us, when all the hard labor is done; he helps out here and there with the painting and tiling, but his real job is something I can’t even begin to understand. I don’t know where Lao Yang found him. But he’s part of the secret, and that makes him family. I just wish I knew what to say.

We carry the steaming bowls of noodles out to the courtyard and sit down. Lao Yang hawks and spits into the bushes, picks up his chopsticks and digs in. Xiao Zhu and I eat slowly, making each bite last. When we’re done, Lao Yang lights up a cigarette, puts his feet up and eyes us across the table.

“That was our twenty-eighth house,” he says. “From here in Gulou to Chenxiang Jie and out to Dongjiaominxiang, we have brought twenty-eight courtyard houses back to reality. Nobody knows it but us, but we are making the past the present, and the present the truth of the past. The future is ours. And I think it’s time to move on.”

“Double prosperity,” I murmur.

“Double prosperity,” Lao Yang agrees. “Twenty-eight is an auspicious number. We’ve talked about this before, and I think we’re ready. There’s a jewel at the heart of this city, a treasure lying forgotten, and it needs to be saved. We can save it, if we’re willing to try.”

“The Forbidden City?” says Xiao Zhu. “We’re talking about the Forbidden City again? It’s massive. We’d be dead before we finished.”

“Not if we had help,” says Lao Yang, and a gleam creeps into his eyes. “What have we been playing at, these past three years? Pockets of reality here and there. Drops in an ocean. But if we could rebuild the palace—shut the holograms off and let people see the truth through the haze—that’d be worth dying for. I know a guy. He’s got a construction company. He’ll come in and help us for a price. We can do it! Give the people back their history! The government thinks they own our futures. Let’s fight them with the past!”

I pick up our bowls, toss the chopsticks in with a clatter. “We’ll talk about it,” I say. And then, apropos of nothing: “If the past and the present and the future had a battle, who would win?”

“The future,” Xiao Zhu says softly. “The future always wins.”

The next day, I head over to Houhai to see my girlfriend. She’s a sweet thing, a little younger than me, and has no idea what I get up to in the small hours of the night. Sometimes I think I should marry her, but then I remember I have no money, no job, no future. I am a down-and-out hero, not a husband. At these times I hold her tighter, kissing her with a sweet desperation; when she finds out the truth, we are finished. But the sun is bright today, the holographic sky projecting a deep and powerful blue, and we walk around the lake hand in hand while she chatters about her extensive circle of friends. I drift in and out, thinking about what Lao Yang said. Restoring the Forbidden City. Bringing it back to reality. Could we really pull it off?

“Oh!” my girlfriend exclaims, her eyes falling on a nearby shop. “They’ve put up the lanterns for the festival!”

“They’re not real lanterns,” I sigh. “They’ve just altered the hologram.”

“Hologram, real lanterns, what’s the difference?” she says. “They’re
pretty
!”

She rushes over to the shop and insists on posing for a photo, two fingers up in a cheeky V-sign. I dutifully hold her bag and snap the picture with her smartphone, assuring her she looks beautiful in every way.

“I’m going to eat so many mooncakes this year,” she says. “I always do. Every year when they come out in the shops, I go in and scold them. You’re going to make me so fat! I say. But I just can’t resist them.”

“You’re not fat,” I say absentmindedly. I’m thinking about the palace, how we’re going to shingle those roofs. Then my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s Xiao Zhu.

“They’ve got Lao Yang,” he gasps.

I stop dead. “Who has?”

“The cops. Or someone like them. That guy he met was a plant, or a rat, or something. They grabbed him this morning on his way to where they were meeting. I don’t know where they took him. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”