The Nicholas Linnear Novels (218 page)

But for the moment, he felt only pity for the feebleness of an aura that needed all this space and solitude to make its presence felt. Still, it was beautiful, as striking as Xu’s face, and he surrounded it with the powerful rings of dark steel so that its light would reflect back on itself, better illuminating it. Immediately he saw that Xu had been right: this spot was made beautiful by the projection of her will.

“It is said that you come from Asama.” Xu looked up into his face. “Is this true?”

“Yes.” He felt the tension come into her frame, and decided to allow her to ask all the questions of him she desired.

“Do you know a tanjian from there known as Aichi?”

“No.” But instinctively Senjin knew that he had made a mistake. “What does he look like?” he asked.

Xu described the River Man.

“I know him,” Senjin said. “For many years he has been my father.”

“Your father!” Xu exclaimed.

Senjin explained how the River Man was Haha-san’s brother, and how he had been his first
sensei.

“Oh, that explains it, then,” Xu said. “Why the elders are afraid of you.”

“Mubao and the others are afraid of me?” Senjin was incredulous. “Then why did they take me in?”

“They were bound to accept you,” she said. “They had no choice. You are tanjian and they cannot refuse you. But coming as you do from Aichi, the man who tried to steal the emeralds of the tanjian—”

“Wait,” Senjin said. “I thought the sixteen emeralds had been stolen many years ago by a traitorous woman named Liang.”

“There were originally twenty-four emeralds,” Xu said. “Eight still reside here. These were the emeralds that Aichi tried to steal.”

“What happened?”

“He was caught,” Xu said. “He was tried, sentenced, and banished. Now I see that he returned to Asama and has begun teaching his own version of Tau-tau. This is strictly forbidden.”

“It hasn’t stopped him.”

“Obviously,” Xu said.

Then something occurred to him. “This law you mentioned, that the elders were bound to take me in. I have not heard of it.”

“It exists, I assure you.”

Something in her eyes drove him to say harshly, “But that’s not all of it.” He evoked the projection of his will, just a little bit.

“No,” Xu whispered, “it’s not all. The law affects only tanjian descended from the prime line.”

Senjin was stunned. “Are you saying that I am—”

“You are descended from Zhao Hsia, the martyr who—”

“Was drowned in the falls by So-Peng.”

“Yes.” Sunlight drenched Xu. Her eyes were liquid. Her face was pure gold. She broke from his grip, moving until she was against his chest.

He felt a stirring of his darkness, the metallic rings that were the projection of his will, which still enclosed her aura. He felt a kind of expansion, a rhythmic pulsing that flooded him with pleasure.

Senjin had already discovered that he could enjoy an odd kind of nontactile sex with his sister. For him, if not for her, it was a game of sorts, of mastery, of dominance. He had loved to feel Shisei’s will dissolving beneath the onslaught of his own prodigious aura, his massive coils that encircled hers, until her pleasure was so great that it spilled over into him.

But this was something far different. It was happening to him from the inside out, his coils being manipulated by that which they enfolded, and the intensity was so great that for an instant he was totally disoriented, floating in time as well as in space. He had no control, had ceded all movement to this other will which possessed him utterly, which made even the questions that had burned themselves upon his spirit disappear behind a veil of delight.

When it was over, Senjin was so shaken that he could not stand up. He slid down Xu’s form, grasping weakly at her ankles. He closed his eyes and for one brilliant moment he was at peace. Then the questions began to reassert their dominance over him, and he was himself again.

Senjin and Xu never returned to that spot in the Taihang Shan; they never came together in that way again. Perhaps she would have wanted to, but Senjin never gave her the opportunity to suggest it. Part of him reveled in the rape (for there was no other word to adequately describe what had happened), in the kind of wild pleasure she had given him. But another, deeper, more dominant part of him remained so terrified of the experience of ceding all control to another that it would not allow the merging to be repeated.

Three months after coming to Zhuji, Senjin saw that the River Man’s truth was not
the
truth. Three years after that, he discovered that the Tau-tau truth was also not
the
truth.

Then he thought of Shisei, who he had not thought of in a very long time. He recalled their conversation when she had asked him, “Why is it that you see everything inverted?” He had had no answer for her then, but he suspected that he did now. He longed to drink her in with all his senses, with his finely-attuned aura, and while thus merged with her, say to her, “I see everything inverted because I know that in this world there is no truth, only many supposed truths. Each man has his own or appropriates another’s, and this is why life is based on conflict.”

Three years and three months after Senjin began his work in Tau-tau at Zhuji, the elders cast the runes. This was a neolithic ritual which took place over the course of a week. It was a week of constant repetitions, constant chanting, and Senjin saw in the elders’ rituals the increased excitation of the membrane of
kokoro,
a building of energy that rang in his ears like a silent shout until sleep was out of the question and every movement, every gesture, was put toward the beating of
kokoro.

At the end of this time, the elders met within the center of one of the stone temples set high up in the side of the mountains. Here a massive fire had been lit by the women, who tended it constantly. Senjin, when he was led in, could see the stars through a hole high up in the roof of the room.

Here the elders were hard at work etching runic messages on the inside of long shards of tortoiseshell. Senjin was reminded of the River Man’s story, of how So-Peng and Zhao Hsia, as boys, had stolen and eaten the tortoise eggs on the beach at Rantau Abang.

These messages were questions the tanjian elders wished answered about the future. When they were done with their etching, the week-long rite culminated with the elders throwing the shards into the fire. The chanting rose to a crescendo, men slowly subsided.

Afterward, the women were dispatched to retrieve the tortoiseshell from the ashes of the fire, and by the way each shard had been cracked by the heat, the elders thus could read the future.

Mubao was brought his tortoiseshell, and he signed for Senjin to join him. When Senjin had squatted down beside Mubao, the elder said, “This is your future.”

Senjin, staring at the sooty shard of tortoiseshell, could see nothing but a fine network of cracks bisecting the etched runes. “What is predicted?” he asked.

“A flood, a torrent, a rage of thunder, a detonation of energy,” Mubao intoned. “And after the deluge,
xin
.” By
xin
he meant the center or heart of things.
Kokoro.

Senjin’s heart beat fast. “Is this what lies in wait for me?”

Mubao nodded. “In part.” His callused thumb rubbed the cracked tortoiseshell. “Death is strong. Its tone permeates the silent echoes we hear and which guide us. Death and more death.”

Mubao’s thumb paused over one spot on the shard. He looked at Senjin and said, “You must leave here. Our time of the day has passed.”

Senjin found it no hardship to leave Zhuji. In fact, he had in recent weeks grown bored with his schooling. He had absorbed everything that Mubao and the other elders had sought to teach him. Now, in his heart, in his own
kokoro,
he wished to teach
them.
They did not know the Truth, but he, Senjin, did. Then, after the casting of the runes, after Mubao had, in effect, delivered his sentence, Senjin understood that they would not understand even if they had given him a chance to tell them what he now knew: that there was no Truth.

It was not that what he had learned was either false or useless. Far from it. But the fact that both forms of Tau-tau were valid and were believed in wholeheartedly, delivered the reality of life to Senjin with the force of a hammer blow.

Nothing was true; nothing was sacred. In that case, there was no Law.

Thus did Senjin return to Japan at age twenty a
dorokusai.
And, to satisfy both his sense of yin-yang and his desire for irony, he became a policeman in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force.

He did not return to Asama, to where he knew Haha-san and the River Man were like death, waiting for him. He did not return to Asama, where he assumed Shisei would be waiting for him. It did not matter; they met in Tokyo, on the glittering Ginza, where giant signs of snaking neon advertised the icons of a new age:
SONY, MATSUSHITA, TOSHIBA, NEC,
and
CBS/SONY.

They were drawn together amid the winking, blinking electronic jungle, by the concentric circles that had bound them as children, the dark, oiled steel and the coil of sinuous perfume.

Their reunion was a joyous one, though no one looking at them could tell. There was no expression on their faces; everything was internalized. And everything was mended, settled.

Or so Shisei thought.

Senjin moved into his twin’s apartment. It was in the most fashionable area of the city. It was huge, filled with Western furniture covered in luxurious, snow-white fabrics. On the way to it that first night of their reunion, Senjin came across three enormous posters with Shisei’s face. He saw her on television, singing before a gargantuan crowd of screaming youngsters.

“I’m a talento,” Shisei said. “The most successful talento in Japan.”

Having been away for some time, Senjin did not know the term.

“I’m a kind of media star,” Shisei said. “I sing a little, dance a little, a dilettante entertainer. I give concerts, I’m about to star in my own television soap opera, I do commercial endorsements for all the big companies. Anything and everything. I’m a role model, held up to the hungry public for their inspection and adoration.”

“Does it make you happy?” Senjin asked. He was riveted by her image, blue and gold, moving across the screen, caressed by the television cameras. He was certain that the director must be in love with her.

“They’re
all
in love with me,” Shisei said. “The audience, the crew, the publicists, the corporate executives.
Especially
the corporate executives. That makes me very happy.” Her face clouded. “But as wonderful as it is, I know it can’t last. A talento must be young, dewy-fresh, virginal. Time is my most vicious enemy.”

“But how did this happen?” Senjin asked.

Each wanted to know everything that had happened to the other during the three years they had been separated. In a way, since the texture and complexities of the energies they threw off had changed, they knew. In other ways, they needed to be told verbally. Oddly, they were both reluctant, just as if they were shy newlyweds come to the moment of truth: their marriage bed.

But Senjin, ever the more impatient of the two, was eager to share with Shisei the end of the story of So-Peng that the River Man had begun so many years ago.

“I was right to travel to Zhuji,” he told her that night. “They knew what had happened there, and they told me.”

It happened, Senjin began, that Tik Po Tak was so incensed by his rival’s usurpation of his territory in Nightside that he discovered where the man went to have sex, and invading the brothel just before dawn, he single-handedly slew the man, his three bodyguards, and their lovers while they slept.

At least, this is what the Singapore police thought, and though they had had a lucrative deal with Tak, this bloody carnage he had wreaked was too much even for their avaricious stomachs. They pursued Tak with all of their resources. They were aided in this by the remnants of the slain rival’s tong.

Now, it must be remembered that So-Peng had a cousin, Wan, who cleaned the offices of the chief of police. Several days after the hunt for Tik Po Tak was begun, newspapermen, following an anonymous note, discovered the tong’s involvement in what was a police murder investigation. The scandal rocked Singapore. The British chief of police, of course, disavowed any knowledge of the involvement of criminals with elements of his department. But the information was too damaging, and he was forced to fire, arraign on charges of misconduct, or reassign, two thirds of his force. This, naturally, left him little time to pursue Tik Po Tak, who eventually returned to Nightside, consolidating his power and then expanding it.

Now, however, Tak was not alone. He had So-Peng behind the scenes to guide him. The tanjian elders at Zhuji say that So-Peng was behind everything. It was he who conceived a way into the closely-guarded brothel, bribing the kitchen staff, who laced the wine drunk by the rival
samseng
and his bodyguards with a sleeping potion.

It had been So-Peng, as well, who had his cousin secrete the incriminating documents in the chief of police’s office. And it was So-Peng who applied for the vacancy left by the departing deputy chief of police.

It was ludicrous, on the face of it. After all, So-Peng was only a lad (no older than I am now, Senjin said). But So-Peng was aided by the nature of the emergency in which the chief of police found himself. The chief was under enormous pressure to restore not only order, which a grand show of British soldiers could accomplish, but confidence in his administration. And military might certainly would not do that. Already the governor had met with him twice, threatening to relieve him of duty, sending him back to England in disgrace. Besides, no one else had applied for the job.

The chief of police, desperate, at his wit’s end, gave So-Peng the job of deputy, even though So-Peng had not had even one day’s experience at police work. But for So-Peng such training was superfluous. He had his extraordinary gift. And he had Tik Po Tak as his staunchest ally.