The Geomancer's Compass (4 page)

“How should I know?” Mom said shortly. I could tell from her tone that she did know, that she was lying. She always sounds angry when she's lying, like she's mad that she has to and it's somehow your fault. “I've booked you out of Calgary on Air
Canada flight 225, leaving at 6:20 tonight. Can you make that?”

I glanced at my watch. I could barely make out the time through the tears welling up in my eyes. It was 4:50 in the afternoon – cutting it close. “Yeah. I guess. Sure.”

The reason I was in Calgary was that I'd scored this wicked internship at CanBoard for the summer. CanBoard was the Canadian division of WorldBoard International, a consortium that had set out at the end of the 1900s to build a planetary infrastructure for associating digital information, tools, and services with a location, a person, or thing. In other words, Augmented Reality, or AR, where 3-D virtual objects are integrated into a real environment in real time. Totally, and I mean totally, cutting edge.

So I'd been living on my own out in Alberta for the past couple of months – well, on my own in a dorm, which is a little scary and lonely when you're sixteen and come from a big, tight-knit family, but also deeply cool, although it would have been cooler if I'd actually had any friends.

I realized Mom was still talking. I heard the words but I wasn't processing their meaning. My head was a jumble of thoughts about A-Ma, about my little, beautiful grandmother. I refocused with difficulty. “Don't go back to your dorm,” Mom was saying. “Go straight to the airport and you'll make it in time. Are you listening?
Take a cab
.”

Later, just as the sun was beginning to set over the jagged, snowcapped peaks on three sides of the city of my birth, my cab pulled up in front of the house on Pender Street. No sooner had it stopped than the big front door opened a crack and Mom waved me in. She must have been watching from the window.

I paid the cab driver, then bounded up the front steps and into the house. “Mom!” I hadn't seen her since I had left for Calgary. Before the internship, the longest I'd ever been away from home on my own was a two-week computer camp. Seeing her, being home, I realized how much I had missed her. Seizing her hand, I squeezed it hard.

She gasped and pulled her hand quickly away.

“Oh.” I said, remembering and wincing. “Sorry.”

“No, honey, that's OK. Really.”

What I'd forgotten was how hypersensitive she had become over the last few years. Practically any physical contact hurt her; we hadn't hugged for a long time. I could remember a time when she played tennis and was a champion swimmer. I could remember lots of hugs. But her sickness had eroded her the same way wind and water carve out shores and canyons – slowly, steadily, but most of all relentlessly. If you could hate a disease, I hated this one, whatever it was. It had taken the body of the mother I remembered, of the mother who could have been, and left in its wake one that was little more than the sum total of a thousand tiny points of agony. It was like
she was its prisoner and it was never, ever going to let her go.

“Where's Daddy?” I asked, although I knew the answer already. He was doing what he always did: sitting in what used to be his home office, staring at the Window Wall – this huge TV taking up an entire wall that he had installed just before his accident. Not watching it. Staring at it. With empty eyes.

“In his office. Why? Do you want to see him?”

I shook my head quickly. What was there to see? “Maybe later.”

No need to ask where the rest of them were. Sebastian was at some camp for blind kids up in the Interior and, by this time of day, Mom would have already strapped on Liam's mask nebulizer and helped him put on his chest wall oscillation vest for a long night of assisted breathing. As for the others, Auntie Ev had been dead for going on two years now. She had spent the last year of her life in bed, unable to lift her head off her pillow, begging for someone to kill her. It was pretty awful. My cousin Aubrey was in rehab for her eating disorder again – the last time I saw her, you could have threaded a needle with her – and Oliver was still at the clinic on the Sunshine Coast, which was sort of ironic since he never went outside. Only my cousin Brian was still a going concern. His combo of dyslexia and ADHD had made school difficult for him, but he had discovered a talent for torturing trees and had found a summer job he liked working for a commercial
bonsai
grower.

“A-Ma's in the little garden,” Mom told me. “She's expecting you.”

“Why don't you go and rest?” I said. She looked exhausted; the bags under her eyes reminded me of a really sad basset hound. “I know the way,” I added.

She didn't argue. “OK,” she said. “It's good that you're home.” She smiled wanly, then turned and dragged herself up the stairs. I know it sounds weird to say that, but that's what it looked like – like it was some super-steep hill and she might not make it to the top.

I dropped my laptop and my knapsack by the door and walked down the long, wide hall toward A-Ma's bedroom. The garden was in a small, enclosed courtyard connected to her room. I knocked tentatively, heard a faint “Come in,” and pushed open the door. The room was only dimly lit. I could just make out the brooding hulk of her big bed, built out of cypress and covered with decorative carvings, and the red and gold armoire in the corner, with its black frame and butterfly decor handles. The lattice door to the courtyard was open. I steeled myself, then crossed the bedroom and walked out into the garden.

A winter-flowering plum stood at its center, its gnarled branches reflected in the clear water of the little carp pool beneath it. The flower beds that flanked the walls were planted sparingly with wispy bamboo and miniature rhododendron. Beside the pool were a pair of chairs, separated by a
glass-topped side table on which was placed a small cherrywood box. A-Ma reclined in one of these chairs, covered with an elaborately embroidered peacock-blue satin quilt, despite the warmth of the early August evening. Carp, fat and golden, slipped through the water like big drops of yellow oil, and the air was tangy with salt, the way it is in cities by the sea.

“A-Ma.” I squatted down beside her chair and took her icy hand in mine. I squeezed it carefully – bird bones, skin as thin and brittle as a dried leaf. I was shocked at how fragile she had grown since I'd been in Calgary. It was like she was turning into a husk or something.

Her eyes creaked open a slit. “You came. I was hoping you would.” Her voice was weak; she spoke in a faint whisper.

“Mom told me you weren't feeling well.”

“She told you I was dying.… No, now shush.” She lifted a trembling hand to silence my protests. “I told her to. Besides, it's true. You mustn't feel bad. I'm ready. I've lived eighty-four long years and now I'm tired. I want to be reborn into something young and sprightly. Something with a little sparkle.”

“You look pretty sparkly to me.” I smiled, but my eyes filled up with tears. “Besides, eighty-four is young. Look how old The Grandfather was when he died. And then only because he choked on a moon cake.”

“Well, The Grandfather was a different case altogether,” said A-Ma. “Help me to sit up a bit, will you?”

I cranked the chair to a more upright position.

“There now,” she said, seeming to rally a little. “That's better. I've something for you.” She pointed to the wooden box on the table.

I stood, reaching over her, and picked it up. It was maybe eight inches square, with intricately worked brass hinges and a symbol inlaid on its lid – mother-of-pearl and ebony. The symbol consisted of a circle equally divided into black and white sections by a reverse S-like shape. Within the black section was a small circle of white, and within the white section was a small circle of black. I recognized the symbol – it was the
yin-yang
symbol and you saw it all over Chinatown – but I couldn't remember what it meant, or maybe I'd never known. “Wow,” I said. “This looks old.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Open it.”

Gingerly I opened the box and peered inside. I don't know what I expected – a jack-in-the-box? an explosive device? – but there, nestled in a lining of faded gold satin, was some sort of round instrument, about six inches in diameter, made of ivory. A smaller version of the
yin-yang
symbol on the lid appeared in the center of the instrument, surrounded by concentric rings densely inscribed with Chinese characters. “Cool,” I breathed. “What is it?”

“A
lo p'an
,” she replied. “
Lo
in Chinese means ‘everything' and
p'an
means ‘bowl.' The
lo p'an
is a circular bowl that holds all the mysteries of the earth. At least that's what The
Grandfather used to say. It's what they call a geomancer's compass.”

I remembered Dr. Yu, the fumbling, fusty old geomancer with hair growing out of his ears, who had selected the date of The Grandfather's funeral based on the year, month, day, and hour of the old man's birth, using a Chinese almanac and something called a Heavenly Sixty-Four Hexagrams Chart. Ridiculous, of course, but according to A-Ma it had been totally important that the date be auspicious, which is to say lucky. If it wasn't auspicious, well, terrible things would supposedly happen. I remembered her description of monsters at The Grandfather's funeral,
iau-kuais
, seething whirlwinds of teeth, claws, dust, and rags with fierce orange eyes. “Was this Dr. Yu's?” I asked.

A-Ma smiled faintly and shook her head. “Dr. Yu? That old fool? No, this was The Grandfather's compass, Miranda … and his father's before him, and his grandfather's … and so forth and so on. This compass dates from the seventeenth century and was made, if memory serves me, in Quangdong Province, our ancestral home. The tradition, however … that goes back much further.”

I have to admit that this took me by surprise. Given all his wheelings and dealings, The Grandfather must have been a pretty busy man in his day; not the kind of guy who had time for a lot of hobbies. “The Grandfather was a geomancer?”

A-Ma nodded. “He was. And his father and his grandfather. Of great renown. You come from a long line of geomancers.” I think this was supposed to impress me.

“Really?” I said. “Well, what do you know? To tell you the truth, though, I haven't a clue what a geomancer does. I mean, other than event scheduling.”

“Geomancy is an ancient and revered science,” she replied. “It involves the identification and balancing of those subtle energies, or earth radiations, that disrupt our lives.” She seemed more with it now than when I had first arrived. Her voice was stronger and the shaking had subsided. Maybe she had been asleep before and I had woken her up. “Which brings me to my point,” she continued. “Why I asked for you. The Grandfather placed this compass in my safekeeping until such time as I could pass it on to you. That time has come.”

This was a surprise. If I hadn't once thrown up on The Grandfather's birthday cake, I would have sworn that he didn't even know who I was. (He was jiggling me on his knee at the time, so really it was partially his fault; who does that to a kid who has already eaten her body weight in candy?) I mean, you'd think that two generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren would all start to blur together after a while. But now he had left me this … I don't know what you'd call it … this precious family heirloom. He'd left it to me, specifically. “Wow,” I began. “I'm
so
honored …”

A-Ma shook her head. “It is not a question of honor so much as obligation, Miranda. The Grandfather wanted you to safeguard the compass because of the mission you must undertake.”

Suddenly I was beginning to get this bad feeling. And I mean
very
bad. “What mission?” I asked.

“The salvation of our family,” she replied.