The Best of Lucius Shepard (60 page)

He
broke off and pawed at something above him in the air–an apparition, perhaps;
then he let out an anguished cry, covered his face with his hands, and began to
shake like a man wracked by fever.

I
sat with him until, exhausted, he lapsed into a fugue, staring dully at the
ground. He was so perfectly still, if I had come across him in the jungle, I
might have mistaken him for a root system that had assumed a hideous
anthropomorphic shape. Only the glutinous surge of his breath opposed this
impression. I didn’t know what to think of his story. The plain style of its
narration had been markedly different from that of his usual stories, and this
lent it credibility; yet I recalled that whenever questioned about his
identity, he would respond in a similar fashion. However, the ambiguous
character of his personal tragedy did not diminish my new fascination with his
mystery. It was as if I had been dusting a vase that rested on my mantelpiece,
and, for the first time, I’d turned it over to inspect the bottom and found
incised there a labyrinthine design, one that drew my eye inward along its
black circuit, promising that should I be able to decipher the hidden character
at its center, I would be granted a glimpse of something ultimately bleak and
at the same time ultimately alluring. Not a secret, but rather the source of
secrets. Not truth, but the ground upon which truth and its opposite were
raised. I was a mere child–half a child, at any rate–thus I have no real
understanding of how I arrived at this recognition, illusory though it may have
been. But I can state with absolute surety why it seemed important at the time:
I had a powerful sense of connection with the major, and, accompanying this,
the presentiment that his mystery was somehow resonant with my own.

Except
for my new program of study, researching my father’s activities, and the
enlarged parameters of my relationship with Major Boyette, whom I visited
whenever I had the opportunity, over the next several years my days were much
the same as ever, occupied by touring, performing (I functioned as a clown and
an apprentice knife thrower), by all the tediums and pleasures that arose from
life in Radiant Green Star. There were, of course, other changes. Vang grew
increasingly frail and withdrawn, the major’s psychological state deteriorated,
and four members of the troupe left and were replaced. We gained two new
acrobats, Kim and Kai, pretty Korean sisters aged seven and ten
respectively–orphans trained by another circus–and Tranh, a middle-aged,
moonfaced man whose potbelly did not hamper in the slightest his energetic
tumbling and pratfalls. But to my mind, the most notable of the replacements
was Vang’s niece, Tan, a slim, quiet girl from Hue with whom I immediately fell
in love.

Tan
was nearly seventeen when she joined us, a year older than I, an age difference
that seemed unbridgeable to my teenage sensibilities. Her shining black hair
hung to her waist, her skin was the color of sandalwood dusted with gold, and
her face was a perfect cameo in which the demure and the sensual commingled.
Her father had been in failing health, and both he and his wife had been
uploaded into a virtual community hosted by the Sony AI–Tan had then become her
uncle’s ward. She had no actual performing skills, but dressed in glittery
revealing costumes, she danced and took part in comic skits and served as one
of the targets for our knife thrower, a taciturn young man named Dat who was
billed as James Bond Cochise. Dat’s other target, Mei, a chunky girl of
Taiwanese extraction who also served as the troupe’s physician, having some
knowledge of herbal medicine, would come prancing out and stand at the board,
and Dat would plant his knives within a centimeter of her flesh; but when Tan
took her place, he would exercise extreme caution and set the knives no closer
than seven or eight inches away, a contrast that amused our audiences no end.

For
months after her arrival, I hardly spoke to Tan, and then only for some
utilitarian purpose; I was too shy to manage a normal conversation. I wished
with all my heart that I was eighteen and a man, with the manly confidence
that, I assumed, naturally flowed from having attained the age. As things stood
I was condemned by my utter lack of self-confidence to admire her from afar, to
imagine conversations and other intimacies, to burn with all the frustration of
unrequited lust. But then, one afternoon, while I sat in the grass outside
Vang’s trailer, poring over some papers dealing with my father’s investments,
she approached, wearing loose black trousers and a white blouse, and asked what
I was doing.

“I
see you reading every day,” she said. “You are so dedicated to your studies.
Are you preparing for the university?”

We
had set up our tents outside Bien Pho, a village some sixty miles south of
Hanoi, on the grassy bank of a wide, meandering river whose water showed black
beneath a pewter sky. Dark green conical hills with rocky outcroppings hemmed
in the spot, and it was shaded here and there by smallish trees with crooked
trunks and puffs of foliage at the ends of their corkscrew branches. The main
tent had been erected at the base of the nearest hill and displayed atop it a
pennant bearing the starry emblem of our troupe. Everyone else was inside,
getting ready for the night’s performance. It was a brooding yet tranquil
scene, like a painting on an ancient Chinese scroll, but I noticed none of
it–the world had shrunk to the bubble of grass and air that enclosed the two of
us.

Tan
sat beside me, crossed her legs in a half-lotus, and I caught her scent. Not
perfume, but the natural musky yield of her flesh. I did my best to explain the
purpose of my studies, the words rushing out as if I were unburdening myself of
an awful secret. Which was more-or-less the case. No one apart from Vang knew
what I was doing, and because his position relative to the task was tutelary,
not that of a confidante, I felt oppressed, isolated by the responsibility I
bore. Now it seemed that by disclosing the sad facts bracketing my life, I was
acting to reduce their power over me. And so, hoping to exorcise them
completely, I told her about my father.

“His
name is William Ferrance,” I said, hastening to add that I’d taken Ky for my
own surname. “His father emigrated to Asia in the Nineties, during the onset of
doi moi
(this the Vietnamese equivalent of
perestroika
), and made
a fortune in Saigon, adapting fleets of taxis to methane power. His son–my
father–expanded the family interests. He invested in a number of construction
projects, all of which lost money. He was in trouble financially when he
married my mother, and he used her money to fund a casino in Danang. That
allowed him to recoup most of his losses. Since then, he’s established
connections with the triads, Malaysian gambling syndicates, and the Bamboo
Union in Taiwan. He’s become an influential man, but his money’s tied up. He
has no room to maneuver. Should he gain control of my grandfather’s estate,
he’ll be a very dangerous man.”

“But
this is so impersonal,” Tan said. “Have you no memories of him?”

“Hazy
ones,” I said. “From all I can gather, he never took much interest in me . . . except
as a potential tool. The truth is, I can scarcely remember my mother. Just the
occasional moment. How she looked standing at a window. The sound of her voice
when she sang. And I have a general impression of the person she was. Nothing
more.”

Tan
looked off toward the river; some of the village children were chasing each
other along the bank, and a cargo boat with a yellow sail was coming into view
around the bend. “I wonder,” she said. “Is it worse to remember those who’ve
gone, or not to remember them?”

I
guessed she was thinking about her parents, and I wanted to say something
helpful, but the concept of uploading an intelligence, a personality, was so
foreign to me, I was afraid of appearing foolish.

“I
can see my mother and father whenever I want,” Tan said, lowering her gaze to
the grass. “I can go to a Sony office anywhere in the world and summon them
with a code. When they appear they look like themselves, they sound like
themselves, but I know it’s not them. The things they say are always . . .
appropriate. But something is missing. Some energy, some quality.” She glanced
up at me, and, looking into her beautiful dark eyes, I felt giddy, almost
weightless. “Something dies,” she went on. “I know it! We’re not just
electrical impulses, we can’t be sucked up into a machine and live. Something
dies, something important. What goes into the machine is nothing. It’s only a
colored shadow of what we are.”

“I
don’t have much experience with computers,” I said.

“But
you’ve experienced life!” She touched the back of my hand. “Can’t you feel it
within you? I don’t know what to call it . . . a soul? I don’t know. . . .”

It
seemed then I could feel the presence of the thing she spoke of moving in my
chest, my blood, going all through me, attached to my mind, my flesh, by an
unfathomable connection, existing inside me the way breath exists inside a
flute, breeding the brief, pretty life of a note, a unique tone, and then
passing on into the ocean of the air. Whenever I think of Tan, how she looked that
morning, I’m able to feel that delicate, tremulous thing, both temporary and
eternal, hovering in the same space I occupy.

“This
is too serious,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about my parents more
than I should.” She shook back the fall of her hair, put on a smile. “Do you
play chess?”

“No,”
I admitted.

“You
must learn! A knowledge of the game will help if you intend to wage war against
your father.” A regretful expression crossed her face, as if she thought she’d
spoken out of turn. “Even if you don’t . . . I mean . . .” Flustered, she waved
her hands to dispel the awkwardness of the moment. “It’s fun,” she said. “I’ll
teach you.”

I
did not make a good chess player, I was far too distracted by the presence of
my teacher to heed her lessons. But I’m grateful to the game, for through the
movements of knights and queens, through my clumsiness and her patience,
through hours of sitting with our heads bent close together, our hearts grew
close. We were never merely friends–from that initial conversation on, it was
apparent that we would someday take the next step in exploring our
relationship, and I rarely felt any anxiety in this regard; I knew that when
Tan was ready, she would tell me. For the time being, we enjoyed a kind of
amplified friendship, spending our leisure moments together, our physical
contact limited to hand-holding and kisses on the cheek. This is not to say
that I always succeeded in conforming to those limits. Once as we lay atop
Vang’s trailer, watching the stars, I was overcome by her scent, the warmth of
her shoulder against mine, and I propped myself up on an elbow and kissed her
on the mouth. She responded, and I stealthily unbuttoned her blouse, exposing
her breasts. Before I could proceed further, she sat bolt upright, holding her
blouse closed, and gave me a injured look; then she slid down from the trailer
and walked off into the dark, leaving me in a state of dismay and painful
arousal. I slept little that night, worried that I had done permanent damage to
the relationship; but the next day she acted as if nothing had happened, and we
went on as before, except that I now wanted her more than ever.

Vang,
however, was not so forgiving. How he knew I had taken liberties with his
niece, I’m not sure–it may have been simply an incidence of his intuitive
abilities; I cannot imagine that Tan told him. Whatever his sources, after our
performance the next night he came into the main tent where I was practicing
with my knives, hurling them into a sheet of plywood upon which the red outline
of a human figure had been painted, and asked if my respect for him had
dwindled to the point that I would dishonor his sister’s daughter.

He
was sitting in the first row of the bleachers, leaning back, resting his elbows
on the row behind him, gazing at me with distaste. I was infuriated by this
casual indictment, and rather than answer immediately I threw another knife,
placing it between the outline’s arm and its waist. I walked to the board,
yanked the blade free, and said without turning to him, “I haven’t dishonored
her.”

“But
surely that is your intent,” he said.

Unable
to contain my anger, I spun about to face him. “Were you never young? Have you
never been in love?”

“Love.”
He let out a dry chuckle. “If you are in love, perhaps you would care to
enlighten me as to its nature.”

I
would have liked to tell him how I felt about Tan, to explain the sense of
security I found with her, the varieties of tenderness, the niceties of my
concern for her, the thousand nuances of longing, the intricate complicity of
our two hearts and the complex specificity of my desire, for though I wanted to
lose myself in the turns of her body, I also wanted to celebrate her, enliven
her, to draw out of her the sadness that sometimes weighed her down, and to
have her leach my sadness from me as well–I knew this was possible for us. But
I was too young and too angry to articulate these things.