The Terracotta Bride (4 page)

Think, Ling'en had told her, what could you do with a thing
that resembled a human body? Stronger than a human, more beautiful, and most
importantly—immortal. Impervious to illness and the persecutions of
demons alike. Such a thing was not pinned to the spokes of the Wheel, unlike
the bodies of every natural thing. Rebirth did not apply to it.

As spirits, Ling'en and Siew Tsin and Junsheng felt alive.
They ate and slept in houses with thatched and tiled roofs, as the living did.
But everyone knew the sturdy-feeling walls, heavy doors and solid roofs were
paper. If they were taken out of the fragile unreal world in which they were
suspended, every pleasure and pain of the flesh they believed they experienced
would show itself to be an illusion. Light their afterlives with a spark and
they would burst into flame—and vanish.

"We can last as long as our money and luck hold
out," said Ling'en. "But sooner or later some demon or god will take
us away from ourselves and flush what remains into our next lives, whether we
will or no. Sooner or later, we will die.

"But this man or woman, whoever it was who created our
Yonghua—they asked themselves: what if we could transfer our
consciousness into something that is not vulnerable to the demands of the
Wheel? If there was something like that, it would render the idea of past lives
and future lives obsolete. All lives would become one."

"They want to become Buddhas?" said Siew Tsin.

"Without putting in the work," said Ling'en.
"There is a group claiming that they have found the secret of immortality.
They have worked out a way to insert their minds into an immortal shell that
does not need food or air to live, that is not affected by material things the
way humans are.

"Once a person has locked their consciousness into
this shell, their memories are sealed in with them forever. Even if the shell
drank Lady Meng's tea of forgetfulness, the mind would be untouched. The person
could climb up into the living world again and live as themselves forever. They
say to live in this shell is like being human, but even better."

"How do you know about this?" whispered Siew
Tsin.

"The revolutionaries asked me for money," said
Ling'en. She looked displeased. "Some fool among my servants has been
talking too much. It seems people think I am rich enough that I could afford to
buy an immortal body to live in. That's why I came to see Yonghua. I would be a
fool to buy without checking the merchandise first."

"Yonghua is—"

"A trial. And an advertisement. A few hundred gold
taels and my mind could be inserted into a body like hers. I must say she is
stunning. The chance to have a body like that is very tempting to a woman my
age."

"But I don't understand," said Siew Tsin.
"Where is her mind from?"

"It's just some script they put in there," said
Ling'en. "They have not tried the process with any real mind yet. She is
only a prototype."

"And Junsheng has known this all along," said
Siew Tsin.

"His brain has grown soft from lack of use," said
Ling'en. "If only he'd started a business as I told him to when we first
died. It would have kept him occupied. Being kept in style by his descendants
has spoilt him. Now he is indulging in conspiracies and plots. We are too old
for such things."

"How much danger are we in, eldest sister?" said
Siew Tsin.

Ling'en shrugged. "If I were a god, I would be angry
at the audacity of mortals, trying to invent a new pantheon. Wouldn't you? But
it would be even worse if I were a hell official. It is not just my status that
would be threatened. It is my livelihood. What would a hell official do if he
did not have spirits to corral into the next life, or to bribe him to refrain?

"Junsheng is well-known enough that they won't simply
collect him and toss him into his next life. They don't want the spirits to
revolt and they don't want the rich men to stop paying out. But if they become
desperate, they may use other means to get at him and Yonghua.
You
are
not important—but they won't notice if their spears pierce three instead
of two."

Siew Tsin had asked whether Ling'en was going to sign up.

"Hn!" said Ling'en. "Be tied to this mind
for the rest of eternity? That is a worse hell than anything you could endure
in the ten courts."

"But … you're still here," Siew Tsin ventured.

Some of the old shrewishness returned to Ling'en's voice.

"And you always do exactly what you should?" She
shrugged. "Anyway, the plan will never work."

"Why?"

"It's bad theology," said Ling'en. "This
fool who created Yonghua was a reanimation engineer when he lived. You'll never
persuade me that someone who would do that job could have any understanding of
religion."

"A necromancer?" said Siew Tsin, using the
English word. "I thought they were only in Europe?"

"This Chen Fei was trained in England. The rain in
that country must have washed away all his sense," said Ling'en.
"Unlike us, Westerners are not content with feeding their dead regularly
and putting in the occasional request for protection. They bottle the vital
essence just before it escapes the bodies of the dead and insert this into
automata, and put the poor creatures to work doing their drudgery for
them."

Siew Tsin's jaw dropped. "But aren't they worried
their ancestors will punish them?"

"Westerners have different feelings about their
ancestors," said Ling'en. "They say the soul flies from the body at
the moment of death, and the vital essence that clings to the corpse is nothing
but energy.

"I suppose when Chen Fei died he expected the Devil to
greet him in a top hat and tails. Instead he ended up here with the rest of us
Chinese. So he has turned his hand to this—perverting the technology of
our ancestors for his own vanity. Once he has raised enough funds to fix
himself and his followers up with immortal bodies, I expect he will climb up
into the world with his army and try to storm the Christian heaven—or the
Royal Society, which is much the same thing to him."

Siew Tsin could not imagine Junsheng putting himself out
for membership of any society, heavenly or royal or both. She said so.

"No. But for self-interest?" said Ling'en.
"My dear sister, who would not move the worlds for that?"

The day after the attack, Siew Tsin shut herself up in
Junsheng's library and read furiously.

If she had paid attention, she would have guessed what was
going on. The clues were there. Junsheng had a startling number of books on
automata, the qualities of terracotta as a building material, rebirth, and the
soul. There were Buddhist scriptures, anthologies of Taoist tales of the
Immortals, and motivational pamphlets on how to win friends and influence
people.

And maps. Siew Tsin gave these her closest attention.

When she emerged, her head swam with information—philosophy
fighting with topography, folktales entangled with engineering.

It had all been there, laid out like dishes on a banquet
table. Junsheng had not even taken care to hide which books he had been
reading: they were stacked on the desk and scattered on the floor. He'd written
notes to himself in the margins and folded over significant pages. If Siew Tsin
had had half the ordinary curiosity of the average sentient being, she told
herself, if she'd bothered to peep in one or two of these books, she would have
found out what Junsheng was up to.

But she hadn't been interested. Idiot that she was, she had
gone into the library and taken down her silly romances, her philosophers, her
biographies of great men and women, her Greek and Latin primers. She'd read
everything except anything that mattered. She'd told herself that even if
nothing was happening externally in her life, at least she was learning. That
was something valuable in itself. The nuns at the convent school would have
said so.

But the nuns at the convent school had been wrong about
death. Why should they be right about anything else?

And Junsheng—he thought so little of her that it had
not even occurred to him to hide his research, though everyone knew she spent
hours in the library. This was a level of disregard that went beyond contempt.
To Junsheng she did not have a brain; she did not have feelings; she did not
have motivations. She was a total nonentity and need not be worried about.

The worst thing was that he was right.

Locked in a wordless tantrum, she went to her room and
packed her things. Then she went to Junsheng's bedroom and searched his
wardrobe. For some reason, when his descendants burnt hell money (which they
did with pious fervour and regularity), it always appeared at the bottom of his
wardrobe, under the magnificent traditional garments he never wore and the
naughty magazines they hid.

There was quite a lot of money this time. Junsheng must
have been too distracted by his plans to collect it.

If Yonghua agreed to her plan, they would not have far to
go. But where they were going, there would be demons to bribe, as well as gods
they would need to hide from. They might have to spend a night or three
outdoors. They would need the money.

She put it at the bottom of her bag.

Then she screwed up her courage and went to look for
Yonghua.

"She is in the music room, mistress," said a
paper maid. The newly awake Siew Tsin noticed the look she gave her. It was a
wary look, almost as if she were afraid of her reaction to—what?

She puzzled over it on the way to the music room. It was
strange: she had never thought of the paper servants as real before. She had
not considered that they might have feelings and thoughts of their own. But
weren't they basically the same thing as Yonghua?

People.

We are slave owners
, she thought.

The idea was so shocking that she forgot to announce
herself when she got to the music room. She opened the door, the words already
on her lips to tell Yonghua. But her mouth stayed open and the words never came
out.

Ling'en and Yonghua sprang away from each other. Ling'en
was looking more human than Siew Tsin had ever seen her, her usually flawless
hair dishevelled and her face a fevered pink, as if she had been drinking.

Yonghua was not flushed and her hair was tidy, but the look
in her whiteless eyes was dazed.

She had looked like that the first time she had met
Ling'en, Siew Tsin realised. And they were here, where Siew Tsin had first
played Yonghua Bach. Here.

"I am sorry," said Ling'en. It was an astonishing
thing to hear from her, but Siew Tsin barely felt the surprise over the sharp
pain at her heart. "Yonghua wanted to hear a folk song from my home
region. I can't sing, so I have been playing her scraps. We were—that
is—"

She seemed to realise how ridiculous she sounded. She
stopped and gathered her dignity around her.

"I should be going," she said. She nodded at
Yonghua like a schoolmistress chiding an absent-minded child. "Remember
what I told you."

"Yes," said Yonghua. Her voice was a floating thing,
unmoored from feeling. She turned her face to follow Ling'en as she left.

Yonghua's creator must not have taught her that people were
allowed to smile for themselves, over their own happiness. She had never smiled
except when the script in her head told her it was the appropriate social
response. As she looked after Ling'en, her face was smooth as a block of silken
tofu.

Someone should have taught her that you smile when you
are happy,
thought Siew Tsin.
Someone ought to help her
find out everything she wants to know.

"Were you looking for me, second sister?" said
Yonghua, her eyes still far away. "Or do you want to play the piano? I
should not disturb you. I will leave."

"No," said Siew Tsin. "Stay. I am
going."

She went back to her bedroom and unpacked her bag. She put
everything away. It would be a while before she could bring herself to look at
the things again. But she kept the money.

Siew Tsin woke in the morning to confusion. The house rang
with raised voices. As she went downstairs, rubbing her eyes, paper servants
rushed past her. Distress hung in the air like a bad smell.

Junsheng was sitting in the dining room, drinking black
coffee. He had a newspaper spread out on the table in front of him, but he
wasn't reading it.

"Good morning," he said when he noticed her.

"What is happening?" said Siew Tsin.

He had clearly been waiting for somebody to ask him this.
He took off his spectacles and set them on the table with the deliberateness of
an actor following a script.

"It appears it is just you and me again," he
said.

Siew Tsin reached out blindly and touched the table. Its
solidity comforted her. She sat down.

"Ling'en has outmanoeuvred me," said Junsheng. He
spoke in an even, detached voice, sounding like an old scholar lecturing on
some abstruse topic. "I thought she was angry about Yonghua because she
was growing pious in her old age. Ling'en never used to care about what was
allowed or not allowed by the gods. We used to be the same. We believed in
doing the best one could for oneself and one's family.