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The Retired Operative Speaks to a Class
You do what you can for your country. I’m sixty-eight years old, and even in high school—it’s 2015 now, so that was fifty years ago—I wanted to be an intelligence analyst . . . an analyst for an intelligence agency, or if I couldn’t do that, at least be a writer for the United States Information Agency, writing books for people of limited English vocabularies so they’d know about us, our freedoms, the way we live. But what I wanted most was to be an analyst—not a covert-action operative, just an analyst. For the CIA or NSA, one of the big civilian agencies. That’s what I wanted to do for my country.
I knew they looked at your high school record, not just college—and not just grades, but also the clubs you were in and any sports. And your family background, that was important, too. My father was an Annapolis graduate, a Pearl Harbor survivor, and a gentle Cold War warrior who’d worked for NATO in northern Italy, when we’d lived there. I knew that would look good to the Agency, and I knew that my dad had friends who’d put in a good word for me, too, friends in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
But I also knew I had to do something for my high school record; and I wasn’t an athlete, so I joined the Anti-Communist Club. I thought it was going to be a group of kids who’d discuss Marxist economics and our free-market system, maybe the misconceptions Marx had about human nature, and maybe even mistakes we were making in developing countries, both propaganda-wise and in the kind of help we were giving them. I didn’t know it was just a front for Barry Goldwater and that all we were going to do was make election signs, but at least I had it on my record.
Genres: Superhero
One second from now, the bean bag will thunk into Scott’s left palm. From reflex, his fingers will wrap around it before he’ll toss it back up again. The trick of juggling lies not in the catch but in the toss. The bean bag will arc up from his right hand, but Scott sees his left hand blur now. Phantom left hands at the few places his left hand may be one second from now overlap with each other, and with his real left hand about a foot above the cold tile floor he’s sitting on. The same holds for the phantom bean bags. They overlap each other and the result looks nearly as cubic, red, and solid in the air, stark against the dorm room’s blank walls, as the bean bag does right now resting in Scott’s right hand.
He’s making a good toss. This catch will be easy. His three bean bag cascade looks to him the way he imagines it must look to anyone else, well, if they were near-sighted and missing their glasses.
When he makes a bad toss, translucent Scotts scatter across the room. They reach for the beds on either side of him, lunge for his or his roommate’s desk, and dive over his bed for the closet. They all stretch for the myriad translucent bean bags raining from the stucco ceiling. The bean bags threaten to knock over the desk lamps, bury themselves in the acting textbooks that line his closet shelf and smack against the window blinds. A desperate enough toss and a phantom bean bag may fly through the doorway into the hall.
He does not need his time-skewed senses to know he will eventually make a bad toss. As hard as he tries to keep his sight solid, to make his life predictable, he will drop a bean bag. That’s why he’s sitting on the floor. It’s easier to pick up dropped bean bags that way.
Genres: Space
The world is shaped like the kanji for umbrella, only written so poorly, like my handwriting, that all the parts are out of proportion.
My father would be greatly ashamed at the childish way I still form my characters. Indeed, I can barely write many of them anymore. My formal schooling back in Japan ceased when I was only eight.
Yet for present purposes, this badly drawn character will do.
The canopy up there is the solar sail. Even that distorted kanji can only give you a hint of its vast size. A hundred times thinner than rice paper, the spinning disc fans out a thousand kilometers into space like a giant kite intent on catching every passing photon. It literally blocks out the sky.
Beneath it dangles a long cable of carbon nanotubes a hundred kilometers long: strong, light, and flexible. At the end of the cable hangs the heart of the Hopeful, the habitat module, a five-hundred-meter-tall cylinder into which all the 1,021 inhabitants of the world are packed.
The light from the sun pushes against the sail, propelling us on an ever widening, ever accelerating, spiraling orbit away from it. The acceleration pins all of us against the decks, gives everything weight.
Our trajectory takes us toward a star called 61 Virginis. You can’t see it now because it is behind the canopy of the solar sail. The Hopeful will get there in about three hundred years, more or less. With luck, my great-great-great-I calculated how many “greats” I needed once, but I don’t remember now-grandchildren will see it.
There are no windows in the habitat module, no casual view of the stars streaming past. Most people don’t care, having grown bored of seeing the stars long ago. But I like looking through the cameras mounted on the bottom of the ship so that I can gaze at this view of the receding, reddish glow of our sun, our past.
Night. Half moon. An occasional hoot from an owl. The merchant and his wife and all the servants had been sent away. The large house was eerily quiet. Father and I crouched behind the scholar’s rock in the courtyard. Through the rock’s many holes I could see the bedroom window of the merchant’s son. “Oh, Tsiao-jung, my sweet Tsiao-jung…” The young man’s feverish groans were pitiful. Half-delirious, he was tied to his bed for his own good, but Father had left a window open so that his plaintive cries could be carried by the breeze far over the rice paddies. “Do you think she really will come?” I whispered. Today was my thirteenth birthday, and this was my first hunt.
“She will,” Father said. “A hulijing cannot resist the cries of the man she has bewitched.”
“Like how the Butterfly Lovers cannot resist each other?” I thought back to the folk opera troupe that had come through our village last fall.
“Not quite,” Father said. But he seemed to have trouble explaining why. “Just know that it’s not the same.”
I nodded, not sure I understood. But I remembered how the merchant and his wife had come to Father to ask for his help.
“How shameful!” The merchant had muttered. “He’s not even nineteen. How could he have read so many sages’ books and still fall under the spell of such a creature?”
“There’s no shame in being entranced by the beauty and wiles of a hulijing,” Father had said. “Even the great scholar Wong Lai once spent three nights in the company of one, and he took first place at the Imperial Examinations. Your son just needs a little help.”
“You must save him,” the merchant’s wife had said, bowing like a chicken pecking at rice. “If this gets out, the matchmakers won’t touch him at all.”
A hulijing was a demon who stole hearts. I shuddered, worried if I would have the courage to face one.
Father put a warm hand on my shoulder, and I felt calmer. In his hand was Swallow Tail, a sword that had first been forged by our ancestor, General Lau Yip, thirteen generations ago. The sword was charged with hundreds of Daoist blessings and had drunk the blood of countless demons.
A passing cloud obscured the moon for a moment, throwing everything into darkness.
When the moon emerged again, I almost cried out.
There, in the courtyard, was the most beautiful lady I had ever seen.
(Continue Reading…)
Rated 17 and up for language and adult situations
I knew Wing’s idea was stupid. But we were all so goddamn sick of quarantine that it sounded great anyway.
“Chinese New Year on Halloween night, huh?” I asked him. We sat on his broken futon and some folding chairs, passing a bottle of Captain Jack among the eight of us. Someone leaned on a car horn outside our apartment. When they didn’t stop, my buddy Matt leaned out the window and swore at them in Mandarin. Matt was loud–even a flu mask didn’t muffle his bellowing. I swear, even though every restaurant in San Francisco Chinatown had been closed since February, tourists still cruised the streets. Even a pandemic couldn’t stop them completely.
“Dude. Someone will shoot us,” said the guy from 4B, who I think was named Jimmy Li. We all lived in the same nasty building on Grant Street above a dim sum place owned by our slumlord. I knew Matt, who’d invited me, and my little brother Jian of course. Wing lived here in 3A. I’d just met the Chao twins who had different haircuts, and then Jimmy and some dude Xiang. At twenty-three, I was pretty sure I was the oldest guy here.
“That’s the point,” said Wing heavily, as if he’d explained this a hundred times when he actually hadn’t. “We’ll be in costume. First off, all the riots will be in the Mission, so that’s where the cops will be. Second, no one’s going to shoot a New Year’s lion. Dude. It’s Chinatown. All the old cops here are superstitious. Can you imagine how much bad luck it would bring? Even if some cop got itchy on the trigger, he’ll think about it long enough for us to run away.”
“No one’s shooting anyone,” said Matt. “For God’s sake, this isn’t Montana.” He pushed his mask aside, swigged the Jack, and passed it to Jian. I snagged the bottle out of his hands. No freaking way would I let my little brother drink from that bottle. Who knew where the other guys had been? They might pull off their masks and drink, but damned if I let my little brother do it. Jian glared at me, but didn’t fight back.
I passed the bottle to Wing. “They might shoot if things get out of hand,” I said. “It’s Halloween. Everyone’s twitchy. But you’re right, I heard a bunch of people are gonna swarm the Mission. That’s where the cops will go.”
Wing took another swig. He wasn’t wearing a mask; that was only Matt and Jian and me. Wing went to the kitchen and reappeared with a stack of well-used disposable cups and washed straws. He swiped an unopened bottle of Jose Cuervo off a shelf and handed it to me.
I thanked him and poured myself way too much tequila. I knew I wasn’t supposed to peel the mask off, even for a minute, but it’d been a bad week. My parents were getting evicted and Jian’s antivirals were out of stock everywhere. Pissed me off–HIV drugs did crap against the flu, but people were desperate and they got prescriptions from quacks. So my little brother might develop full-blown AIDS thanks to those selfish jackholes.
(Continue Reading…)