The Nicholas Linnear Novels (216 page)

At night, pointing over his head,
sensei
would say, “Look there.” Obediently, the twins would crane their necks, staring into the star-filled sky. “You are looking outward,”
sensei
would say, “yet what you see is in the past. That light—all those lights from the stars—is millions of years old. It took that long to reach us here on this planet. You look outward and see inward.

“This is the essence of Kshira, the language of the sound-light continuum. It is the opposite of eternity because Kshira is never at rest. Take the lesson of the stars to heart; it is the essence of everything I will teach you. The stars are far away both in distance and in time. In a sense, the two are the same. The past—your past and mine—are in another place as well as another time.

“It is the same with the days. Man has names for the different days, but Kshira tells us that there is only one day. It returns again and again, and so may be influenced.

“There is a membrane at
kokoro,
the heart of things. It is not an organ that beats thum-thum, thum-thum, as your heart or mine does. It is a field of energy that can be influenced by manipulation of the forces inside ourselves.

“The paths are twofold: ritual and meditation. Ritualized
actions
and meditative
thoughts.
Both focus energy, harnessing it into a concentrated beam that may be beaten against the membrane of
kokoro,
exciting it, exerting an influence. The paths must be repeated over and over. And the longer these repetitions go on, the more the membrane
kokoro
is excited, the more energy is created.”

Firelight played across the River Man’s face, making it seem to change aspect with each flicker. “As an example…” he intoned, his eyes closing, his face becoming placid.

The twins, with their extraordinary gift, could feel the emanations—much as So-Peng had felt his mother’s force—concentric circles of light that were nevertheless devoid of illumination. The atmosphere became heavy, aqueous. The stars still dazzled, but now it seemed to the avidly watching twins that their light was being reduced from a shower to a drizzle.

Abruptly, overhead, the stars winked out, a wind, damp and chill, sprang up and it began to rain lightly. In a moment it stopped. The fire sizzled and cracked as if filled with bones.

The River Man opened his eyes. “You see what Kshira can do,” he said softly.

“You made a cloud,” Senjin said.

“Now the night is clear again,” Shisei said.

The River Man smiled. “I did not make a cloud. That is beyond the powers of any human creature. But Kshira tells us that there are always clouds, even when they are not apparent to the eye. Clouds are part of nature and nature is entirely in flux. Always. Clouds are always forming or dissipating, always there. This is true of everything in nature. One needs but to gather up the requisite energy, focus it against the membrane of
kokoro,
cause an action to gain a reaction.”

The River Man stood up. “But I used only thought to generate the energy, one path, and I told you that there are two.” He disappeared into the darkness, returning a moment later with a stoat. The twins had seen stoats many times in summer, their thin brown coats unmistakable in the underbrush. Now, in winter, the stoat was covered in a long silky pelt. It was a magnificent creature.

It squirmed in
sensei
’s arms, clearly terrified, until with a twist of his thumb and forefinger he broke the stoat’s neck. Then, producing a small knife, he set about skinning it. He did it not as a hunter might, in the most efficient way, but in long, protracted cuts that were so stylized that their ritualistic nature was evident even to the children.

The stoat’s skin came off in thin, bloody strips which
sensei
carefully arranged like the petals of a flower. Senjin and Shisei could see that his eyes were almost fully closed; just a thin line of white was visible, and they knew that the meditation, the focusing of energy, had begun anew.

Now the two paths, ritualistic action and meditative thought, were combined, and the twins shivered as they felt the first harsh gusts of the gale whipping the tops of the trees. Leaves spun in the night air, and the tree frogs ceased their croaking. There was no sign of the nocturnal insects: fireflies, crickets, or midges.

The night grew black, as if a vast blanket were being pulled across the stage of the heavens, blotting out the starlight. The rushing of the nearby river coalesced with the rushing of the moisture-laden wind to give the impression that the entire world was suddenly in flux.

A moment later the twins started as a ferocious clap of thunder cracked almost directly above their heads and the world seemed to tremble beneath them. There was no lightning that they could see, but the thunder continued, short and sharp, very close, very loud.

They became aware of a kind of fabric, perhaps the very membrane of
kokoro
that the River Man had described to them, its dark vibrations, like beats upon a drum, the cause of the instability that flooded the sylvan river valley.

It was only when the downpour began that the River Man’s eyes opened fully. He grinned at them.

“This is your power,”
sensei
said. “The power of Kshira, the Way of the Two Paths.”

Time passed, and Senjin dreamed of Zhuji. Soon Haha-san had her own curriculum for them. She began to teach them the strange language that she had used to sing them lullabies when they were younger. It was, she told them, the language of the tanjian.

Senjin now began to see a purpose to his hard, exacting work. The search for the ending of the story of the two brothers, So-Peng and Zhao Hsia, had become a passionate obsession.

The River Man was nothing if not thorough. He delivered to the twins volumes encompassing a broad range of philosophical, theological, moral, political, and ethical thought. These included the great minds of Western as well as Eastern civilization.

The twins, precocious in all aspects of their development, gorged themselves on literature. They continued with their lessons in Kshira. But as for their interaction with the outside world, Senjin soon knew that something was wrong.

He automatically assumed that he would be better at everything than any of the other boys his age. He wasn’t, and this crushed him. He could not understand how he could be so smart and so talented in some areas, yet utterly ignorant and inept in others.

Then, during his reading, Senjin came across a volume by the sixteenth century French moralist, Joseph Joubert. In it, he found the way for, him—the separatist, the special, the one—to live comfortably in society, side by side with the common man. “Great minds are those that disguise their limits, that mask their mediocrity,” Joubert wrote, and from that moment on, Senjin lived his life by that rule.

He ceased to insist on competing in everything, but rather stuck to his areas of expertise and even, on occasion allowed himself to lose in order not to bring too much attention to himself. He discovered, much to his surprise, that he had little desire to become a leader among his peers, simply because they were so uninteresting to him. He would much rattier practice his martial arts, read, or discuss philosophy with
sensei,
or debate morality with Shisei.

This last he did with his sister late at night, when they were in bed. Either he would crawl into her bed or she into his. Initially, this was done so they could talk as long as they wished without disturbing Haha-san, who was attuned to their psychic emanations even, it often seemed, in her sleep.

In time the twins came to understand the shared warmth. Senjin found that he liked to be up against her, reveling in the places where women, even ones as physical as Shisei, were soft. For her part, Shisei loved the press of his hard muscles. There was no give anywhere on his body, and she often dreamed of Senjin’s form splayed wide to protect her from unnamed dangers. And often when they fell asleep in this way, they dreamed the same dream.

But the warmth was not physical alone. Shisei could feel inside herself a strange sensation, as if someone were massaging her spinal cord and brain stem. Much later she would be stunned to discover this same, peculiarly wonderful feeling flooding through her at the moment of sexual orgasm.

In the warm, formless zone they constructed of their energies, the twins spoke deep into the night of the nature of good and evil. Because they made it so, there was nothing here but their psyches. They created their own colors, generated light without illumination: the heat of the merging of their twin engines.

They were gods, without knowing it. Neither good nor evil had yet touched them (so they could view them with a rare kind of objectivity), but these momentous concepts were lurking just around the corner, in the slowly opening doorway to adulthood.

Senjin was of the opinion that good and evil were mutable, defined differently from individual to individual; this, he argued, was endemic to the nature of man. He even likened this to a punishment: the Western concept of original sin, theorizing that at some time far in the past, before original sin, good and evil were immutable.

On the other side, Shisei believed that good and evil were and always would be immutable principles. This, she told her brother in an impassioned tone, was what made mankind mortal, different from the gods or from Buddha, who could indeed perceive good and evil as arcs of light that bent to his will.

“We are humbled by the gods, by nature—even by the animals—who are closer to the spirits, the energy, that animate the universe than we can ever be,” Shisei said.

“But isn’t that what
sensei
is teaching us, what Kshira is all about?” Senjin said. “Learning to manipulate the energy membrane of
kokoro.
”

“That’s the problem with you.” Shisei said. “You see everything in terms of manipulation.
Sensei
is teaching us to understand our world as we come to understand ourselves.”

“You still don’t see it,” Senjin said. “All understanding is an illusion, the understanding of the self the biggest illusion of all. And do you know why? Because we don’t want to know what sightless worms are squirming in the blackness at the heart of our spirits.”

“You don’t know how wrong you are. ‘The beautiful spirits are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things,’” Shisei said, paraphrasing Michel de Montaigne.

Senjin laughed. “The fallacy of that,” he said, “is that we are not living in a beautiful world.”

“Why is it,” she asked, “that you see everything inverted?”

Senjin had no answer for her. Instead, he reached out and touched her.

After a time Shisei sighed. “That feels good.”

He took one long fingernail, scraped it down the center of her back until he drew blood.

“And this?” he said. “How does this feel?”

Two years later, when he was seventeen, Senjin disappeared. Shisei knew, of course, where he had gone: Zhuji. But she told no one, not even Haha-san, who was frantic with worry, because she knew that if Haha-san found out where Senjin had gone, she would dispatch the River Man to bring him back.

Shisei felt her brother’s absence with the keen edge of a blade. Her bed was cold and lonely without the hard metallic circles of his aura surrounding her. Oddly, she felt less innocent with his departure, as if this abandonment were a passage for her from the naiveté of youth to the disillusionment of adulthood.

There had been no adolescence in the twins’ development. Their rigorous training, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, precluded some basic hormonal development as well as effectively isolating them from the normal growth patterns of their contemporaries.

Theirs had been a world apart, an odd kind of paradise where their work was endless and arduous, yet in everything else they were pampered as if they were the sole successors to the Emperor.

Shisei felt her twin’s abandonment with as much force as Senjin did his mother’s. Shisei did not feel abandoned by her mother. She never thought of her parents at all, or when she did, it was of a couple in a motion picture, with a sense of observation rather than obligation. Besides, she had Haha-san, who was Mother, and the River Man, who was Father.

Still, Senjin’s departure shattered Shisei’s dream world, and at once she saw how like Haha-san she had become, locked within a hermetically sealed environment, feeding only on herself. This disturbed her. Her pursuit of
seishinshugi,
the triumph of the spiritual over the physical, was perhaps generated by the knowledge of how weak she was. Oh, yes, she had Kshira, and with it she could do many things. But it could not give her brute strength. For that she was, and always would be, dependent on others. She knew that she needed to find a way to do that while keeping to a minimum the risk of being dominated.

In the stillness of the night, alone in her bed, hugging a hull pillow to her breast, she thought of Senjin, her brother, her twin, of how she was dependent on him, of how she wanted to be dominated by him. A single tear trembled in her eye.

If it had not been for the River Man’s detailed description of Zhuji, Senjin undoubtably would have ended up in the wrong place. The only Zhuji that anyone knew about was a town perhaps forty-five miles almost due south of Hangchow, now known by the revolution-obsessed Chinese as Hangzhou.

But this town, engaged in the manufacture of silk and Dragon Well green tea, was in an alluvial plain in the lake country of southeast China, and Senjin was certain that the Zhuji he was searching for was a much smaller mountain village in the northwest.

He finally found the Zhuji of the tanjian in the north of Henan province, in the Taihang Shan, the mountains fifty miles west of Anyang, the cradle of Chinese civilization.

Even the dung-colored mountains here seemed bent and worn with antiquity. Zhuji, carved into the heart of the shan, was filled with temples. Like grains of salt spilled from a shaker, the temples were identical, spread across the slopes of the mountains.

But it was not only the River Man’s description that led Senjin to his goal, it was Kshira. Kshira enabled Senjin to “see” Zhuji in the past: over distance and time. And when he came to Zhuji, hidden within the dung-colored mountains of Taihang, he found no Mao jackets, no maddening modern Chinese bureaucracy, no Communist Chinese exhortational slogans, posters, cant, no inefficient government appointed by Peking.