CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
Tèbié yánjiū dānwèi 32
(Special Research Unit 32)
Xi’an, China
June 25th, 2032 to June 25th, 165 CE
Yuè Daiyu—the second, personal name meant Black Jade—bolted upright in bed from a confused dream of fear and flight and chaos.
It took an instant before she realized that she was hearing the strobing screech of a siren, not simply dreaming it.
“Tā mā de!” she swore, putting the heels of her hands to her eyes, then forced herself into action.
Starting with hitting the light switch. She’d had an hour and a half of sleep after falling thankfully and early into bed at the end of a long day’s mental and physical work followed by a dismal institutional dinner. At least there had been plenty of it.
Less than two hours was worse than no sleep at all, in a way. She could feel the sand grinding in the gears of her brain.
Another practice run! It’s only been two days since the last one! I didn’t want to join the Army!
Reaction to the siren was automatic, though, drilled in by months of hearing that sound at unpredictable intervals day and night. She bolted out of the sheets and threw on the clean, sturdy field uniform that always hung ready in the little cubicle, stamped her feet into the boots, cinched the belt with the Type 92 pistol and holster, and swung the full pack on her back and put on the billed cap.
The only thing that wasn’t drilled in was the last-instant snatch at her mother’s pendant from its place on the little bedside table.
Wàn yī, she thought: Just in case.
The news had been very bad the last few days—and the gaps in the news were even worse, if you kept up with things. Not even rumors on WeChat to fill the gaps, just silence.
Which means the government really, really doesn’t want us to know the truth. What a surprise!
You learned to fill in the gaps yourself, unless you were one of the ones who just accepted the official line . . . which her immediate family didn’t, at least not when they were strictly private.
China is not a lucky country. Especially about politics.
Her mother’s necklace was old, even as a pendant; family legend said it had been handed down from mother to daughter since it was found in one of the first modern archaeological digs, over a century ago. The centerpiece was an Eastern Han bronze coin—round, with a square hole in the center—in a gold ring that enclosed the ancient metal. And it dated from the reign of Emperor Ling, 1,860 years ago . . .
Which is ironic, when you think about it, flitted through her mind as she dashed out the door. I kept it secret . . . I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t . . . but I hate the government that’s gotten us into this fix . . . that may destroy the country! The Eastern Han were even worse, if that’s possible. Though they didn’t have nuclear weapons!
The lights were strobing red in the corridor outside as she tucked it away beneath shirt and jacket. She turned right and trotted all the way to the operations room, just as she was supposed to; the colonel would be waiting, expressionless but watching a time readout.
She was sweating a little by the time she got there and breathing deeply, after running nearly a kilometer with twenty kilos on her back, dodging other running people at the same time. Their faces had been drawn and fixed, and many of them were sweating more than their efforts could account for.
That sweat and panting was despite being in the best condition of her life—the training here included a strong physical element, and she’d gained ten pounds on her original tall willowy frame, all of it muscle.
Her degree in Chinese historical linguistics was one of the reasons she’d been picked for this, but not the only one; youth and health were among the others. She’d also gotten mRNA vaccinations here against every infectious disease known to humankind. Including a number that were officially extinct, and survived only as samples.
The technicians sitting at their workstations or tending the hulking machinery—which she didn’t pretend to understand, she was a historical linguist, not a physicist—were sweating too, under the stiff discipline.
The sweat of fear.
Like the people I passed on the way here, she thought. Thank the ancestors for discipline, or this would be a riot of despair. But people fall back on training and habit in emergencies.
She looked over at Liu Xiang as she took her place on the circle of gridwork, shedding her pack and lying down as the drill mandated. The building was semiunderground . . . because that circle was as close as they could come to the ground level of long, long ago. The roof above them was a plastered ferroconcrete dome nearly half a meter thick.
“Shàngxiào?” she asked quietly. “Colonel?”
He was a square-faced, stocky-fit, gimlet-eyed man just turned forty, a decade and a half older than her and about the same five-foot-seven height, which was typical of their respective generations and genders. She wasn’t altogether sure what he was a colonel in, even after months of working together, but he’d proved disconcertingly knowledgeable about all the team’s specialties.
Including her deeply obscure one.
Which most people haven’t even heard of!
Here they’d all cross-trained so that they could help each other. Or perhaps replace each other if necessary. And gotten hands-on experience with other things, like field medicine and riding horses, marksmanship and martial arts and a dozen other recondite skills. Two of them had had their appendixes removed as well, and they’d all had tonsillectomies.
She was morally certain the older man had studied at some university or another at some point in his life, though. Whether he was Army or People’s Armed Police or Ministry of State Security or something more obscure in the labyrinthine coils of the Chinese security state.
Which she secretly detested under a show of deep respect. The Taiwanese had . . . had had . . . democracy, which showed you it wasn’t alien to Chinese culture as the official line went.
But you had to grant the colonel plenty of brains.
“This is not a drill,” he said calmly.
I think he suspects me. But if we . . . get where we are supposed to go . . . would that matter? Not that I can see, and so would he think . . . I think. Our politics wouldn’t even be comprehensible to the people then.
He spoke excellent standard Mandarin, but with an occasional slip that made her think he came from the northeast up near the now-theoretical Russian border. She hadn’t dared to ask. Now she felt a jolt of genuine fear. That meant . . .
“Now keep silent,” he added.
The other three members of the team trotted in instants later: Yang Biao, the mechanical engineer; Hú Bingwen, the agronomist and civil engineer; and Ding Àilún, their historian proper. Mostly an expert in technological history and its infinite details. He was indeed handsome and cheerful most of the time as his name indicated . . . but not very cheerful right now, and fear made his face bleak.
Do I look as scared as they do? I hope not!
They all glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes as they took their places and lay on the gridwork inside the personalized painted outlines. Theory was one thing, reality another. None of them were married or parents, that had apparently been part of the selection process, but nearly everyone had some family even nowadays and they’d be thinking about them now.
That and their personal friends from university or earlier. Who would all be dead soon, quickly if they were lucky. In a hideously prolonged fashion if they weren’t.
The cargo surrounded them on three sides and part of the fourth, in carefully arranged heaps lashed together with rope—hemp rope, at that. Not all that much of it was hers; some books, more data on the military-grade laptops and drives. Most of the gear was in Biao and Bingwen’s care, tools and gauges and seeds and plans and working models, and they were checking it over compulsively with their eyes.
Probably as a distraction from fear of impending death . . . or fear of where they’d end up if they didn’t die. All of them were older than her, but not by more than a few years—she suspected that she’d been brought in when the original choice . . .
Almost certainly a man, her mind added, with weary resignation and well-buried anger.
. . . disqualified himself somehow. The number of people with her specialty was limited, especially if you insisted on someone young and healthy and with no immediate family attachments. She carefully didn’t think of what had probably happened to hypothetical-him then. This was an ultrasecret project and the people running it weren’t taking chances . . . so death or a camp were the most likely destination for anyone who failed.
She hadn’t believed what it was, not at first, though she’d carefully not said anything to that effect. If the authorities believed something, you acted as if you did, if you weren’t a complete idiot or living alone on a Tibetan mountaintop . . . and even then there was probably a concealed camera and a drone keeping you under constant surveillance.
She still wasn’t absolutely certain that it would work . . . though right now she strongly hoped it did.
Very strongly. Very, very strongly.
A stiffly self-controlled messenger delivered a tablet to Colonel Liu, and added as the officer flipped through the report: “The strike on Vienna will be in the first wave, sir.”
“Good,” Liu said, nodding. “We need no competition . . . no rivals . . . where . . . we’re going.”
Oh.
Nothing had ever been officially said, but she’d heard the rumors that this setup was a copy, and the original was in Austria, of all places. Apparently serendipity combined with good espionage had given them this chance to correct the dead-end . . . literally, a mass-death-dead-end . . . that the world seemed to be in.
May Xi suffer through the Seven Hells. He put our feet on this road! And for him . . . for him, I wish I believed in the Seven Hells.
Then the colonel raised his voice: “You labor to ensure China’s future! You are heroes of our country!”
A different future starting far in the past, Black Jade thought; what he’d said wasn’t quite a lie, exactly, but—
It won’t look anything like our China by this date. Which is much better than nothing, I suppose, since there will be something besides ruins and bones.
“Commence the run!”
Fingers tapped keyboards, voices murmured low. A whining drone built; even now, men and women labored at one piece of equipment, snapping in parts and stepping back and nodding at the last instant before it went live.
Then someone’s voice broke in, half a scream as they leapt to their feet: “Beijing! Beijing is gone! Multiple hits!”
Black Jade hissed involuntarily. She’d lived there for much of her life, her parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been academics at Beijing University—had been since it was the Imperial University, generation after generation for more than a century. Apart from a brief exile when the Japanese occupied it, and a not-too-bad temporary rustication during the Cultural Revolution.
The thought of the blast wave leaving burning rubble in its wake . . . burning people in its wake . . . some nothing but shadows on concrete as had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . .
Biao grunted as if someone had punched him in the stomach; he was an only child, like most people their age, but she knew his parents and grandparents lived there.
Did live there. Died there right away, if they’re lucky.
Another shout: “Missile inbound for Xi’an . . . breaking up . . . no, multiple warheads, independently steered.”
Black Jade jammed a knuckle into her mouth and bit. Her parents were dead six years ago now, and her grandparents earlier than that; she had a second cousin who she’d never met. But that missile was headed for her. Some part of her mind scolded her for selfishness; billions would be dying soon, many millions already had . . .
But my dying wouldn’t help them, would it?
“Initiating!” someone said.
And that means it’s irreversible, her mind gibbered. She’d picked up that much from overhearing the physicists. Nothing can stop it now, it doesn’t need the equipment anymore. Whether or not it’s in time.
“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . ”
Flicker.
Everything seemed to freeze for an instant, and then things were back to normal . . . if you could call this instant of mass destruction anything resembling normal.
Flicker. Flicker.
Like a hiccup in the flow of time, freezing everything outside the circle of gridwork and slowing it down within.
“Missile warheads approaching,” the same voice said, an edge to it now. “Countermissiles launching . . . one . . . two . . . three warheads still on course.”
Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.
The world was strobing faster and faster, like some crazed early film where things moved jerkily. Slow motion, normalcy . . . blurring into each other so that sound droned low . . .
“Missile nearing destruction radius—”
An ear-piercing whine filled the air, going up and down the scale from shrill to bass as those disconcerting moments of stasis struck. Sparks flew, and a man whose nerve had broken was caught dashing towards them in a great arcing discharge, shaking and dancing like a spastic puppet.
Colonel Liu’s face was still like something carved of granite, his breathing even, but there were beads of sweat on his brow and his pupils had flared wide.
FlickerFlickerFlickerFlicker—
Everything was in slow motion now, each moment of frozen time blending into the next. She noticed his eyes glancing up . . . over what seemed like an eternity. Black Jade followed his gaze . . . and stifled a scream with difficulty. The concrete dome above them was bulging.
Bulging slowly.
It was like being paralyzed and seeing death stroll towards you at a leisurely pace, taking its time. Cracks spread, and plaster fell away from the smooth surface, drifting downward like vast snowflakes. The concrete cracked too, a huge crumbling hemisphere of it bending inward and pointed straight at her. As if a giant metal fist was striking it from the east.
And it is, she thought . . . or mentally gibbered. A fist of red-hot air rammed forward faster than sound.
The cracks in the thick concrete spread. She could see the steel rebar within now, snapping like thread and shooting . . . very slowly . . . sparks as it did.
Light behind that, light blinding-bright, growing, heat beating on her face.
A dull roaring noise, drawn out and slow. Screams, equally bass and low, as the technicians under the dome saw death seconds away.
. . . flickflickflickflick . . .
Blackness.
* * *
Black Jade realized her head hurt even before her eyes opened. Hurt badly. And blood was running down her upper lip, salty and nasty in her mouth. She moaned and stirred, coughed and spat.
Then she realized she was lying on . . .
Dirt, she thought. And I can smell night soil.
That meant composted human waste used as fertilizer; one of their training trips had been to places where that was still done. Relief uncoiled within her.
We made it! We’re here! We’re not going to die right away!
That cut through the pain and grief. Then she heard the distinctive shick-shank of an automatic pistol being cocked, and shed her pack and forced herself to her feet. There was a pistol at her own belt, come to that, but she kept her hand away from the holster. She could use it, the virtual-reality training had been brutally realistic, but—
The metric ton of . . . stuff . . . they’d brought with them was intact. In the space left for an entrance Colonel Liu was standing with the weapon in his hand. In front of him were a clutch of . . .
Peasants, she thought. Badly frightened peasants. Angry frightened peasants.
The reason they were angry was obvious; the Chinese time travelers and their metric ton of gear had landed on a field of nearly ripe vegetables, bok choy and eggplant and others now thoroughly crushed and scenting the air with bruised green smells like after-hours at a market. These people probably got some of their money selling their produce in nearby Xi’an . . . Chang’an, this far back . . . and needed the money very, very badly. She was back to the times her grandparents had talked about . . . elliptically . . . when millions could starve.
Starve to death. When everyone knew that could happen, and feared it.
This . . . this particular time and place . . . wasn’t friendly to the poor, either. She’d taken enough general historical courses on it to know that, very definitely.
They were frightened because the strangers and their baggage had appeared out of nowhere without pack animals or porters or wagons—though they probably hadn’t seen the arrival, or they’d still be running and screaming about evil sorcery and magicians over and over again.
Be grateful for that. We didn’t know if we’d have an audience!
All of the peasants were ragged, dressed in short lap-over jackets held with rope belts, with loose pants below for the men and long skirts for the women, and mostly bare feet. She could smell them from here, too, even with her nose bleeding. Old sweat sunk into coarse hemp cloth, unwashed bodies . . .
Colonel Liu hadn’t opened fire. Black Jade didn’t think that was his automatic response to any confrontation, for which she was thankful. Too many in his line of work did think that way.
But shoot he would if he had to, with pellucid ruthlessness. She was utterly certain of that. The peasants would run when they saw some struck down by magic with sounds unlike anything they’d heard before. Right now they were brandishing hoes—she noted that the heads were crude, heavy cast iron.
He called out to her.
“Your translation services would be appreciated, Doctor Yuè,” he said, politely but with a snap in it. “They don’t appear to understand my attempt at the language at all.”
She walked—more hobbled and reeled—over to him, mopping at her lip with a tissue as she did; one of her many patch pockets was full of them.
And I’ll never get any more, some distant part of her mind gibbered, under the ice-pick pain of the headache stabbing inward from her temples. Never any more . . . of so many things . . .
There was a trickle of blood on his neck, from his left ear. She suppressed an impulse to mop at it, and spoke to the mob of two dozen farmers . . . and the families behind them . . . with both her hands raised, palms open. Even then she blinked at little in surprise at the sheer number of half-naked children of all ages mixed in with the peasants. Knowing a total fertility rate and seeing it were two different things.
“Please, good people, listen to what I say,” she began, in her best stab at the late stage of Old Chinese spoken toward the end of the Eastern Han period.
Or very earliest stage of Middle Chinese, she noted absently; that was still a matter of dispute. The Shang oracle bone inscriptions are nearly fifteen hundred years before this, after all. Confucius has already been dead six hundred years! They wouldn’t even know my name means Black Jade, here.
China was an old place. Her language was one of the few that descended unbroken from an ancestor in the Bronze Age, almost alone in that it had been one country—with chaotic episodes—from that period too. Most of the time you just took that for granted and got on with your life, though her specialty made her more conscious of it than most. Here and now it was very, very apparent.
Another glance:
And they’re so short! And skinny! Bent backs, missing eyes, scars, skin diseases . . . bad teeth . . . and I think they look older than they are. A lot older.
What the peasants were saying . . . or shouting . . . didn’t sound at all like modern standard Mandarin, or even the Mandarin dialect that would be spoken here in her time. Much harsher and choppier, with glottal stops and consonant combinations that didn’t exist anymore and hadn’t for a long time, well over a thousand years. It was roughly like the sound reconstructions she’d spent years listening to and contributing her own mite to, but not exactly.
Sounds we hadn’t used for a long time in my age. But in this one, yes, this is current, she thought, the knowledge disorienting in its strangeness.
The tone system of Middle Chinese was just now barely starting to develop from consonant-cluster endings in Old Chinese . . . and while the Middle Chinese system that would emerge by Tang dynasty times was ancestral to what she’d grown up speaking, it wasn’t very much like it all. A little more like Min, or Cantonese, those were comparatively archaic, but not very like those either.
The peasants stared at her, blinking, and then some of them recognized she was female, which seemed to puzzle them.
Maybe it’s the trousers. None of the women here seem to be wearing them . . . that must have happened later, it was routine for peasant women for a long, long time. Lower-class people wore trousers, upper-class dressed in robes.
The one in front brandishing a hoe—he had a few wisps of beard, mostly grey—lowered the tool and frowned. He scratched at the bandana-like covering tied around his head.
Then he spoke.
She caught exactly one word for certain: djuj with a slight “k” echo, meaning who.
Probably in a sentence meaning:
Who in the name of every demon are you people and why have you destroyed some of our crops?
Black Jade turned to Colonel Liu, flogging her aching head into working order by sheer willpower:
“Sir, they’re speaking a, ah, a dialect of Eastern Han period Old Chinese. A rural, western, dialect of Old Chinese. What I know is the best reconstruction we have of the literary, court speech of Luoyang, the”—she shifted to Old Chinese herself—“the Eastern Capital—”
The old peasant caught the name of the city and spoke excitedly to his fellows. Then they all laid down their tools, dropped to their knees, and bowed their heads nearly to the ground. Some things about the strangers had probably sunk in; the quality of their clothes, their size—they were all at least four inches taller than the average here—and the sheer fact that they didn’t look as if they worked too much and ate too little. They were strangers . . . but obviously rich strangers.
That made them dangerous strangers, to a group of peasants.
The elderly peasant . . .
I doubt he’s more than a decade older than the colonel! Though he looks about seventy-five or eighty. Bent back, gray-white hair, not many teeth left . . . that makes him harder to understand too!
. . . spoke again; much more slowly, and she thought he was trying to mute the distinctive sounds of his local speech. He evidently knew that court language was different from his, but not enough to realize she was speaking a weird variety of it. Probably his only experience of the court language was officials in elaborate robes reading out incomprehensible decrees.
Mostly imposing heavier taxes.
She nodded, repeated what she thought he’d said back to him, and he nodded enthusiastically. They spent a moment more repeating the sentence to each other, slowly and carefully.
“Sir, he says he’s sending his son to”—she pointed north—“Chang’an. That’s, ah, probably what he said.”
Chang’an was the ancient name of Xi’an. It had been an Imperial capital for a long time—in the Qin period after the First Emperor unified the country, and then in the initial, earlier period of the current dynasty known as the Western Han, before the brief interregnum of Wang Mang in—
Her mind did a skip. About a hundred and fifty years ago, as of now, she told herself. This now is your now . . . now! Forever. The machinery up . . . up in the . . . former present? It’s destroyed. The world is destroyed. Was destroyed. Nothing we can do will be worse than that. Maybe these children’s grandchildren will have enough to eat all their lives!
Luoyang was a long way east of here; hence the name of the second phase of that dynasty, Eastern Han.
Her folk still called themselves Han people and their speech the Han tongue . . .
Though how many of them were left after the nuclear war was doubtful.
“The boy . . . young man . . . will go fetch some sort of official. Who will probably be easier to understand, I should think.”
“Excellent, Doctor,” the colonel said, holstering his pistol. “You saved us considerable trouble. Possibly saved lives.”
Behind her she heard groans, and when she turned her head she saw the others sitting up and wiping at dribbles of blood from noses, ears, and eyes.
“We will need transport,” the commander of their party continued.
She nodded and turned back to the old-looking peasant man.
“We . . . will . . . need . . . carts,” Black Jade said slowly, trying to make each word distinct. “Several . . . carts. Carts. Wagons. Things . . . with . . . wheels. Oxen. For . . . pull.”
“Carts!” the man replied, just barely recognizable as the word to her, nodding, and pointing to the gear with a questioning expression and beaming when she nodded.
He’d caught that at least; and this close to a city, market gardeners like these probably had a few. Handcarts, if not animal drawn. Even this far back, Old Chinese had a stripped-down positional grammar, which helped.
I don’t think we’ve invented wheelbarrows yet . . . not quite yet. We invented so many things . . . but gradually. What will come of them all happening at once?
She nodded again.
The colonel pulled replica coins from a pocket, held on a string through their square central holes, and handed them over. The villagers’ enthusiasm grew; those bronze coins were probably more than they’d expected to get from this little patch of truck.
Their baggage included precious metals and jewels, enough to make them rich by here-and-now standards.
If this official doesn’t try to have us killed and take it when he arrives, she thought with a shiver.
There were two rifles in the baggage . . . but if they had to use them . . .
“We should keep a low profile at first,” Liu said thoughtfully. “It will be some time . . . several years . . . before the Emperor Ling takes the throne, and I think it will be best if we approach him, rather than his predecessor. He will be a boy . . . only twelve . . . and probably easier to influence. First we will secure our position with the local government, then the provincial governor. Who will probably try to keep us secret, for the sake of his own advantage. Then—”